Reactive Attachment Disorder in Young Adoptees

My oldest child (adopted at 11 years old in 2003) struggles with severe emotional issues. He was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder while still in foster care and his inability to control his anger is leading him down a path that concerns me. When we adopted him, we knew he had issues to deal with and we have done more to help him than we even thought we had in us. I’ll write more about RAD in another post but...

Adoption Interviews #1

Here are the first two, in what will become a series of interviews with adoptive and waiting parents, that I did through e-mail and on our adoption forum. In an effort to show the many paths adoption can take, I’ll try and choose two that pursued adoption in different ways. If you’re interested in participating (the more the merrier), please e-mail me at joannegreco AT gmail.com. 1) Somebunniesmom from our...

comment question

Ali said… I am so glad I stumbled across your blog! First of all, your picture is wonderful. Those kids are very fortunate to be involved with the foster parents like that.Second, I have been looking into adoption recently, and was discouraged about the costs. I would love any kind of advice, or information about making it more affordable. How can a lower income family afford...

What Extended Family Can Mean To A Child That Was ...

Because my children were adopted at an older age (5, 8 and 11), family has extra special meaning to them, especially extended family. They enjoy meeting second and third cousins because it gives them a sense of connection to a whole other side of their family. They get a feeling of being part of something larger than just our immediate family. My cousin Pat, her two daughters and their daughters came to visit this past...

Using Advertising and Facilitators in Adoptive Pla...

Many people choose to adopt, and many birth parents choose to place their children for adoption, without the involvement of an agency. These placements are known as private placements or independent adoptions. Private placement is often preferred by people who want to adopt newborn infants from the United States and avoid the often years-long waiting lists of adoption agencies. The challenge for prospective adoptive parents...

Birthmother Scams

“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” — Anonymous Warning signs of potential birthparent scams: One sign alone does not mean you are being scammed. It is the combination of several and your instincts that should make you leary. A favorite ploy is for a scam artist is to fix you up with a “friend”. That person might pose as an adoptive parent or adoption professional. If this “friend”...

Study On Young Adoptees

UNCG RESEARCHERS FIND ADOPTED CHILDREN TO BE AS WELL-ADJUSTED AS THEIR PEERS By Deborah Durkee Dr. DiAnne Borders Dr. Kay Pasley GREENSBORO — Parenting is a tough job. One with many questions and no training manual, employing instead a sink-or-swim method of learning. Add adoption to the mix, and the questions of parenting become more complicated, causing adoptive parents to seek advice from counselors more quickly and...

International Adoption Video

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We’re Giving Comment Luv

One of the things I wanted to do when I moved this blog to wordpress was install the comment luv plug in. It’s in and working! What this little beauty does is find your latest blog post and insert a link to it after your comment. Share

What To Do With Your Kid’s Art Work

One of our long time adoption forum members asked for suggestions on how to manage the ever growing collection of her child’s art work. Having three kids myself, I’ve had to come up with some creative ways to display their pictures, drawings and paintings over the years. One of the things I do is line the inside of EVERY cabinet door with my kids artwork. Every kitchen cabinet door (16 of them) plus all...

Real Parents

Teaching This Equation at School and at Home by Deborah McCurdy “They’re not your real parents!” The little girl’s words were not meant to hurt. At 8, she was struggling to understand her own adoption. But our adopted son was hearing these words for the first time, at the age of 5. And he was devastated. For weeks, Mark could not bring himself to share the incident, nor his pain, with us. What...

Sidebar Additions

I’ve been checking out some of the many word press plug-ins for this blog and I wanted to post about the few I added so far. In the left sidebar, the last three comments and trackbacks will be listed. Also the top three commentators for each month will be listed, with a lnk back to their site or blog. At the bottom of each post I’ve added links to some of the social bookmarking sites like facebook and sk*rt....

Reactive Attachment Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Parents of Reactive Attachment Disordered Children by Jody Swarbrick Many foster and adoptive families of Reactive Attachment Disordered children live in a home that has become a battleground. In the beginning, the daily struggles can be expected, after all, we knew that problems would occur. Initially, stress can be so subtle that we lose sight of a war which others do not realize is...

A Day At Home

As homeschoolers, we have the freedom to choose what we do with our days (I’ll share my thought on homeschooling and adoption in another post) and sometimes that includes a day spent at home, which can lead us in many different directions. This mix of photos is from various days spent at home sweet home. Dress up is always a hit. Both girls enjoy it, but Shawna really loves to act out scenes from movies or character...

Adoption Lifebooks

The Life Book Story: Vera Fahlberg It is difficult to grow up to be a psychologically-healthy adult without having had to one’s own history. Traditionally, the family is the repository of knowledge about the child. Children separated from their families of origin do not have daily access to this source of information about their personal histories. It becomes more difficult for them to develop a strong sense of self...

Families Formed Through Adoption

Nature & Nurture: A New Look at How Families Work Early results reveal that children adopted into families fare as well as those born into them. by Susan Freivalds When Matt McGue and his wife were preparing for the adoption of their daughters, Sammie and Elise, he was struck by how little solid information was available on adoption outcomes. “Most of what we heard was based on anecdote or stereotypes,” says McGue, a...

Open adoption

Like most people, when we first started the adoption process we decided what we were and were not comfortable with. It’s very important to continually have these discussions before starting the process. One of the things (there were a few) we weren’t comfortable with was committing to being involved in an open adoption. It’ll be interesting to hear what this generation of adoptees say about open adoption in...

Adoption Agency Fraud

The following information was compiled through various online sources. It covers ways to protect yourself against potential agency fraud. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” — Anonymous Agency Fraud (domestic & international): Get references and contact them. Get references who are at different stages in the process and who have completed adoptions at different times. This is important to...