Search Results for: blog should adoptive parents search for their childrens birth parents

China Adoption Book Review: The Lost Daughters of China

Karin Evans is a journalist. Her book, Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past alternates between her story of adopting a one-year-old Chinese girl and her research into the circumstances leading to the abandonment of so many girls from China. (I should point out, as I’ve written before, that abandonment is not always—nor even usually in other countries—leaving a child to its fate. In countries where there are no adoption agencies helping birthparents nor laws allowing the relinquishment of babies, leaving a child in a place where she will easily … Continue reading →

Book Review: Adoption–Social Issues Firsthand Series

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The series Social Issues Firsthand is published by Greenhaven Press, the publishers of the Opposing Viewpoints series (see my review of Opposing Viewpoints: Adoption). The Social Issues series does not consist of direct arguments by those with different beliefs, but does endeavor to have contributions from people with diverse experiences. The volume Adoption, from the Social Issues Firsthand series, contains sixteen articles, approximately 600 words each, divided roughly into sections. The first section is “Giving Up a Child for Adoption”. Many people today would object to the phraseology used here. Positive Adoption Language prefers “made an adoption plan” to emphasize … Continue reading →

Book Review: How it Feels to be Adopted

Jill Krementz is a writer and artist known for her simple but powerful black and white photographs and for the word portraits which accompany them. She has written the series “A Very Young..[Dancer, Musician, Gymnast,] and also the series “How it Feels..[to have a Physical Disability, to be Fighting for Your Life, When Parents Divorce]. How it Feels to Be Adopted contains the stories of 19 children, told in their own words and accompanied by photographs. As with my last review, Why Was I Adopted?, I hesitated to read this book because it is twenty years old. Like Why Was … Continue reading →

Book Review: Throwaway Daughter

I read this book with a mixture of fascination and horror. The author of Throwaway Daughter, Ting-Xing Le, lived through the Cultural Revolution in China and worked as a translator before defecting to the West. (Her life story is told in her memoir A Leaf in the Bitter Wind.) Throwaway Daughter, however, is a novel about a Chinese girl adopted to Canada who goes back to look for her Chinese family. The American Library Association listed it on its Best Books for Young Adults, but I would warn parents against giving this volume to children. Parents should read it first … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Adoption Life Cycle

The Adoption Life Cycle,by Elinor Rosenberg, fills a niche in adoption literature by talking about issues such as separation, loss, identity and family relationships not only as they emerge at different stages of children’s development, but also in the context of family systems. Rosenberg has seen adoption from several perspectives—as a social worker working with birthmothers, as a therapist working with adopted children in residential treatment centers, and later as an adoptive parent of two. She devotes her first chapter to the myth of adoption as “the perfect solution”. While strongly supportive of adoption, she recognizes that it usually leaves … Continue reading →