Attaching In Adoption

This classic text is a comprehensive guide for prospective and actual adoptive parents on how to understand and care for their adopted child and promote healthy attachment. It explains what attachment is and provides parenting techniques matched to children's emotional needs and stages to enhance children's happiness and emotional health.

Adopted children who have suffered trauma and neglect have structural brain change, as well as specific developmental and emotional needs. They need particular care to build attachment and overcome trauma. This book provides professionals with the knowledge and advice they need to help adoptive families build positive relationships and help children heal. It explains how neglect, trauma and prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol affect brain and emotional development, and explains how to recognise these effects and attachment issues in children. It also provides ways to help children settle into new families and home and school approaches that encourage children to flourish. The book also includes practical resources such as checklists, questionnaires, assessments and tools for professionals including social workers, child welfare workers and mental health workers. This book will be an invaluable resource for professionals working with adoptive families and will support them in nurturing positive family relationships and resilient, happy children. It is ideal as a child welfare text or reference book and will also be of interest to parents.

Attachment is at the heart of family life and adoption. Schifield and Beek trace the pathways of secure and insecure patterns of attachment from birth to adulthood, exploring the impact of past experiences of abuse, neglect and separation on children's behaviour in foster and adoptive families. They explain from an attachment perspective the dimensions of parenting that are associated with helping children to feel more secure and fulfil their potential in the family - with peers, at school and in the community.

Capturing the warmth and fun of forming close relationships with children, this book offers simple advice to parents of children who find it difficult to attach and bond - whether following adoption, divorce or other difficult experiences. Attachment therapist Deborah D. Gray describes how to use the latest thinking on attachment in your daily parenting. She reveals sensory techniques which have proven to help children bond - straightforward activities like keeping close eye contact or stroking a child's feet or cheeks - and explains why routines like mealtimes and play time are so important in helping children to attach. The book offers positive ideas for responding to immediate crises like difficult behaviour and meltdowns, but importantly also offers longer-term strategies to help children to develop the skills they need to cope as they grow up - the ability to plan, concentrate and be in control of their emotions. Offering fascinating insights into how children who struggle to attach can be helped, this book is full of easy-to-use ideas which will help you to enjoy the many pleasures of bonding and attaching with your child.

Discusses how young children make sense of the fact that they are adopted with 20 accounts of parents talking to their children about adoption.

This book is a virtual one-step shop for adoption information for readers at any knowledge level . . . Strongly recommended for all public libraries and for all large university social science collections.--Lynn C. Maxwell, "Library Journal."

Based on a hugely successful US model, the Seven Core Issues in Adoption is the first conceptual framework of its kind to offer a unifying lens that was inclusive of all individuals touched by the adoption experience. The Seven Core Issues are Loss, Rejection, Shame/Guilt, Grief, Identity, Intimacy, and Mastery/Control. The book expands the model to be inclusive of adoption and all forms of permanency: adoption, foster care, kinship care, donor insemination and surrogacy. Attachment and trauma are integrated with the Seven Core Issues model to address and normalize the additional tasks individuals and families will encounter. The book views the Seven Core Issues from a range of perspectives including: multi-racial, LGBTQ, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, African-American, International, openness, search and reunion, and others. This essential guide introduces each Core Issue, its impact on individuals, offering techniques for growth and healing.

The world is full of hurt children, and bringing one into your home can quickly derail the easy family life you once knew. Get effective suggestions, wisdom, and advice to parent the hurt child in your life. The best hope for tragedy prevention is knowledge! Updated and revised.