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Adoption Blog Month in Review: August 2007

A major theme for this month in the adoption blog was discussions—especially discussions with your child, but also discussions with others. I began the month sharing my four-year-old daughter Regina’s questions about her droopy eyelid in Talking With Kids About Special Needs, and in Principles for Talking with Kids About Special Needs I discuss how I tried to use the same tenets for talking about her eye that I use when talking about adoption issues. Regina also figures prominently in the next blogs. She told me, “I Don’t Like My Skin”. I stumbled through a response, shared in I Don’t … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Open Adoption Experience

The Open Adoption Experience, by Lois Ruskai Melina and Sharon Kaplan Roszia, is a comprehensive resource for birth and adoptive families. It talks about options on the spectrum of openness, from non-identifying information only, to letters and photos through an intermediary, through visits on birthdays, to frequent visits. The book was written in 1993 and so has only a small section on international adoption, reflecting the fact that few international adoptions were open at that time. (Most still are, but openness—at least through letters and photos—is becoming more common.) Nevertheless, the authors briefly share the experiences of half a dozen … Continue reading →

Media Review: Adoptive Families Magazine

Adoptive Families is a comprehensive bimonthly adoption magazine which covers all types of adoption—domestic and international, infant and older child, open, semi-open and confidential, and adopting from foster care. I have found the coverage to be very well-balanced among the different types. In the past two years I have canceled several magazine subscriptions because I don’t have time to read them. Adoptive Families, by contrast, is read cover to cover before I go to bed the day it is delivered. The magazine is written almost entirely by adoptive families. There are sections of advice from experts such as counselors, social … Continue reading →

Talking About Tough Issues: Criminal Activity/Birthparents in Prison and Incest

This is one of a series on talking about tough issues with your adopted children. For general principles of talking about tough topics, see the first blog in the series. Talking about criminal activity or a birthparent in prison: For young children: “When adults break an important law (rule) and it might be dangerous to others, they go to a big time-out place. Your birthmother will be there for many years. You couldn’t wait that long for parents to raise you, so you will be with us until you grow up—and we will love you even after that.” For an … Continue reading →

Talking about Tough Issues: Rape

Stress that the child was not given up because of the circumstances of her conception, but because the mother could not care for her (which may have been partly because of the emotional trauma of the cirucumstances of the conception). In early childhood: “It wasn’t a happy relationship. Your birthmother was scared. Sometimes your birthfather hadn’t respected her and had made her do things that hurt her. She didn’t want you around him, and she was too hurt by what had happened to take care of you herself, so she made an adoption plan that would keep you safe and … Continue reading →

Talking About Tough Issues: Child Abuse

The key message here is that birthparents probably love their children, but some have reasons why they just cannot keep a child safe. For preschoolers: “Your birthparents probably loved you, but they couldn’t keep you safe. All children need parents who can keep them safe, so that’s why you came to grow up with us.” Talking About physical abuse: For early elementary-age children, or a child who remembers being abused: “Do you ever feel angry with your friends or with Mommy and Daddy (siblings, etc.)…sometimes you yell and hit even though you love us. But you are learning not to … Continue reading →

Talking About Tough Issues: Drug Abuse

Some of the suggestions for talking about drug abuse and physical abuse and mental illness may also be adapted to talk about neglect, whether the neglect is due to maternal depression, or to birthparents’ seeming lack of knowledge of children’s needs, or their seeming inability to care for another. In early childhood: “Your mother took a kind of medicine that wasn’t given her by a doctor. She thought it would make her feel good, but it was bad medicine. It made her sleepy so she couldn’t take good care of you.” In elementary school: Your mother took bad drugs that … Continue reading →

Talking About Tough Questions

Adoption, under the best possible circumstances, involves loss. Few birthparents deliberately plan to have a child they will have to let someone else parent. Adoptive parents, like all parents, want to shield their children from sadness and from things they think may be damaging to their self-esteem. However, the loss of trust in their parents that secrecy creates is potentially more damaging than the original losses. Books such as Lois Melina’s Making Sense of Adoption and Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child, by Betsy Keefer and Jayne Schooler, recommend age-appropriate ways of conveying a child’s story to … Continue reading →

Book Review: Making Sense of Adoption by Lois Ruskai Melina

Lois Melina’s Making Sense of Adoption is unique in that it deals with questions asked not only by adoptees from traditional adoptions, but by children and young people conceived using assisted reproduction techniques such as egg or sperm donation or surrogacy. These persons also, whether a legal adoption proceeding took place or not, must deal with knowing that they either have genetic parents who are not the parents raising them, or that they were born to someone other than their birthmothers. Melina, an adoptive parent of two, is the author of Raising Adopted Children and has been a frequent writer … Continue reading →