...provides parents with effective strategies for ensuring that their adopted child adjusts as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
Becoming a Family
Promoting Healthy Attachments with Your Adopted Child
Description
It is a story that moves us to tears. An American couple travels across the world to rescue a child from the hopelessness of a foreign orphanage, bringing their new son or daughter to a life of love and family. But does this transition always go smoothly?
Adoptive parents hope their child will easily fit into the family and quickly become emotionally connected to the parents or siblings. But child psychologists and adoption experts say this connection is the most difficult aspect of international adoption.
In countries where international adoptions are common-China, Russia, or Romania-orphanages commonly represent the available children to their new parents as healthy kids who just need a little love. In many cases, this is a gross misrepresentation. Children who spend time in institutionalized care may have experienced trauma, and therefore may not attach easily to their new family. Parents anxious to bring these children into their homes and their hearts struggle seriously with this issue. Although these children will eventually adapt in a healthy fashion, the road to emotional health and harmony can be a rocky one.
Becoming a Family tackles this intricate issue head on. It provides parents with effective strategies for ensuring that their adopted child adjusts as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Practical and accessible, this book will help parents identify severe problems before the adoption, significantly reduce the risk of future difficulty, improve the damage already done to the child's otherwise normal, healthy development, and dramatically help enfold the child into a family ready to give love, security, and a new life.
Reviews
Practical steps a parent can take to alleviate a child's attachment problems are also highlighted, and types of therapy that may be helpful for the child are discussed.
That some older adoptive children didn't know how to trust can be the source of misunderstanding, fustration, anger, and pain for many of the parents who adopt them. The sooner the parents understand and respond to the source of the distrust rather than take it personally, the sooner they will be a family in spirit as well as words.
It discusses the characterisitics of normal parent-child attachment and explains what can happen if the attachement is interrupted. Practical steps a parent can take to alleviate a child's attachment problems are also highlighted and different types of therapy that may be helpful for the child are discussed.
