Adoption and the Family

Addressing the Needs of Adopted Teens
Most parents agree the adolescent and teen years are without question the most challenging for their children and for the family as a whole. This can be especially true in the case of adopted children who, like all teens, struggle with issues related to who they are and who they want to be. Imagine the added confusion during this crucial developmental stage, when teens reflect on their unique situation as an adopted child. Read more >>

Book Review - Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens
Book review of Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens by Debbie Riley and Dr. John Meeks. Read more >>

Adoption Doctors
Adoption doctor is a specialty recognized by the American Academy of Pediatrics who evaluate a child's medical records, conduct physical examinations and tests, and advise parents on childcare. They help children transition from foreign or domestic orphanages and foster care into their new permanent homes. Read more >>

Post-Adoption Depression Syndrome?
Science is just beginning to define Post-Adoption Depression Syndrome (PADS). PADS can range from a full-blown episode of severe depression that requires hospitalization or just a simple case of the blues that lasts a month or two. The few scientific studies of PADS indicate that over half of adoptive mothers experience it. Read more >>

Holidays with Extended "Family": An opportunity for connection
For some families who live far apart and only see each other at holiday time, the chance to build connections makes this time especially important. For adoptive parents, the desire for their children (and their family) to be loved and accepted may be tinged with anxiety.Just as adoptive parents broadened their understanding of adoption (beyond the personal experiences they had prior to considering adoption), so too must extended family members learn a great deal. Read more >>

Adoption and the Holidays
For children adopted at older ages, holiday time can conjure up important memories and associations. Whether having lived with birth families, in foster care, or in orphanages, children with positive or negative memories of what happened during this season, of how holidays were celebrated or not, are likely to experience powerful emotions related to their memories. Read more >>

Inside Adoption: Single parent with three adopted children
Kathy is a mom to three kids who were adopted. One was adopted as a newborn, one as a three-year-old, and one as an 11-year-old. All three children have various emotional, behavioral, developmental, and mental health issues including bipolar, autism, learning disabilities, depression, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), RAD (reactive attachment disorder), and ADHD. Read more >>

Adopting Older Children
There are many reasons why prospective parents choose to adopt children who are older. Whatever the motivation, the decision to adopt older children must come after careful consideration and education as to both the many rewards as well as the challenges involved. Read more >>

Single Parent Adoptive Families
Some single adoptive parents originally thought they'd parent someday with a partner, and subsequently made the sometimes difficult decision to go it alone, rather than continue to wait for Mr. or Ms. Right. They have had to embrace the many obvious challenges with single parenthood, but also have come to appreciate the many less obvious beneficial aspects of single parenting. Read more >>

Supplemental Therapies For Adoptive Families
Families that adopt often undergo family therapy to discuss adjustment, parenting, grief, and the adopted child may also need additional interpersonal psychotherapy to work through issues of abandonment, creating new attachments, and peer relations. For some families, however, standard therapy may not be enough. Additional issues in need of treatment might include auditory processing difficulties, speech complications, attachment and bonding challenges, trauma related issues, and more. Read more >>

Therapeutic Respite: What? Where? How?
Parenting children or youth with emotional, behavioral, or mental health issues - including many foster and adopted kids - can be very challenging and stressful. Foster and adoptive families sometimes have access to respite: someone else who will caretake their child for a few hours or a few days. Read more >>

Adoptive Parents Can Only Guess. . .
Communication is critical to successful parent-child relationships. Understanding and empathy help parents to communicate with their children. But, do parents really have a connection when it comes to what it feels like to be adopted? Yes, there are some adoptive parents who themselves were adopted, but most parents cannot put themselves into the shoes of their adopted child. Read more >>

Talking About Adoption: How Often and How Much?
Most adoptive parents worry about whether or not they are communicating enough with their children about adoption, especially with children who don't present them with a lot of questions. On the other hand, some parents express concern about overdoing the emphasis on adoption, perhaps giving their children the impression that they were unfortunate victims of life's events. Today's adoptive parents need to help their children with their important feelings related to adoption, including feelings of loss and grief, which impact their child' sense of security and self-esteem. Read more >>

Adoption and Sexuality
Talking with children about sex can be one of the most challenging aspects of parenthood. This task may generate additional anxiety in adoptive parents because adoption and sexuality are intertwined in complex, emotional ways for both adoptive parents and their children. Adoptive parents need to look for appropriate ways to correct this misperception so that their children/adolescents will view them as a resource for information on sexuality as well as role models to identify with. Read more >>

Therapeutic Interventions with Sexually Abused Children and Their Families
What all victimized children do have in common is the violation of their bodies and appropriate boundaries. The resulting loss is of trust in adults, either because they perpetrated the abuse or failed to protect them from the abuse. Helping children heal and recover from the trauma of sexual abuse takes time and patience and is most effective when both child and caregivers are involved in the treatment process. Effective treatment must always integrate parents into the treatment process. It is not uncommon for the adoptive parents to feel confused, anxious and angry when the trauma is revealed. Read more >>

Adolescence and Adoption
There are two major tasks of personal growth for all teens: identity formation and separation. For adopted teens, the tasks of mastering identity and separation come with more complexity because of the additional challenges that are part of the adoption process. This growth, however, is necessary and important to their development and well-being. Read more >>

Healing Loss in the Traumatized Child
Many of the stories of children who enter the foster care system involve abuse - physical, sexual or emotional - neglect or abandonment. Care giving adults may be drug or alcohol addicted or mentally ill, unable to care for themselves, let alone children. In some instances, children have witnessed violence, even murder against loved ones. Unfortunately, multiple caregivers and moves both prior to and subsequent to placement in foster care compound the experience of trauma and loss. Read more >>

Post-Adoption Counseling
The field of post-adoption services reflect both the research and clinical practice that has clearly demonstrated the unique needs and challenges that adopted children and their families face throughout their lifespan. Children adopted at older ages, who have experienced abuse, neglect or some other early life trauma including multiple foster care placements, institutional care as in international adoption, or children with other types of special needs may be at additional risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties which require effective mental health intervention. Read more >>

Talking with Children Conceived Through Donor Insemination, IVF with Egg Donor or Surrogacy
Although controversy continues to exist regarding adoption practices such as transracial and open adoption, there is no controversy about the expectation that at some point, adoptive parents will talk with their child about his/her adoptive status and share the facts related to how their child came to be part of the family. Unlike adoption, however, no such clear expectation for disclosure exists for parents who conceived their child through alternative family-building methods such as donor insemination or in vitro fertilization (IVF) with an egg donor or surrogacy. Parents who have successfully conceived with the help of a third party continue to be counseled by some medical and mental health professionals that it is not necessary to share the circumstances of the child's conception with their child - that it is not necessary for the child to know the truth about how he came to be part of his family. Read more >>

I Don't Care if he goes to Harvard, But...
Everyone who decides to embark on the journey of parenthood goes down the road with fantasies of what parenthood will be like, and more importantly, dreams about what their child will become as he grows up. Adoptive parents have the same dreams that all parents have, although they have less information about the biological road maps of their children. Adoptive parents may find this inability to predict actually frees them from standard pressures but creates another, unique set that must be dealt with. Read more >>

Sibling Bonds and Separations
Since sibling relationships are potentially the longest relationship we will ever have mental health professionals believe they are more influential than the relationships with our parents, spouses, or children. Children in foster care and those in adoptive families have some unique challenges when it comes to siblings. Sometimes they know about their siblings, and sometimes they only wonder if they might exist. As parents, we need to respect how our children might feel about the siblings they cannot be with, and find ways to open communication about their thoughts and feelings about siblings. Read more >>

Adopted Teens Often Fear Leaving Home
While adoptive parents may certainly experience ambivalence about seeing their children growing up in preparation to leave the nest, it is often the adopted adolescent who may have difficulty with separation because of unique feelings related to adoption. The ad where the parents seemingly can't wait to renovate their child's room/house/garage as soon as the child leaves may not be all that humorous to adopted teens. Read more >>

Discovering Red Flags: Is it Adoption or is it Something Else?
Adoptive parents must be especially good at noticing changes in their child’s behavior. They must then figure out if the signal/difficulty indicates that their child is struggling with an issue that is related to adoption. Because it is too important that parents accurately “diagnose” the difficulty, most adoptive parents would like to know what adoption-related issues might be indicated by the behavioral signal their child is sending. Read more >>

Post-Adoption Support Benefits Adopted Teens and Parents
Even the most well adjusted adopted teen may begin to struggle with feelings of rejection and abandonment as they become adults. Post-adoption support in the form of emotional counseling or family therapy can help you and your teenager work through the issues that often emerge during an adopted child's adolescence. If your teen needs more constant or consistent support, you might consider a school especially equipped to support adopted teens. Read more >>

Successfully Communicating with Your Adopted Teen
When your adopted teen hits adolescence, it's more important than ever to keep the lines of communication open. This tends to be the time that children experience a range of emotional concerns related to their adoption. If your adopted teenager becomes distant, "closed off" or remote, there are a few simple guidelines you can employ to maintain a positive, open and supportive relationship with your adopted teen. Read more >>

Adoption Issues - Adoption Information, Resource Center, and Support Services for Adopted Children and Adoptive Parents and Families | Site Map