After all, unless you have personally experienced adoption, you may know very little about how adoption works and what it means. Are you worried that your loved one may face disappointment? Do you find yourself wondering exactly what your role is going to be in the child's life? Does the term "open adoption" confuse and concern you? Just what are the privacy boundaries for families built by adoption: what is okay to ask about? "Adoption Is a Family Affair!" will answer all of these questions and more, offering you information about who can adopt, why people consider adopting, how kids understand adoption as they grow up, and more. This short book is crammed full of the 'need to know' information for friends and families that will help to encourage informed, happy and healthy family relationships.

    Gently provocative, warm and convincing, this open adoption guide includes actual letters between adoptive parents and birthparents, and between the latter and the children they have

    You will find: • An easy-to-understand analysis of the differences between domestic and international adoption• Advice on choosing a country, including 25 important factors to consider, such as the waiting times involved and the estimated costs for each of the top placing countries, with charts for easy comparison• A detailed discussion of the potential health issues based on the latest research and interviews with doctors who specialize in international adoption • Worksheets and a suggested system for preparing and organizing the extensive paperwork involved• Parenting tips to enhance attachment and suggestions for addressing the issues that come up in raising an internationally adopted child• Real parents’ stories and advice at every stage of the process• Plus all of the information you need to select your agency, plan financially, prepare for the home study, travel sensibly, evaluate your child’s health and integrate your new familyMore than just provide the facts, The Complete Book of International Adoption also helps parents manage the emotional rollercoaster that comes with the territory. Sensitive, wise, and often witty, this book is a must-have for any parent considering building their family through adoption.

    In 2011, 90% or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may intrude at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of situations. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the children involved is paramount. This book offers readers the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated common issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up. Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, they review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted children first, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized, so parents can learn to act out of love and honesty.

    Parenting adopted children requires understanding the extra layer and this book helps in that understanding. Appropriate for the newly created family or the more experienced, Adoption Parenting looks at stumbling blocks to good parenting and standard parenting practices that arent appropriate for adopted children. It looks at the core issues all members of the adoption triad face, and at how it affects standard parenting challenges like sleeping through the night, discipline, and attachment. Adoption Parenting covers specific challenges families have faced: dealing with grief and loss, FASD, Trauma and PTSD, Sensory Integration, Speech and Language delays, and ways to effectively parent a post-institutionalized child or a child who has experienced trauma in their journey to you.

    A guide for adoptive parents from preparations for a child's arrival through the teen years.

    Melina addresses the pressing adoption issues of today, such as open adoption, international adoption, and transracial adoption, and answers parents' most frequently asked questions, such as:How will my child "bond" or form attachments to me?When and how should I tell my child that he was adopted?What should schools be told about my child?Will adoption make adolescent upheavals more complicated?Up-to-date, sensitive, and clear, Raising Adopted Children is the definitive resource for all adoptive parents and concerned professionals.

    This is the real stuff: dynamic, messy, baffling adoptive parenting, rooted in domestic life.Award-winning columnist and adoptive parent Sally Donovan offers savvy, compassionate advice on how to be 'good enough' in the face of both day-to-day and more bewildering challenges – how to respond to 'red mist' meltdowns, crippling anxieties about new routines and, most importantly, how to meet the intimidating challenge of being strong enough to protect and nurture your child.Full of affecting and hilarious stories drawn from life in the Donovan household, The Unofficial Guide to Adoptive Parenting offers parents a refreshing counterblast to stuffy parenting manuals -- read it, weep, laugh and learn.

    Some adoptions, though, present unique challenges. Welcoming these children into your family--and addressing their special needs--requires care, consideration, and compassion.Written by two research psychologists specializing in adoption and attachment, "The Connected Child" will help you: Build bonds of affection and trust with your adopted child Effectively deal with any learning or behavioral disorders Discipline your child with love without making him or her feel threatened

    164 pages

    When their youngest was three, God opened their eyes to the needs of orphans all over the world--and answered Mary's longing for another baby. Over the next nine years the couple adopted two boys from Korea and four girls from Ethiopia.Ostyn, a beloved adoption writer and blogger, shares--alongside stories from other adoptive families--the practical tools and resources she uses to thrive as an adoptive mom. In Forever Mom, she reveals how to:build heart connections prepare your other children for new siblings help babies, toddlers, and older children settle in implement attachment parenting address misbehavior while remaining connected nurture your marriage in the midst of it allWhether you're the parent of an adopted child or interested in pursuing adoption, Ostyn's warm advice and fresh perspective will inspire, inform, and affirm. You'll walk away confident you will be the perfect mom for whatever child God brings into your life.

    - Includes information on foreign adoptions- Also available: Parenting the Hurt Child

    One adoption professional called 'In On It' "the adoption book for everyone else"--the many individuals who are not adoptive parents themselves but seek information and insights into adoption in order to best show their love and support, positively interact with or provide services to adoptive families.

    Joyce Maguire Pavao uses her thirty years of experience as a family and adoption therapist to explain to adoptive parents, birthparents, adult adopted people, and extended family, as well as to those who work with children professionally the developmental stages and challenges one can expect in the life of the adopted person.The Family of Adoption is truly the most insightful and healing book on the adoption shelf.

    And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children's unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame.With warmth and candor, Sherrie Eldridge reveals the twenty complex emotional issues you must understand to nurture the child you love--that he must grieve his loss now if he is to receive love fully in the future--that she needs honest information about her birth family no matter how painful the details may be--and that although he may choose to search for his birth family, he will always rely on you to be his parents.Filled with powerful insights from children, parents, and experts in the field, plus practical strategies and case histories that will ring true for every adoptive family, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew is an invaluable guide to the complex emotions that take up residence within the heart of the adopted child--and within the adoptive home.