January 22, 2017

Link Roundup

It’s been a busy, action-packed week and there is so much compelling content floating around the world right now.

Here are the reads that have caught our eyes, minds, and hearts.

The banned books your child should read. “When your children read books that have been challenged or banned, you have a double opportunity as a parent; you can discuss the books themselves, and the information they provide, and you can also talk about why people might find them troubling.”

After losing a foster child, contemplating another. “I dream about him. In my dreams, he’s always a little bit older with slightly more chiseled features. Sometimes he remembers me, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he runs into my arms, sometimes he runs from them. On the days when he remembers me, when I pull him in for a tight hug and he asks me where I’ve been, it feels so real that I wake up with an irrational hope that he had the same dream, too. That maybe we’d found a way to cross the distance between us, just for a moment.”

5 reasons a new adoptive mom goes MIA.

Is this parenting trend the reason Dutch families are so happy?

This beautiful children’s book encourages a thoughtful dialogue about an adoptee’s birth and adoption story.

Something that’s not often addressed in the adoption community: what if you are considering adopting out of birth order? It’s a parenting conundrum only an adoptive parent could have, and Creating A Family offers helpful tips and thoughts for making the transition as smooth as possible.

Twin sisters separated at birth were reunited live on Good Morning America, and it’s incredibly emotional.

The concept of “real” in adoption, and how it splits our babies. “Posing the question [which set of parents are your “real” parents?] or asking for a ranking comes from an Either/Or paradigm that splits the baby/child/tween/teen/adult in two. It’s dualistic, starkly black and white, pitting a winner against a loser. Either we are the real parents or they are. Either we can legitimately claim the child or they can. While the baby in the King Solomon story was threatened with being sliced by a literal sword, adoptees are faced with a figurative sword splitting their hearts, their loyalties, their psyches, their identities. This happens anytime the adults around them operate from the Either/Or paradigm.”

20 small habits that can change your life.