Grief and loss

Every adoptive family needs health providers who understand the unique circumstances and health implications of their child’s beginnings. This pull-out guide was produced for an American audience, but the information applies well to Canada too. Cut it out or copy it to share with your healthcare team!

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.

Growing their family through adoption has been busy and exhausting for the Carroll family. Jennifer shares their story, along with why being an AFABC Member is important to their family.

Finding the right match

Storytelling can help your child receive a more accurate assessment

Holiday seasons can be tricky for any family. Adoption or permanency often adds an additional layer of joy and complexity. Here’s our guide to making it through the season.

In Lion, which stars Dev Patel of Slumdog MIllionaire fame, international adoption gets a rare, heart-wrenching, nuanced portrayal on the big screen.

My daughter Libby was born as I held her birth mother Carla’s hand, breathing with her through the agony of labour. When her daughter drew her first breath, Carla looked at me and said, “Congratulations on your new baby.” Then she asked me to cut the umbilical cord.

Advice from a counsellor on how to recognize and help wounded children and youth.

Trauma: adoption’s shadow

Many children and youth who are adopted have been exposed to highly stressful situations and traumatic events; however, the resulting special needs these children can experience aren’t always recognized or supported. It’s vital for caregivers and professionals to learn the signs and symptoms of trauma as they present in children and youth, and to know how to find and access age-appropriate trauma-informed care.

If you're adopted or in care, it can be difficult to make and keep friends. So many things are always going on in your life. There might be attachment anxieties, loss and grief, and issues with separating from what you were once comfortable with. Change is really hard because you're trying to figure out "why" all the time.

By the time their long-awaited adopted child is placed in their arms, parents usually--and understandably--just want to put all the heartache behind them and move on into the joyful realms of parenthood. But their very real feelings of loss need to have a place in the story of their new family, or they can cast ever-lengthening shadows on the relationship between parents and child.