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ADDITIONAL READING RESOURCES
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Being Adopted: The Lifelong
Search for Self David Brodzinsky, Ph.D., Marshal Schechter, MD., and Robin Henig This classic illustrates the adoptees' common developmental pathways as they occur throughout the life span. It probes the complex issues that are involved in this ongoing life process. Five themes run throughout this book: the experience of adoptees, developmental perspectives, normality, search for self, and sense of loss. Doubleday, New York, NY, 1992 |
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Making Sense of Adoption Lois Ruskai Melina At each stage of development, adopted children have questions and concerns. This book provides advice on how to help your child deal with these. Each chapter recommends age-specific activities to reinforce the concepts discussed. There are many sample conversations that parents can use as a guide for talking with their children. This book should be read by all parents with adopted children. Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1989 |
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Why Didn't She Keep Me? Barbara Burlingham-Brown This is a collection of moving, revealing, honest and personal stories of women who faced unplanned pregnancies and answered with adoption. Here, in their own words, are revealed the experiences and situations of 15 women who gave up their babies for adoption. The result is a book that is a must-read for anyone contemplating placement of a child for adoption or hoping to adopt.
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Talking with Children About Open
Adoption Mary Watkins, Susan Fisher This book, designed to help adoptive parents, as well as professional counselors and therapists, deals with questions youngsters ask about their adoption, contains revealing conversations between parents and their children, aged 2 to 10, from 20 families of all kinds - single, lesbian, and interracial, among them.
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Children's Books About Adoption
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How It Feels to be Adopted Jill Kremnetz Nineteen boys and girls share their feelings about being adopted.
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The Mulberry Bird: An Adoption
Story Anne Braff Brodzinsky Relinquishment is the hardest part of adoption to talk about and is often glossed over in children's books. Brodzinsky has chosen to tell the story using birds to represent the people involved. Kindergarten - Grade 4
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Beginnings: How Families Come To
Be Virginia Kroll This book illustrates the various ways to enlarge a family: birth, adoption (open and closed, domestic and foreign), guardianship, single parenthood. Each features a child asking a parent to tell "the story of me," "how you became my now mom," etc. The responses are both loving and reassuring as well as instructive. Kroll carefully selects children from a variety of backgrounds; it is respectful and never condescending.
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How I Was Adopted: Samantha's
Story Joanna Cole Samantha has a joyful story to tell, a story completely her own, yet common to millions of families. It is a story of how babies are born and how children grow, a story of what makes people different and what makes them the same. But most of all, this is a book about love. And in the end, Sam's story comes full circle, inviting young readers to learn and to tell the stories of how they were adopted.
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Pugnose Has Two Special Families Karis Kruzel This book uses a family of mice to talk about open adoption on a child's level. it addresses birth origins, and the Pugnose's special relationship with his birth family.
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Tell Me Again About The Night I Was
Born Jamie Lee Curtis A sweet and sunny look at adoption, the story is framed as a much-loved and clearly much-requested family tale, and rings true from beginning to end. Combining wit ("Tell me again how you carried me like a china doll all the way home and how you glared at anyone who sneezed") with candor, Curtis deftly addresses the logistics of adoption in a mater-of-fact manner that radiates love and reassurance.
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Families Are Different Nina Pellegrini Pellegrini takes on the voice of her younger adopted daughter, Nico, who explains that she and her sister come from Korea; they don't look like their parents - "I grew in someone else's belly, but my mom and dad are the ones who promised to love and take care of me forever." Comparing her family to others she knows, Nico discovers nine other patterns - varied in size, color, composition, and family resemblances - all "glued together with love."
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A Mother for Choco Keoko Kasza Cheerful, energetic illustrations decorate the simple but charming tale of a youngster's search for a loving parent. A chubby-faced yellow bird with blue-striped feet, Choco believes that physical similarity is a prerequisite for family relationships. He asks a series of animals who bear even the slightest resemblance to him if they might be his mother, but all turn him away. Discouraged by their rejection, Choco is pleasantly surprised when Mrs. Bear takes an interest in him, plays and cuddles him, and ultimately offers him a home.
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Open Adoption
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How to Open an Adoption: A Guide
for Parents and Birth Parents of Minors Patricia Martinez Dorner This is an invaluable resource for families opening adoptions, for families that have already done so and need counsel and reassurance, and for adoptive families in closed adoptions, whose children are saying they need something more. This book speaks to the perspectives of all members of the adoption circle.
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Openness in Adoption: Exploring
Family Connections Harold Grotevant, Ruth McRoy Open adoption gets its due in this comprehensive study of its effects on all triad members. The research seems to prove that more openness is better; and that adoptees who have ongoing relationships with their birth families have stronger, better bonds with their adoptive families, too.
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Children of Open Adoption and Their
Families Kathleen Silber, Patricia Martinez Dorner A book that examines the effects of open adoption on the children. Two pioneers in the field examine scores of open adoption experiences from infancy to adolescence. Among topics covered: bonding, grief, communication, entitlement, and adoption understanding among children.
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Understanding Adopted Persons
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Journey of the Adopted Self: A
Quest for Wholeness Betty Jean Lifton The book draws on interviews with adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents, as well as Lifton's experience of counseling practice with adult adopted persons, to describe the complex tangle of grief, pain, and confusion that closed adoption can cause for adoptive children and the healing integration that can result if adoptees gain access to both strands of their heritage.
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The Primal Wound: Understanding
the Adopted Child Nancy Newton Verrier Verrier is both knowledgeable and sensitive to the issues surrounding adoption, especially to the particular issues of the adoptive mother and the adopted person. She also talks honestly about the taboo of the infant adoptee's pain from that initial separation. This book outlines in clear language and terms the process of the adoptee's journey and the attributes common among so many adoptees.
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Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted
Daughter Betty Jean Lifton Lifton has provided a realistic look inside the mind of the adopted person. She has taken us on a journey of search, reunion and all the joys and disappointments one may find along the way. |
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