December 01, 2014

Adoption News Roundup

Let’s open our first Adoption News Roundup of December with a little DIY love. Parents.com has an adorable feature on getting crafty with your kids. 17 easy projects for a homemade holiday!

Adoption fundraising is a controversial topic. This adoptive mother is an advocate, and she has some valuable information to share on why the costs of adoption are what they are. She has a point that many queries about adoption costs — why adoptive families don’t have the money at the ready, what that money actually goes to (including legal fees, birth mother counseling, and the home study) — result from a lack of understanding. In light of this, she has some excellent advice on how to build trust with potential supporters.

Writer Roxanne Gay wrote a long, in-depth profound piece in response to the racial tension in Ferguson, and the discussion surrounding race it has recently brought into the cultural conversation. “How do we talk about race? How do we see one another as human, as having lives that matter, as people deserving of inalienable rights? These conversations are always so tense, so painful. People are defensive. We want to believe we are good. To face the racisms and prejudices we carry forces us to recognize the ways in which we are imperfect. We have to be willing to accept our imperfections and we have to be willing to accept the imperfections of others. Is that possible on the scale required for change?”

This mother adopted a 6 and a half year old girl who had been living on the streets, with a fight or flight mode very few of us could imagine. In this very moving piece she discusses the “ugly side of adoption.” Not all parents have to struggle with attachment issues. But for a variety of reasons, this is a devastating, ongoing battle with many parents. Some children simply arrive in their new homes with a more complex set of issues to work through, and this is especially prevalent in older child adoption. Her honesty is profound. It’s okay to have questions, to feel like you made a mistake, or to wonder what comes next. No judgment, please, in reading her story — everyone deserves their voice.

The NYTimes just wrote an interesting article about how parents in the child welfare system need to be heard. The assertion it makes — that many people don’t understand what happens in the child welfare system, outside of negative news coverage — is defended in a truly illuminating read.