Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child: Making Sense of the Past

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and forthright
Review: Excellent step by step instruction on how to tell kids difficult information about their birth parents. E.g., your birth mother was a drug addict. Also shows how to present this information for kids of different ages: what you say to a 5 year old, a 10 year old, a 15 year old. I have read just about every book on adoption/fostering and this is one of the best. Since reading it I have known how to answer my son's questions and have felt much more comfortable discussing his birth parents with him.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I loved this book for a variety of reasons. It begins by laying a groundwork of WHY information can be so powerful and destructive in a family. It contrasts that with how openness can build a foundation of honesty between adopted youths and their parents. In that sense it starts out very conceptual. But it does not stop there, it goes on to give very concrete and practical ways you can give your children possibly hurtful information about their pasts in developmentally sensitive ways. I highly reccommend this book for anyone who plans on adopting from the foster care system. Sometimes questions come from our kids we don't always know how to answer. This book can help us to do that AND understand how our children respond to those answers.

Rating:
Summary: Practical and Conceptual
Review: I loved this book for a variety of reasons. It begins by laying a groundwork of WHY information can be so powerful and destructive in a family. It contrasts that with how openness can build a foundation of honesty between adopted youths and their parents. In that sense it starts out very conceptual. But it does not stop there, it goes on to give very concrete and practical ways you can give your children possibly hurtful information about their pasts in developmentally sensitive ways. I highly reccommend this book for anyone who plans on adopting from the foster care system. Sometimes questions come from our kids we don't always know how to answer. This book can help us to do that AND understand how our children respond to those answers.

Rating:
Summary: Informative and compassionate
Review: Keefer & Schooler have given us an excellent and substantive guide on numerous issues concerning adoption, notably how to tell children about adoption, how to handle adolescents' feelings. Unlike some other writers who think that children as young as 2-1/2 can understand and conceptualize the ideas of birth and adoption, Keefer and Schooler recognize that only by age eight do children have the ability to think in abstract terms and begin to understand the meaning of adoption. (In their book, Openness in Adoption, Exploring Family Connections, Harold D. Grotevant and Ruth G. McRoy found that only at the mean age of 10.5, age range 8.0-12.1, is the adoption relationship fully understood with its characterized permanency.) Schooler's description of the adoptee's various developmental stages is worded such that it appears all adoptees grieve, go through stages of anger and during adolescence experience an identity crisis. The adopted youths 'identity may fluctuate with their current fantasy of the birth family.' I am puzzled by our daughter who insists that she has never suffered an identity crisis. She has grown up with many adopted children, some of whom suffered such a crisis, others did not. Some studies of identity crises in adoptees and nonadoptees have shown no significant differences between the groups, so that 'adoptive status itself cannot produce a negative identity.' One study showed that nonsearchers had more positive self-concepts than searchers and overall self-esteem, identity, family self, physical self, self-satisfaction. These nonsearchers had less concern than searchers about their own background.
But research results are like see-saws: One result says green, the other says red. It's bewildering and cause for caution not to generalize. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

Rating:
Summary: Informative and compassionate
Review: Keefer & Schooler have given us an excellent and substantive guide on numerous issues concerning adoption, notably how to tell children about adoption, how to handle adolescents' feelings. Unlike some other writers who think that children as young as 2-1/2 can understand and conceptualize the ideas of birth and adoption, Keefer and Schooler recognize that only by age eight do children have the ability to think in abstract terms and begin to understand the meaning of adoption. (In their book, Openness in Adoption, Exploring Family Connections, Harold D. Grotevant and Ruth G. McRoy found that only at the mean age of 10.5, age range 8.0-12.1, is the adoption relationship fully understood with its characterized permanency.) Schooler's description of the adoptee's various developmental stages is worded such that it appears all adoptees grieve, go through stages of anger and during adolescence experience an identity crisis. The adopted youths 'identity may fluctuate with their current fantasy of the birth family.' I am puzzled by our daughter who insists that she has never suffered an identity crisis. She has grown up with many adopted children, some of whom suffered such a crisis, others did not. Some studies of identity crises in adoptees and nonadoptees have shown no significant differences between the groups, so that 'adoptive status itself cannot produce a negative identity.' One study showed that nonsearchers had more positive self-concepts than searchers and overall self-esteem, identity, family self, physical self, self-satisfaction. These nonsearchers had less concern than searchers about their own background.
But research results are like see-saws: One result says green, the other says red. It's bewildering and cause for caution not to generalize. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This book is wonderful! It communicates well; gives sound advice about when and how to tell children about adoption. It gives advice on how to deal with children and adolescents' feelings surrounding adoption issues. Addresses domestic as well as international adoption issues. Etc.

Rating:
Summary: Telling the truth
Review: This is the most comprehensive and "on target" book about adoption I have found. If you are adopted, reading this book will make you feel very understood...and if you are an adoptive parent, reading this book will be one of the best things you can do for your child!