Parenting Books
 
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Adoption Is a Family Affair! What Relatives and Friends Must Know
By Patricia Irwin Johnston
 
Offering you information about who can adopt, why they consider adopting, how they adopt, how kids understand adoption as they grow up, and more. As it's subtitle makes clear, this short book is crammed full of What Relatives and Friends Must Know in order to welcome with enthusiasm a new member.
  
Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation and Ballot Initiative 58
by E. Wayne Carp
 
The passage of Measure 58 in Oregon in 1998 was a milestone in adoption reform. For the first time in U.S. history a grassroots initiative restored the legal right of adopted adults to request and receive their original birth certificates. Within a day after the law went into effect, nearly 2,400 adoptees had applied for these previously sealed records, elevating their right to know over a birth mother's right to privacy.
E. Wayne Carp, a nationally respected authority on adoption history, now reveals the efforts of the radical adoptee rights organization Bastard Nation to pass this milestone initiative.
   
$17

 $35
Beyond the Blue
by Leslie Gould
 
Genevieve's most harrowing memory is of 1975, when her mother died in the attempt to get an adopted Amerasian son out of a Vietnam on the brink of civil war. Meanwhile, young Lan grows up in crushing poverty in Vietnam. She's so poor, in fact, that, in the 1980s, she's forced to give up her children. Enter the adult, infertile Genevieve, still dealing with her childhood losses. While the story sounds sentimental, it's grounded in the reality of both countries, and Gould spends a lot of time on the nightmarish complexities of adopting a child from Vietnam.
Children of Intercountry Adoptions in School: A Primer for Parents and Professionals
By Ruth Lyn Meese
 
Children of intercountry adoption have complex histories that place them at high risk for difficulty or failure in school. Teachers and other school professionals rarely know how to test them, teach them, or meet their needs. This volume explains those needs and offers guidelines and suggestions for maximizing the educational performance of these children and helping them to meet their potential.
$16

 $50
Cross Cultural Adoption: How To Answer Questions from Family, Friends & Community
by Amy Coughlin & Caryn Abramowitz
 
"Where Is She From?" International adoption by American families has skyrocketed in the last decade, increasing by more than 300 percent since 1992. In the past three years alone, American families adopted nearly 60,000 children from other countries, and the rate of cross-border adoptions continues to grow. Domestic transracial adoptions also are on the rise. The family unit is becoming the new, scaled-down model for the "great American melting pot." All of these cross-cultural families engender questions, particularly from small children: "Who are her real parents? Where is she from?" If adults aren't careful, the answers can have devastating effects; if they are careful, the answers can lay a solid foundation for a developing wisdom about love, families, and relationships.
Infertility: Old Myths, New Meanings
by Jan Rehner
 
With sensitivity and direct language, Jan Rehner, a woman who herself is infertile, presents an insightful examination of the problem of infertility and how to deal with it. Focusing on the feeling, insecurities and experiences of women faced with the condition, she discusses the options available, technologies prescribed and approaches taken.
$24
 
 $20
 
 
Intercountry Adoption from China
By Jay Rojewski and Jacy L. Rojewski
 
This book provides a detailed examination of the post-adoptive views, actions, and experiences of a national sample of families with children from China toward acknowledging their adopted child's Chinese cultural-heritage and the issues they face together as a multicultural family. Historical and present-day issues affecting intercountry adoptees and their families, such as arguments used to support or oppose intercountry and transracial adoption, developmental delay and the effects of institutionalization on Chinese adoptees, parent-child attachment, discrimination and racial prejudice, and identity development, are detailed.
 
Parenting the Hurt Child : Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow
by Gregory Keck & Regina M. Kupecky
 
Keck and Kupecky explore how parents can help adopted or foster children who have suffered neglect or abuse. They begin by outlining changes in adoption and fostering procedures in recent years and use case studies to document the friction and disruption introduced into a household when a hurt, adopted child is brought into the family. The authors examine attachment disorders and control issues as well as parenting techniques that work (praise, consistency, flexibility, anger management) and those that don't work (punishment, withholding parental love, grounding, time-outs, deprivation). They highlight the symptoms of abuse and options for therapy. Foster or adoptive parents need to claim the role of parent in the child's life, the authors advise, suggesting ways to deal with teachers and other authority figures in the child's life. The book includes a variety of resources on, among other topics, finance, therapy for siblings and parents, cultural differences, and marriage counseling.
$30
 
 $27
 
 
Parenting Your Adopted Older Child: How to Overcome the Unique Challenges and Raise a Happy and Healthy Child
 
This comprehensive guide by an adoption expert provides specific parenting strategies for the growing number of people who adopt children over two years old. Parents learn to identify their child’s needs, meet such challenges as aggressive behavior and attention deficit disorder, and create a sense of belonging.
Pregnant? Adoption Is an Option: Making an Adoption Plan for a Child
by Jeanne Warren Lindsay
 
With pregnant teenagers as her target audience, Lindsay addresses the option of "open adoption," the ongoing relationship between adoptive and birthparents. The author presents current research that shows open adoption is better for the child. Emphasis is also placed on the problem of birthfathers being ignored and the need for both birthparents to be involved in the process of making an adoption plan; the importance of counseling; and the grieving process that naturally occurs when the child is relinquished to the adoptive parents. Numerous interviews with birthparents enhance readability and interest. This straightforward, well-organized book fills an important need for today's teens. Black-and-white drawings with multicultural representation accompany the text.
$23
 
 $17
 
 
Raising Adopted Children: Practical Reassuring Advice for Every Adoptive Parent
 
Drawing on the findings and practices of pediatricians, social workers, scientists, and adoptive parents, Raising Adopted Children is carefully and thoroughly researched. Chapters on open adoption, international adoption, and transracial adoption are combined with advice on bonding and attachment, breast-feeding an adoptive infant (possible but complicated), dealing with schools, privacy issues, adopting a child with disabilities, adopting as a single parent, and the challenges of adolescence. While Melina's many years of professional and personal experience shape her advice, she remains very evenhanded.
Reaching Out: The Guide to Writing a Terrific Dear Birthmother Letter  
by Nelson Handel
 
It's hard to write about yourself, and even harder to reveal yourself to strangers. REACHING OUT takes the fear out of the process. It helps you to know your audience, clarify your goals, and have confidence in what you are doing. You don't need to be a great writer to write a great Dear Birthmother letter! REACHING OUT is a toolkit for self-expression that almost anyone can use.
CONTENTS INCLUDE: * The "10 Golden Rules" of Dear Birthmother letters * Easy strategies for writing authentically, and from the heart * Common mistakes and how to avoid them * Tons of examples, samples, and styles to spark your imagination * Secrets of selecting photographs that work * Detailed discussion of each subject area * Step-by-step writing and revision techniques to help anyone write well * What birthparents look for in a good letter * Tips for writing with your partner.
$19
 
 $23
 
 
Sweet Grapes: How to Stop Being Infertile and Start Living Again
by Jean W. Carter & Michael Carter
 
A discussion of communication and decision making that empowers couples to take back control of their lives, this book was also the first to consider at length the positive option of childfree living after infertility! Jean Carter is herself an ob/gyn. Mike is an English professor. Together they figured out a way to pull themselves out of the pit of infertility, re-evaluate, and embrace a joy-filled life without children. Over the years, though, our infertile couple clients have often asked about the staying power of the Carters' decision. Do they have regrets? Aren't they sorry that they didn't adopt or go into more high tech treatment?
 
Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child: Making Sense of the Past
 
"Do I have to tell my adopted child the truth?" This is a question that faces every adoptive parent. Filling a much-needed gap in the adoption literature regarding communication with adopted children, Telling the Truth to Your Adopted-Foster Child provides parents with the important knowledge of why adopted children need to know the truth about their past. The authors offer practical guidelines and tools that parents can use in communicating with their children the circumstances of their past. This book presents the developmental stages of how children understand adoption and what needs to be said to a child age appropriately. The authors suggest how to share with children the painful and difficult issues regarding their circumstances, birth family and background. The goal is to provide a gateway into life as emotionally and psychologically healthy adults, with solid foundations for identity and self-esteem.
$15
 
$28
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Open Adoption Experience: Complete Guide for Adoptive and Birth Families
by Lois Ruskai Melina & Sharon Kaplan Roszia
 
Two leading experts provide an authoritative and reassuring guide to the issues and concerns of adoptive and birth families through all stages of the open adoption relationship.
 
The Personality Compass: A New Way to Understand People
by Diane Turner
 
This unique system gives you the key to identifying and locating fundamental personality profile precisely fits you, your friends and family.
$15
 
 $18
 
 
The Post-Adoption Blues: Overcoming the Unforeseen Challenges of Adoption
 
While the path to parenting through adoption is rich with rewards and fulfillment, it's not without its bumps. This compassionate, illuminating, and ultimately uplifting book is the first to openly recognize the very normal feelings of stress that adoptive families encounter as they cope with the challenges and expectations of their new families. Where do parents turn when the waited-for bonding with their adopted child is slow to form? When they find themselves grieving over the birth child they couldn't have? When the child they so eagerly welcomed into their home arrives with major, unexpected needs? Until now, adoptive parents have had to struggle silently with their feelings, which can range from flutters of anxiety to unbearable sadness. At last, Karen J. Foli, a registered nurse, and her husband, John R. Thompson, a psychiatrist, lift the curtain of secrecy from 'Post-Adoption Depression Syndrome' (PADS). Drawing on their own experience as adoptive parents as well as interviews with dozens of adoptive families ies and experts in the field, the couple offers parents the understanding, support, and concrete solutions they need to overcome post-adoption blues-and open their hearts to the joy adoption can bring.
 
The Spirit of Open Adoption
By James L. Gritter
 
Using as groundwork the profound insights of contemporary thinkers in the fields of adoption, theology, philosophy, and literature, James Gritter guides the reader along a spiritual pathway that discovers the honesty, community, and cooperation that produce successful open adoption.
$15
 
 $17
 
 
"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity
by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D.
 
Anyone who's been to a high school or college has noted how students of the same race seem to stick together. Beverly Daniel Tatum has noticed it too, and she doesn't think it's so bad. As she explains in this provocative, though not-altogether-convincing book, these students are in the process of establishing and affirming their racial identity. As Tatum sees it, blacks must secure a racial identity free of negative stereotypes. The challenge to whites, on which she expounds, is to give up the privilege that their skin color affords and to work actively to combat injustice in society.
Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China
by Emily Prager
 
This moving story of a single mother's two-month trip to Wuhu, China, in 2001 with her five-year-old adopted daughter, LuLu, combines memoir, travelog, and a bit of philosophy. A novelist (Roger Fishbite) and satirical columnist for the Village Voice, among other publications, Prager herself spent some of her childhood in LuLu's homeland. For anyone considering multicultural adoption or already involved in one, this compelling work offers encouragement and an example of how to help an adopted child get acquainted with her roots and build her sense of self. For others, it provides a wonderful view of a part of China seldom written about. Readers will also gain insight into the strengthening bonds between children and their adopted parents and the insecurities both feel. Following the trip, LuLu no longer exhibited frantic behavior. She seemed to have a better sense of herself and her heritage, which gave her more confidence, as well as a firmer comprehension of her adopted mother's commitment.
$21
 $18
 
 
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* please note that some items are available while supplies last only, feel free to call Vicki Baker 503.233.1099 for availability.