A leading authority on adoption and an award-winning writer bring wisdom and clarity to situations important to all adoptive parents. Real Parents, Real Children goes beyond the question of when to tell children they are adopted with practical advice for parents on how to talk with their children about adoption - not just once but throughout childhood, adolescence, and into young adulthood - and how to help them through the rougher points of growing up adopted. Authors Holly van Gulden and Lisa Bartels-Rabb offer insight into how adopted children at each age commonly think and feel about being adopted. They also explain how and why adopted children grieve for their birth parents and suggest ways adoptive parents can help them come to a healthy resolution of this grief. For prospective parents, the authors discuss ways to prepare themselves and the child they are about to adopt for the new family union. Throughout, the special concerns and challenges of interracial, international, and older-child adoptions are also addressed. Though written with parents in mind, Real Parents, Real Children provides the clinical information that professional therapists, counselors, and placement workers must have if they are to truly be of help to adoptive families at every stage of their lives. Real Parents, Real Children fills a real gap in adoption literature and offers confidence and assurance as well as sought-after answers to lifelong question.

"Birthdays may be difficult for me." "I want you to take the initiative in opening conversations about my birth family." "When I act out my fears in obnoxious ways, please hang in there with me." "I am afraid you will abandon me." The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. 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.

Originally published in 1993, this classic piece of literature on adoption has revolutionised the way people think about adopted children. Nancy Verrier examines the life-long consequences of the 'primal wound' - the wound that is caused when a child is separated from its mother - for adopted people. Her argument is supported by thorough research in pre- and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding and the effects of loss.

This classic text is a comprehensive guide for prospective and actual adoptive parents on how to understand and care for their adopted child and promote healthy attachment. It explains what attachment is and provides parenting techniques matched to children's emotional needs and stages to enhance children's happiness and emotional health.

Discusses how young children make sense of the fact that they are adopted with 20 accounts of parents talking to their children about adoption.

This book offers support and practical tools to help parents prepare for and support the toddler's transition between the familiar environment of their biological parent's home or foster home to a new and unfamiliar one, and considers the issues that arise at different developmental stages.

This book is a virtual one-step shop for adoption information for readers at any knowledge level . . . Strongly recommended for all public libraries and for all large university social science collections.--Lynn C. Maxwell, "Library Journal."