The Family of Adoption

Rating:
Summary: Understanding, wisdom and compassion
Review: The Family of Adoption is a great adoption book. Dr. Pavao has insights gained from being an adoptee and from working with adoptees. She helps families understand the thoughts, needs and realities from the adoptee perspecitve. This is one book that I recommend to all adoptive families. A must have! It is required reading for our families.

Rating:
Summary: The Best "All Around" Adoption Book!
Review: The Family of Adoption is a great adoption book. Dr. Pavao has insights gained from being an adoptee and from working with adoptees. She helps families understand the thoughts, needs and realities from the adoptee perspecitve. This is one book that I recommend to all adoptive families. A must have! It is required reading for our families.

Rating:
Summary: Understanding, wisdom and compassion
Review: This book is a gem. It is full of undersanding, wisdom and compassion for all involved in adoption. It goes beyond generalities and charts the changing needs that birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees face in the different stages of their lives. I particularly like the way the author identifies the special issues for adoptees and their families as 'normative crises' rather than 'pathologies'. I am buying extra copies for my therapist friends.

Rating:
Summary: Finally, a book by Dr. Joyce Pavao!
Review: This extraordinary little book, with its carefully chosen anecdotes and clear, direct message, is the best book available about adoption and being adopted. It changed the structure of life in my family, and I give it to family members, teachers of my adopted children, and anyone else who is looking for clarity in the complex world of adoption. When you finish reading you will understand loss in adoption, you will understand what Dr. Pavao means by the "Family of Adoption", you will know how to listen better to your adopted children so that you can really hear what they are telling you, and you will be a better parent, teacher, grandparent, or friend. Buy this book and treasure it! I have read almost all adoption books published in the last ten years in the USA, and this is without question a beautiful, powerful and poignant work, and one of the best.

Rating:
Summary: a powerful little book for EVERYONE concerned with adoption
Review: This extraordinary little book, with its carefully chosen anecdotes and clear, direct message, is the best book available about adoption and being adopted. It changed the structure of life in my family, and I give it to family members, teachers of my adopted children, and anyone else who is looking for clarity in the complex world of adoption. When you finish reading you will understand loss in adoption, you will understand what Dr. Pavao means by the "Family of Adoption", you will know how to listen better to your adopted children so that you can really hear what they are telling you, and you will be a better parent, teacher, grandparent, or friend. Buy this book and treasure it! I have read almost all adoption books published in the last ten years in the USA, and this is without question a beautiful, powerful and poignant work, and one of the best.

Rating:
Summary: A great resource for everyone
Review: This is a great resource for adoption members (and anyone else) who want to understand the developmental stages and clinical issues in adoption. Pavao, an adoptee herself, was only told once of her adoption and after that "no one would talk, no one would explain." She grew up with the poisonous idea that "people who have secrets about them think there's something wrong with them." When she met her birthmother, the secrecy continued. No wonder, today, as a "family-system thinker," Pavao works to change a system that perpetuates secrecy and in so doing The Family of Adoption is meant for everyone in the world of adoption, but with focus on the best interest of the child. Pavao points out that birth and adoptive families are not the only ones responsible for the family of adoption. She deplores the fact that to this day material on adoption in medical school texts are lacking. The nation's psychiatrists, pediatricians, obstetricians, gynecologists and general practitioners are taught next to nothing about adoption. Law schools, too, neglect to give lawyers and judges a broader framework within which to view adoption and serve each client and case. Social workers too get inadequate training to work with complex families, as do professors in psychology programs. Pavao points out the "sad change of events" today which shows that adoptions in the U.S. are not based on a deliberation about the child's welfare but on business considerations. Her informative book tries to stir both public and private adoptions in the direction of seeing what placement would be the best for the child, and not best for the family, agency or adoption professional. I heartily recommend this book to the general public.
Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?