Child welfare

The basics on FASD and some of the provincial services available to families for their kids with FASD

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is used to describe the problems resulting from alcohol use during pregnancy.

When we say that children waiting to be adopted have "no family" it's rarely true. Most have family--we just haven't looked hard enough.

In the adoption world, we often state that children waiting to be adopted have “no family” and, therefore, need a new one.

Choices Adoption and all BC adoption agencies, are now able to offer MCFD social workers home studies of approved families signed up with their agencies.

In the 32nd of our series, our mom of three kids--Emily, Grant, and Lynn--finally has some hope after she connects with an FASD key worker.

I can’t believe it - she actually understands us. Why did I wait so long to contact her?

Mom Tanya describes how her family lost its privacy when she and her husband adopted transracially.

Before we became a transracial family, we were accustomed to a certain degree of privacy; now, all that’s changed.

An adoption reunion can answer many questions. It can also change an adoptee's life in unexpected ways.

When she packed her birth certificate, some cherished photographs, and set off, Sevdin MacDonald hoped they might provide valuable clues that would lead to her lost family in Romania.

When a new child joins your family, it means that all the family members need to adjust and adapt to the new arrival so that he or she develops a sense of belonging.

This transformation has to occur not only the first time a family adopts, but each time a child arrives. If the members of the family system don’t make the shift to include the new child, then the child will be stuck in the outer limits of the family, never really belonging.

Openness doesn't always go smoothly--especially when a child was appreehended because of abuse or neglect.

Openness between the birth and adoptive parents of children who were in foster care because of neglect or abuse has become the norm. This sort of openness relationship can be very different to that between adoptive parents and healthy birth parents who made adoption plans for their children.

Cyberspace offers the adoption community both opportunities and risks--we need to prepare for both.

Growing numbers of adoptive parents and adoptees use social networking to talk, to meet, to share, to find, and to learn.

Thanks to social networking we are now all potential publishers—we can tell our stories, we can rant, we can chronicle, we can learn. Not only is our potential audience massive, what we write can be widely shared and distributed by anyone who reads it. Therein lies the wonder and the worry around sharing our stories online.

Explaining parental illness to a child can be hard - especially when the mental illness is connected to a child's adoption.

My eight-year-old daughter has been asking why her birthmom, who has a mental illness, couldn’t raise her.