January 26, 2018
Adoption and Parenting Reads of the Week
Hello, dear friends!
How was your week? Splendid, we hope.
As always, we’re here to greet the weekend with reads we found interesting, inspirational, informational, and important. Apparently words that begin with “i” have a big impact on us.
Please enjoy and pass along! From the 2017 adoption tax credit to why domestic adoption is so very important, this is a great crop of pieces.
See you Monday. <3
Why open adoption isn’t confusing to children.
How birth fathers can also be involved in adoptions.
Excellent children’s books about adoption!
These parents adopted a baby with no arms or legs.
The power of domestic adoption. “In the first moments of working with our American adoption agency, we realized that many decisions lay ahead of us. Would we be open only to a child who looks like us, or would we consider a child of a different race? Would we be open to a child who’d been exposed to alcohol, marijuana, crack, cocaine, heroin, or other drugs? What about openness to the birth parents’ possible mental-health issues, such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorders, or schizophrenia? At the start of our process, I thought we’d wait for a white child (who could blend seamlessly into our Orthodox Jewish community) who’d had no prenatal drug or alcohol exposure of any kind. But my mindset shifted, and I began to question myself: Was this about us as parents or the child in need?”
This dedicated man found his birth family near 90 years after he was orphaned and adopted.
7 things no one told me would happen after we created our adoption profile. “It would be nice to say that after you’ve created your profile, you could just sit back and wait for the right birth family to find it. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Creating a profile isn’t enough. You still have to get it out there in front of as many eyeballs as you can. Depending on your budget and resourcefulness, that could mean anything from creating a video to maintaining a blog.”
“Why I am not striving to be a perfect parent.”
Emotive language around adoption will not help vulnerable children. “However, it is unhelpful if language challenging adoption practice becomes as emotive and divisive as the pro-adoption language used to be. The reality of what is happening with permanency planning bears little relation to this rhetoric. We need to focus on what is happening and its impact on vulnerable children.”