Six Things Adoptive/Foster Families Need When New Children Arrive

by Lisa Qualls

lisa qualls

This was the question,

What would have helped you the most in the early weeks and months of adding a child to your family through adoption or foster care? If somebody had asked you, “What can I do to help?” and you were able  to answer anything at all with no shame, guilt, or concern about whether they really would want to do it, what would it have been?

This is what you answered:

Bring Food

Many of you stated that having meals delivered allowed more time to focus on all of your children, but also gave you some contact with “the outside world.”  It does not have to be dinner, as somebody said, even bringing cut-up fruit would help.  Someone else mentioned having dinner brought by friends who then shared the meal and spent the evening with them.  One person wrote that when they adopted a baby, friends brought meals, but when they adopted an older child people assumed it wasn’t as demanding and didn’t bring meals.  I think we can safely say that every adopting/foster family will be blessed by meals. […]

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Untangling the Web: The Internet’s Transformative Impact on Adoption

Dear Reader: This is a fascinating “read,” especially for those people deeply entrenched or working within the adoption community. Here’s the synopsis and a link to the material –

“Untangling the Web: The Internet’s Transformative Impact on Adoption” is the initial publication of a multiyear research project on the subject by the Donaldson Adoption Institute. Its key findings include:

  • There is a growing “commodification” of adoption on the web, replete with dubious practices, and a shift away from the perspective that its primary purpose is to find families for children.
  • Finding  birth  relatives is becoming increasingly easy and commonplace, with significant institutional and personal implications, including the likely end of the era of “closed” adoption.
  • A growing number of young adoptees are forming relationships with birth relatives, sometimes without their adoptive parents’ knowledge and usually without guidance or preparation.
  • A rising number of websites offer useful, positive resources and expedite the adoption of children and youth who need families, notably including those with special needs.
  • http://adoptioninstitute.org/research/2012_12_UntanglingtheWeb.php
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Done

by Jane Samuel

Done: This mother of babies has retired.

The email surprised me. Apparently the Chinese orphan we had sponsored for the last five years had been adopted. Not three days earlier I had finally shipped off a package of specially selected Christmas presents: a doll, a few Chinese picture books, a cheongsam (Chinese dress), and some craft items. […]

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Putin Signs Law Barring U.S. Adoptions (A Commentary)

by Cyma Shapiro

Dear Reader: Please read a portion of the Huffington Post article on Putin’s barring of U.S. Adoptions and my Huffington Post commentary:

MOSCOW — Defying a storm of domestic and international criticism, Russia moved toward finalizing a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, as Parliament’s upper house voted unanimously in favor of a measure that President Vladimir Putin has indicated he will sign into law.

The bill is widely seen as the Kremlin’s retaliation against an American law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators. Dozens of Russian children close to being adopted by American families now will almost certainly be blocked from leaving the country. The law also cuts off the main international adoption route for Russian children stuck in often dismal orphanages…There are about 740,000 children without parental care in Russia, according to UNICEF.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/26/russia-adoption-ban-against-us_n_2364481.html For those of us fortunate to have adopted internationally, especially from Russia – my ancestors’ homeland – today’s headlines are maddening and saddening. I am especially struck as I think back to the adoption of my two youngest, from Russia, and the undeniable obstacles, roadblocks, and sheer exploitation we endured, just to have what we so fervently and passionately desired – our children and a family. With multiple and repeated unnecessary trips to Russia, countless dollars, tears, and humiliating experiences and circumstances to endure, to have held our children in our arms and touched down on American soil (thus, cementing their citizenship) began the healing of it all.  Until now. […]

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Adoption in the Media: What Do Pregnant Women, Killers and Crying Babies Have in Common?

by Adam Pertman

When we don’t fully understand something, we’re prone to make mistakes when dealing with it. This not-very-profound truism popped into my head recently as I was thinking about how to lead into a new commentary – the one you’re reading right now – about the negative repercussions of the secrecy, stigma and shame that permeated adoption for generations and, alas, sometimes still do. […]

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Adoption Tax Credit (In Honor of Adoption Awareness Month)

Dear Reader: With Adoption Awareness Month set for November, we’re posting this in support of the movement and to benefit all those choosing adoption.

Save the Adoption Tax Credit is an effort of the Adoption Tax Credit Working Group—a collaboration of 139 adoption and child welfare organizations dedicated to preserving tax credits for families choosing adoption. What follows is a portion of the letter sent earlier this year to interested individuals, organizations and families. […]

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I Will Honor Her (In Honor of My Daughter’s Birth Mother)

by Jane D. Samuel

“Can you imagine that someone just threw her away?”

Seven years later, these words are still as sharp and wrong as the day they were innocently uttered. Carrying our youngest daughter into church that day, I did not turn around to see who said them. It did not matter.

Though I have been known to set a few folks straight about China’s one-child policy and its subsequent boom in international adoption, this time I chose to let it pass. It was Easter Vigil and our daughter’s day – she was being marked by baptism as Christ’s own forever. And she was ours forever. […]

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On Failure, Forgiveness and Cutting Ourselves Some Slack

by Peg O'Neill, M.D.

We forgot about “Gotcha Day.”  In the world of adoptive families, this is a significant faux-pas.  “Gotcha Day” is the celebration of bringing a non-biologic child into the family.  For us, it commemorates the day our family became whole; the day that my husband and I were given the gift of our precious child and entered the challenging world of raising multiple boys, with all the craziness, motion, joy and exhaustion.  For my older son, it was the day he became a sibling and began his journey as a big brother.  For my adoptive son, though he was just six months old when he joined our family forever, it is akin to a birthday – a momentous event, a beginning, a symbol of who he is, at least in part.  Over the past six years, we have commemorated “Gotcha Day” with story-telling about how we prayed for him to become part of our family, how we came to know him, and the details of how he joined our family, including how good he was on the plane coming back from Guatemala.  We look at pictures, ooh and aah over how cute and funny he was.  We go out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, a mediocre pasta joint near our house. […]

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Better Full Than Empty

by Jane Samuel

We added our third child when I was forty and that’s when the skeptical stares started. You know the ones. You are just coming up to the counter at the local gym or squeezing through the candy-packed aisle at the grocery, baby on your hip, mask of exhaustion painted on your face where make-up should be when some bright-faced-twenty-something looks over in disbelief and says, “My! You have your hands full.” […]

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