Showing titles in Adoption & Fostering

Welcome to The DNA Guide for Adoptees: How to use genealogy and genetics to uncover your roots, connect with your biological family, and better understand your medical history. If you are an adoptee, there’s likely missing information about your past and you hope to change that. You’ve come to the right place! This book is for you if you have hope that DNA testing might open up the search for information about yourself, your origins, and your future. We’ve worked hard to compile the resources in this book and explain in plain English how DNA and genealogical records fit together like ...

So, you want to help your child by therapeutic parenting, but how are YOU? This easy-to-follow, dip-in dip-out resource addresses common challenges and feelings experienced by therapeutic parents and offers 80 practical strategies to help you cope and survive. Best-selling parenting author Sarah Naish writes with humour and compassion, sharing her personal and professional experiences covering all of the essentials: self-maintenance, coping with isolation and rejection, scheduling holidays and, of course, the therapeutic importance of cake!

When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster 15 years of involvement with the traumatized, yet resilient, birth family. In Counting Down, Gold artfully tells her story of forging a family within an often confounding system in ways that defied the expectations of everyone involved.

A poignant true story of a woman who turned her tale of foster care and adoption by a Jewish family into a heart-rending play. A courageous and energetic storyteller, she brings life’s complex issues of identity, strength, character, and charm to the stage. We experience what it must have been like to grow up adopted. The listener is taken on a beautiful journey that explores self-identity, the importance of family, and the search for self. We follow her path and realize we are all in a constant search despite our experiences.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

A Soft Place to Land tells the story of foster care from the inside out. You will be immersed in the true, heart-wrenching stories of 15 foster children and one foster family as together they navigate the complexities of an imperfect system.

Belonging Matters is meant to support the adoption community, while creating a conversation with those not directly touched by adoption.

If you think her only options are parenting and abortion, this book is for you. American adoption is nothing like it used to be. Those forced, secret adoptions hurt women and their children. Thankfully, adoption in the US has changed dramatically. If you never thought about suggesting adoption, (and never thought you would!), this book is for you.

"Our adopted angel"—that's what Danielle's adoptive parents called her. She grew up adored, doted on, and unconditionally loved. It wasn't until she was in college that she first felt a gnawing curiosity about her roots. From time to time, she would wonder: Where did this face come from? Where did this body come from? Where did this blood come from? Her search to find her biological parents had begun-one full of surprises and revelations.

In the early 1960s, the head of a prominent New York City Child Development Center and a psychiatrist from Columbia University launched a study designed to track the development of twins and triplets given up for adoption and raised by different families. The controversial and disturbing catch? None of the adoptive parents had been told that they were raising a twin - the study's investigators insisted that the separation be kept secret.

Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee, she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being unwanted that drove her to perfectionism, suicidal ideations, and fantasy mothers.

When Kate meets the captivating Dan on her 21st birthday, she believes she's found her happily ever after. But her fairy tale is shattered when he disappears without a trace, leaving her with a broken heart and a mind full of unanswered questions. Just as Kate begins to pick up the pieces, a startling letter arrives, unravelling a tangled web of lies that Dan had spun. As she delves deeper into her lover's dark secrets, Kate's perception of their shared past shifts, and she uncovers hidden truths in her own life that she never could have imagined. With her future hanging by a thread, Kate ...

Breathing Through Foster Care is an honest and sometimes raw account of the daily joys and challenges of fostering. This honest glimpse into an imperfect family offers practical tips on how to avoid the missteps they made. It also provides many strategies they learned along the way to maintain a healthy family with children who have experienced trauma.

An American music icon is on a collision course with the world's two superpowers when trying to save a Chinese baby from death. Haunted by a troubled past and betrayed by the people closest to her, she is set to win against those determined to silence her.

In April 1969, a day before her 22nd birthday, Judith Ellen Bock gave birth to a 5 pound 15 ounce girl in a Tulsa hospital. Under the secrecy of a “NO SHOW, NO TELL” order, even Bock was kept from knowing much of anything about her newborn. Although she consented to the subsequent relinquishment of her parental rights and her daughter’s adoption, she was haunted by unresolved grief that she submerged for years under the mantra that she had “done the right thing.”

It's the heatwave summer of 1976 and 14-year-old would be poet Jackie Chadwick is newly fostered by the Walls. She desperately needs stability, but their insecure, jealous teenage daughter isn't happy about the cuckoo in the nest and sets about ousting her. When her attempts to do so lead to near-tragedy—and the Walls' veneer of middle-class respectability begins to crumble—everyone in the household is forced to reassess what really matters.

One day when he was eighteen, Michael Blair was lounging on the living room sofa when his mother shut off the vacuum and turned his world upside down. “Craig is not your real dad,” she suddenly told him. Stunned by the news, Michael discovered that this was a secret his entire family had kept from him. Two years later Michael began the search for his biological father. Wading through years of untruths and talking to people who were not forthcoming, Michael spent the next twenty-five years following clues and leads, all resulting in more questions and dead end roads. Finally, as with ...

Promote optimal fertility and start living a life of peace and joy…even before you have a baby in your arms! When the trauma, anxiety, and all-consuming desperation to have a baby take over, it’s difficult to know where to turn and how to mend your broken heart and spirit. Healing feels like a tall order, and finding peace, ease, and a sense of control seems nearly impossible. This book shows you how to achieve all of this and more…even before your bundle of joy arrives! Reduce the trauma, anxiety, consuming thoughts, and desperation of infertility. Create peace, ease, and miracles. ...

Embarking on an adoption journey can be daunting, but now you are not alone! This collection of true, beautiful accounts takes an honest look at the process, the struggles, and the undeniable joy that comes with adoption. With insights from all three adoption triad viewpoints, Adopting Hope shares a wealth of lessons learned and tips for every person contemplating an adoption journey.

In Blank: A Memoir, The Year I Felt the Humming in My DNA, Patricia Havens shares the extraordinary story of uncovering a family secret hidden for over 50 years. While grieving the recent loss of her father, Patricia receives a life-altering letter from a cousin, alongside DNA test results that reveal a shocking truth: she was adopted. This revelation sends her on an emotional journey of discovery, where she grapples with the concepts of identity, belonging, and the bonds that define family.