Search Results for: blog talking about tough questions

Baby Blog Month in Review: July 2008

Two of my three children are summer babies. That is, they were born in the summer and had their first months surrounded by sunshine streaming in the windows, the sound of birds chirping, and days spent wearing nothing but a diaper and a “onsie.” I made sure that they had Fourth of July outfits ready, even though one of them arrived a week after the holiday. I guess he just wasn’t interested in the parade. Do you have a summer baby, too? We had a lot of new information to share this past month, such as recall notices and new … Continue reading →

Talking to Kids About Bad Things

Some of you who have been reading my blogs know that we live in New York. Some of you may even know that we live in the inner city–what someone here once aptly described as ‘the ghetto.’ We’re here specifically to be a part of our church and to minister in this neighborhood. We knew moving in that this was not considered the ‘ideal’ place to raise children–but we felt strongly that the Lord wanted us here and so here is where we stayed. However, we’re not ignorant to the dangers that are around us but rather we live in … Continue reading →

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 →

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 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 →

Another Take on Gold

We keep hearing people talk about gold. I had a question to pose to my friend, financial advisor John Hauserman of RetirementQuest. I asked, “I keep seeing people advise us to buy gold, but I have a question. What if I end up with all kinds of gold, but there’s nothing to spend it on? What if no one will take my gold? What other ways do you advise us to prepare for future economic downturns?” John replied, “I am really glad you asked this question. While someone could write an entire book on this subject, which I actually did … Continue reading →

Sex Education in the Homeschool Home

One of the reasons we chose to home school was so we could teach our children about the world around them while at the same time making sure they had the foundation they needed to go along with that teaching. No topic is a better example of this than sex education. We wanted to teach our children to have respect for their bodies and the bodies of others. We wanted to introduce the topic with our strong Christian background. We wanted to do it in private, with just one child at a time, and two parents, so they could ask … Continue reading →

Book Review: All About Adoption:How Families Are Made and How Kids Feel About It

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All About Adoption: How Families Are Made and How Kids Feel About It is a book from Magination Press, which specializes in titles helping children understand tough situations or deal with feelings. (Magination Press is also the publisher of Maybe Days, a Book about Foster Care.) All About Adoption authors Marc Nemiroff and Jane Annunziata are both clinical psychologists specializing in families and children. All About Adoption starts out by saying “there are lots of different ways to have a baby. ..some parents have one baby..and some parents have two or three babies all at once. “Babies grow inside a … Continue reading →

From the Mouths of Babes: Why Pets Have Such Short Lives

I’m a big fan of the James Herriot books and stories. You may be most familiar with All Creatures Great and Small — the book, the film, or the series. Herriot referred to them as his “little cat and dog stories”, but they are much more than that. They are glimpses into lives — Herriot’s own, and the lives of his clients and their owners. My favorite story has to be the one about why pets have such short lives. It goes a little something like this: a family needed to have their dog put to sleep. The dog, at … Continue reading →

Media Review: Follow that Bird!

I consider myself a book-lover, frugal, and responsible about other people’s property. Thus it may surprise you that, upon finding and reading a book in the church nursery, I ripped it up. By hand. Into tiny little pieces. I told the nursery director later that I didn’t even want someone to pull it out of the recycling and read it. Perhaps even more surprising is that it was a Sesame Street book. More surprising yet, I set out to review the movie the book was based on, and ending up thinking that it wasn’t that bad, actually enjoyable, with a … Continue reading →