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 Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew :: 044050838X
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"Birthdays may be difficult for me."
"I want you to take the initiative in opening conversations about my birth family."
"When I act out my fears in obnoxious ways, please hang in there with me."
"I am afraid you will abandon me."
The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children's unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame.
With warmth and candor, Sherrie Eldridge reveals the twenty complex emotional issues you must understand to nurture the child you love--that he must grieve his loss now if he is to receive love fully in the future--that she needs honest information about her birth family no matter how painful the details may be--and that although he may choose to search for his birth family, he will always rely on you to be his parents.
Filled with powerful insights from children, parents, and experts in the field, plus practical strategies and case histories that will ring true for every adoptive family, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew is an invaluable guide to the complex emotions that take up residence within the heart of the adopted child--and within the adoptive home.Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
This ia an invaluable tool for adoptive parents written in an easy reading style. No fancy psychological terms - just brutally honest feelings of those children adopted into their families. Highly recommended.
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Author: Guest
I highly recommend this book for every adoptive home - to be well-read, and if the need arises, well-used.
The home study, the paperwork, the wait, perhaps a trip to a foreign country, are, like labour, over and forgotten. All that matters now is the excitement, awe, and wonder, of your new baby or child, home at last, to be loved forever.
For parents, there is nothing quite like having a new child placed in your arms - whether the baby is biological or adopted. The difference is in the birth history and eventually, all kids want to know where they came from. However, for adopted kids, the answers sought are far more than the biology lesson.
With the answers and subsequent comprehension, may come feelings of loss and grief, feelings that may have been present early on. These feelings have nothing to do with the fact that a child has been loved, nurtured, and raised in a good home.
Eldridge's book validates the feelings and needs that could arise for an adopted child and offers practical suggestions and activities to do together. Even if the need is not readily apparent in your child, the suggestions and activities could only enhance your child's self-esteem and well-being.
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Author: Guest
Don't get caught up in this authors personal therapy. Although her adoption experience was not positive, adoption can and usually is a beautiful way to have a family. This author really encompases all the worst of all the situations - even saying as much as that a child instantly grieves being ripped from her mothers arms at birth. A bit much. While we do believe infants do sense who their mothers are, they are fully able to attach & adapt quickly to the parents that love and raise them everyday. Take it from me - I look into the bright and giggling face of my adopted son everyday. And the one thing we learned from this book - DON'T KEEP SECRETS OR BE ASHAMED.
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Author: Guest
This book brought to light so many issues that adopted kids face that had never occoured to me before. My husband and I are on the list to adopt 2 kids through the Fos-adopt program, and I thought that mentioning their birth parents would be painful to them, so I was just never going to talk about it. So many of the struggles that ALL of my friends that have been adopted face even today, can be traced back to how their adoptive parents failed to address their issues with adoption loss. My one minor complaint that I have with this book is that it doesn't really address the grief that most adoptive parents go through. Issues with sterility, knowing that this child will never truely be "yours", not getting to experience the joy of pregnancy, etc. Otherwise a wonderful book.
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Author: Guest
Sherrie Eldridge means well: she wants to help adoptive parents do a better job of parenting their adoptive children. But Eldridge has written a deeply-flawed book that cannot be relied upon regarding either its descriptions or prescriptions.
The first problem is that Eldridge makes sweeping statements about how adoptees feel and what adoptees need from their adoptive parents without, however, supporting her claims with any scientific research, either her own or others. On reading the many claims Eldridge makes in her book, I kept wanting to ask: how do you know this? She never tells us.
At most, Eldridge offers annecdotes from her own experience and that of other adoptees. But we have no way of knowing whether these experiences fairly represent the experiences of most adoptees; whether they were selected because they support Eldridge's views; or whether, in talking with other adoptees, Eldridge "found" just what she was looking for.
Another problem is the absence of any serious comparative perspective: how, for example, do non-adopted children experience and cope with the loss of a parent? Or, let's consider a major theme in Eldridge's writing: the idea that all adoptees suffer a loss that must be grieved because, having lived for nine months in her birth mother's womb, adoption removes the infant from the only environment she has known. Well, birth does that to all of us: we all are expelled from the Eden of our mothers' wombs; all of us are cut off from our pre-natal environment.
If the pre-natal experience is as important as Eldridge wants us to believe, then the "loss" involved in being born should be universal. It thus becomes essential to understand the effects of that experience and to distinguish them from the effects of adoption as such. Eldridge fails to address this issue.
I'll conclude with a much smaller example. One that, however, illustrates the problem I had trusting Eldridge's judgment and reliability. One of the works included in her bibliography is "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" by Bruno Bettleheim, whom Eldridge identifies as "German author Bruno Bettelheim" (p. 75), and, subsequently, as "renowned psychologist and author Bruno Bettelheim" (p. 77).
What's wrong with this? First, Bettelheim was born and educated in Austria, not Germany. Second, he did all his work in the United States (and so might be described as American), to which he came in 1939 as a Jewish refugee from Nazism (so that simply calling him "German," even if he had been born there, would have been misleading). Third, Bettelheim's reputation as a psychologist was exploded at least two years before Eldridge published her book: a widely-reviewed biography by Richard Pollak ("The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim"), exposed him as a fraud.
That Eldridge cannot properly identify Bettelheim and that she relies on someone so discredited substantially undermines my confidence in her knowledge and judgment.
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