Health

In ongoing this series, we interview experts about your key questions about adoption.

Are you an expert wanting to lend your knowledge to our families? Email us at editor@bcadoption.com.

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 

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.

One of the best things you can do to set the stage for a successful school year is to make sure both you and your kids get plenty of quality sleep. In this article, a mental health expert and adoptive dad gives you a head start by explaining how healthy sleep habits for the whole family start with you.

In our summer issue, we explored how difficult but important it is to share our not-so-perfect moments. In this piece, Caroline shares one of hers. We hope it encourages you.

“Mom, when did Mamoo see me for the first time?” My child asked this question completely out of the blue. (By the way, Mamoo is my mom.)

I turned to my child and explained that Mamoo came the very next day after my child arrived at our home.

“Did she hold me like this? How did I act to her? Show me how I was held.”

How our brains grow

We’re each born with as many brain cells as the Milky Way has stars—approximately 100 billion of them. These brain cells cells, known as neurons, form connections that are called synapses. They divide and multiply like wildfire, creating new cells and and forming even more connections. In a positive, healthy environment, the brain explodes with growth until around age 3.5.This frenzy of growth slows and levels off after that, but it doesn’t stop. By mid- to late childhood, a typical brain contains twice as many synapses as it did at birth.

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.

Each year, approximately 15 of Moomba’s 40 campers are adoptees or foster kids!

Summer camp, with a twist

Camp Moomba’s motto is “Friends together having fun.” Campers enjoy all the classic activities that make sleep-away camps magical, from rock climbing and sailing to campfires and arts and crafts. They also bond over something unique. The camp is run by YouthCO HIV & Hep C Society, and each Moomba camper either lives with HIV or has a family member who does.

New research reveals that prenatal alcohol exposure impacts the entire body, not just the brain.

A whole-body disorder

For the past several decades, the widely held assumption in the field of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) research has been that a fetus’s brain is by far more vulnerable to the damaging effects of alcohol exposure than any other part of its developing body.