Photo Credit: Jill Heupel Photography
In the Media:
MSNBC: Melissa Harris-Perry
NPR
Jezebel
Lavender Luz
Huffington Post Live
TRADED DREAMS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Open Adoption Bloggers
Table of Contents:
Prologue
Chapter 1: Choosing
Transracial Adoption: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Nesting
Without an Egg: Announcing, Waiting for,
and Preparing to Adopt Transracially
Chapter 3: The Call: Ready, Set, Parent!
Chapter 4: Are You
Really the Parents?: Raising a Black,
Adopted Child in a White, Biological World
Chapter 5: Crown of
Glory: Hair (and Skin) Care
Chapter 6: Two
Mommies, Two Daddies: Navigating Open
Adoption
Chapter 7: Processing,
Talking About, and Confronting Racism:
From the N-Word to Watermelon
Chapter 8: It Takes
a Village: Creating Support
Chapter 9: “I Was In
Her Belly Button”: Discussing Adoption
and Race With Children
Chapter 10: “Are They Real Siblings?”: Life as a Growing Adoptive Family
Chapter 11: Where’s the Black?: Supporting Your Transracially Adopted Child
Chapter 12: Somewhere Over the Rainbow: What Tomorrow Might Bring
Some fantastic features, beyond each book chapter’s
content, include:
• Extensive
resource lists (for further exploration and education) for parents and children
on a wide range of adoption-related topics
• Questions
for discussion (to enhance the reader’s understanding on adoption)
• Questions
from the trenches (the burning questions adoptive parents have) and answers
• Advice
and insight from experienced adoption professionals, adoptive parents, birth
parents, and adoptees including Jana Wolff:
Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive
Mother, Sherrie Eldridge: Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their
Adoptive Parents Knew, Patricia Irwin Johnston: Adoption
is a Family Affair!: What Relatives and
Friends Must Know, Arleta James: Brothers and Sisters in Adoption: Helping Children Navigate Relationships When
New Kids Join the Family, Deborah Gray:
Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents,
Elisabeth O’Toole: In On It: What Adoptive Parents
Would Like You To You Know About Adoption, Lois Ruskai Melina and Sharon
Kaplan Roszia: The Open Adoption Experience, Adam Perman: Adoption
Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is
Transforming Our Families—and America, Nancy Newton Verrier: The
Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted
Child, and many more.
• Practical
application exercises
• True
stories from the media
This book is a good resource for:
• Prospective
or current adoptive families
• Adoptees
• Birth
parents or expectant parents considering adoption
• Adoption
professionals such as social workers, birth parent counselors, and adoption
attorneys
• Teachers,
counselors, therapists, pediatricians
• Extended
birth and adoptive family members
Hi Rachel,
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to stop by and tell you how much I enjoyed reading your book. I got it a couple of days ago and finished it last night! My husband and I are first-time “almost” adoptive parents. We’ve recently been matched after a two plus years wait. We started out much like you and your husband did—not a lot of education or feedback from the agency when we first filled out paperwork and checked the boxes on “preferences.” After learning more and waiting more, we began to ask ourselves the same soul-searching questions. We finally decided that we would be open and ready to adopt and parent a child of any race. We are eagerly awaiting the birth of a bi-racial baby boy at the end of May. We hope he will be our son. ☺ We are excited and nervous! We’re educating ourselves in preparation to be the best parents we can be. I think that may mean a move for us in the not-so-distant future because we do not live in a particularly diverse area. Thank you for writing the book. It’s a tremendous resource and one I’m sure I will turn to again and again on this journey.
Erin