Abandonment

Rebekah Craig, AFABC’s Education Manager, sat down with Registered Clinical Counsellor Carrie DeJong to discuss trauma-informed care.

You can also view the full video of the interview on Facebook, or below the article. 

We've added 40 books to our adoption library! Check them out here, and stop by our head office in Burnaby to borrow one. For more information on our lending library visits our main library page.     

Gotcha Day is one of the names many adoptive parents use to mark the day their child was adopted. While is it intended as a celebration, adoptee Mila Konomos shares a different perspective, along with her personal adoption story. Mila is a transracial, transnational Korean American adoptee. She has been in reunion with her Korean family for over a decade. 

I’d like to address the practice of so-called “Gotcha Day.” An adoptive parent wrote to ask me for my opinion about it as an adult adoptee. 

In this article, originally shared on the Lost Daughters website, Lynn Grubb shares some of the key lessons and outlooks on life she discovered as an adopted person.

The Survival Guide for Making and Being Friends
by James J. Crist, Ph.D.

Lori Holden literally wrote the book on open adoption (The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole). In this article, she presents a new way of thinking about openness.

In recognition of BC Youth in Care Week, we asked a young adult adoptee to write about her journey to understand her identity.

Dear Self,

I know it’s been a while, and you’ve had a hard time lately. There’s a certain time every year when you feel the expanse of emptiness in your body a little more. That slow ache.

Janet was abandoned at birth outside a hospital in northern BC. In 2017, she found four half-siblings who were also abandoned as babies by the same mother. Through DNA testing, she learned the identity of her deceased biological mother and her biological father, Emil Weinreich. Janet met Emil for the first time just over a year ago. In this article, Janet reflects on how their shared love for her led her biological and adoptive fathers to become family to each other, too.

For more than 25 years, Catherine has worked in and with the adoption community as a therapist, an adoptee, and an adoptive mom, always searching for a truly effective approach to adoption therapy. In this article, she explains an approach that she's found to be highly effective for issues related to adoption trauma.

Katrine Conroy is BC's new Minister for Children and Family Development. Get to know her, and the new provincial government's vision for kids and families, in this Q&A.