Parenting

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.

Five things every family should know

International adoption is a complicated process that involves the child, the parents, the provincial government, the federal government, and the government in the child’s birth country. You will need to do a lot of planning, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of waiting before the journey is complete.

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.

What adoptees want parents to know

If we could go back in time and, with the wisdom of hindsight, ask our parents to do things differently, what would adopted people request? It’s a dream question, of course. What person wouldn’t want the chance to set their parents straight?

To help me answer this question more objectively, I asked many of the adopted adults who belong to We are Adopted: The Adoptees Association to share their thoughts. I also reflected on the many stories I’ve heard from other adopted people over the years.

Spring’s here, and Mother’s Day is around the corner. In this section, we offer a variety of perspectives on how to celebrate when adoption is part of your story.

When Mother’s Day hurts

Holidays are a natural time to reflect on family and the past. For obvious reasons, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are extremely common times for adopted children to feel down or to have a lot of questions about their birth parents.

Author’s note: this article expresses my opinion and feelings, formed both through my own experiences and through my association with many other mothers in person, at the Forget Me Not Family Society, and in online communities.     

When my children were small, I lived on a ranch surrounded by woods and wildlife. Other than the chickens and the kids, I had no one to talk to for days on end. I read everything I could find about raising adopted children but in those days there wasn’t much. I had to create my own education. I researched and wrote about teens who were adopted, and recently I wrote a book about modern adoptive parenting. Today there are many more books and education options for adoptive parents.

For many youth, foster and adoptive homes can be safe places for care and support when the biological family does not provide appropriate care. Unfortunately, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth are placed in foster homes where their caretakers do not understand or accept these youth because of their gender or sexual orientation.

Catherine is the co-founder of the non-profit organization We Are Adopted/Adoptees Association. In this article she draws on her personal experience as an adoptee and an adoptive mother as well as her professional experience as a registered clinical counsellor to explain why shame and adoption are so intertwined.

The Lohse family first appeared in the April/May 1998 issue of Focus on Adoption magazine, where Annette told the story of adopting Mikayla. Today we catch up with them and hear about the following 18 years from three perspectives: adoptive mom Annette, adoptee Mikayla, and birth mom Lisa.

In part one, we hear Annette’s perspective.