Parenting Adopted Teenagers

In his newest release, Dr. Gregory C. Keck offers new insights and parenting strategies relative to adolescents, especially adopted adolescents. Parents will find humor and relief as they realize their role in their child’s journey in the adoption process.

How can adoptive parents and their teenagers navigate the challenges of the adolescent years? Full of valuable, grounded advice, this guide will help parents to understand the impact of early trauma on a child's development and the specific nature of the changes that occur during adolescence. With tips for coping with common problems, it combines first-hand accounts from professionals, parents and teenagers themselves. It also covers essential topics such as: family and peer relationships, developing healthy intimate relationships, emerging identity issues, and contacting birth family. Accessible and honest, Parenting Adopted Teenagers is an invaluable resource for adoptive parents as well as professionals working with them.

Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child guides adoptive parents in promoting a child's emotional and social adjustment, from the family's first hours together through the teen years. It explains how to help an adopted child cope with the ''Big Change,'' bond with new parents, become part of a family, and develop a positive self-image that incorporates both American identity and ethnicity origins. Parents waiting to meet their adoptive children will appreciate Cogen's advice about preparing for the trip and handling the first meeting. The author's main focus, though, is the child's adaptation over the next months and years. Cogen explains how to deal with the child's ''mixed maturities''; how (and why) to tell the child's story from the child's point of view; how to handle sleep problems and resistance to household rules; and how to encourage eye contact and ease transitions and separations. The reassuring narrative tone and the breadth and depth of information make this the most substantive and accessible book available and an indispensable resource for parents who adopt, professionals who advise adoptive parents, and teachers of adoptive children

"Birthdays may be difficult for me." "I want you to take the initiative in opening conversations about my birth family." "When I act out my fears in obnoxious ways, please hang in there with me." "I am afraid you will abandon me." The voices of adopted children are poignant, questioning. And they tell a familiar story of loss, fear, and hope. This extraordinary book, written by a woman who was adopted herself, gives voice to children's unspoken concerns, and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame. With warmth and candor, Sherrie Eldridge reveals the twenty complex emotional issues you must understand to nurture the child you love--that he must grieve his loss now if he is to receive love fully in the future--that she needs honest information about her birth family no matter how painful the details may be--and that although he may choose to search for his birth family, he will always rely on you to be his parents. Filled with powerful insights from children, parents, and experts in the field, plus practical strategies and case histories that will ring true for every adoptive family, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew is an invaluable guide to the complex emotions that take up residence within the heart of the adopted child--and within the adoptive home.

A leading authority on adoption and an award-winning writer bring wisdom and clarity to situations important to all adoptive parents. Real Parents, Real Children goes beyond the question of when to tell children they are adopted with practical advice for parents on how to talk with their children about adoption - not just once but throughout childhood, adolescence, and into young adulthood - and how to help them through the rougher points of growing up adopted. Authors Holly van Gulden and Lisa Bartels-Rabb offer insight into how adopted children at each age commonly think and feel about being adopted. They also explain how and why adopted children grieve for their birth parents and suggest ways adoptive parents can help them come to a healthy resolution of this grief. For prospective parents, the authors discuss ways to prepare themselves and the child they are about to adopt for the new family union. Throughout, the special concerns and challenges of interracial, international, and older-child adoptions are also addressed. Though written with parents in mind, Real Parents, Real Children provides the clinical information that professional therapists, counselors, and placement workers must have if they are to truly be of help to adoptive families at every stage of their lives. Real Parents, Real Children fills a real gap in adoption literature and offers confidence and assurance as well as sought-after answers to lifelong question.

Explaining how adoptive parents can help their traumatised child develop, it looks at the many different factors that can manifest in trauma, and how parents should respond to them.

Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child guides adoptive parents in promoting a child's emotional and social adjustment, from the family's first hours together through the teen years. It explains how to help an adopted child cope with the ''Big Change,'' bond with new parents, become part of a family, and develop a positive self-image that incorporates both American identity and ethnicity origins. Parents waiting to meet their adoptive children will appreciate Cogen's advice about preparing for the trip and handling the first meeting. The author's main focus, though, is the child's adaptation over the next months and years. Cogen explains how to deal with the child's ''mixed maturities''; how (and why) to tell the child's story from the child's point of view; how to handle sleep problems and resistance to household rules; and how to encourage eye contact and ease transitions and separations. The reassuring narrative tone and the breadth and depth of information make this the most substantive and accessible book available and an indispensable resource for parents who adopt, professionals who advise adoptive parents, and teachers of adoptive children