Grief and loss

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.     

This adoptive parent shares her story of welcoming an 11-year-old daughter into her family to join herself, her husband, and their three biological teenage boys. While the journey wasn’t always easy, it was definitely worth any hardships.

My family

I am the proud parent of three birth children and an adopted daughter.

I have to be honest: the journey of adopting an older child into our family has not been easy. We adopted our wonderful daughter at age 11 into a family of five, including myself, my husband, and our three teenage boys by birth.

Here are some of the articles from our long-running Diary of an Adoptive Mom series. This adoptive mother shares her experiences and secret thoughts of raising three children. This series ran from 2006 to 2010.

Note: Diary entries #1 to #7 are unavailable 

This is an article about the challenges and complexities of searching and reconnecting with a birth parent, and learning to cope when things don’t work out the way you’d hoped they would.

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.

Loss is never an easy topic, and the very nature of adoption comes with a plethora of it. In this article, Catherine Moore—both an adoptee and an adoptive parent—explains the revelatory concept of ambiguous loss. 

Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees. There’s no easy way to talk about this topic, but talk about it we must.

Post-adoption depression is a common experience. In this article we tell the stories of parents who have been through it and share what you can do to find help.