August 21, 2016

Adoption News Roundup

Happy Sunday, friends!

We hope you had the loveliest weekend with your family, and are now settling into a relaxing evening. Here are a few links and reads to wind down with tonight.

Simone Biles isn’t the only adopted Olympian! Here are 11 more.

Do you feel like it’s time for you to stop trying to adopt?

Recognizing minority status from an adoptee’s perspective. “Applying to colleges gave me a new perspective. Before, I didn’t have a grasp on just how much my ethnic background affected my life. Looking back at my childhood, I realized that not every child attended Asian culture camps and adoption support groups, celebrated “Gotcha Day,” got mild stares in public as a transracial family, and were asked multiple times if there was an interest in finding one’s birth parents. Yet, these experiences were just a part of my life and everyone goes through life differently.”

Positive adoption language is a MUST. “Whether “Open” or not, adoption joins adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents in a life-long relationship. As surely as our children are grafted to our family tree, they are also the fruit of their biological family tree.  Our kids carry the DNA of their ancestry. When we treat their birth families and heritage with respect, we teach children to respect and value an integral part of themselves.”

4 tips for special needs parents we don’t talk about. “With that being said, there is an entirely different population of special needs parents out there who can sometimes be overlooked and underappreciated. They are the parents like me, parents who don’t have a child with special needs. Instead, we are special needs parents because we are parents and we have a disability. There are many parents with disabilities that care very deeply and passionately about our children. The primary difference is that we are special needs parents because we are caregivers who at times need a little extra care ourselves.”

Unplanned and unwanted are not the same thing.