Come Rain or Come Shine: A White Parent's Guide to Adopting and Parenting Black Children

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

1 comment:

  1. Hi Rachel,
    I 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

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