Book Store
You Are Special - You Were Chosen
We all have many gifts that make us special. Joanna learned at an early age from her adoptive father just how special she was because he wrote her a story about just how much he loved her. And now she shares the amazing story he once told her with adoptive children everywhere. Ferlan and Prather show in this timeless poem just how much an adoptive child is loved before he or she is ever born.
author: Joanna Ferlan and Mary Fox Prather
Who's in a Family?
This equal opportunity, open-minded picture book has no preconceptions about what makes a family a family. There's even equal time given to some of children's favorite animal families. With warm and inviting illustrations, this is a great book for that long talk with a little person on your lap. Pencil and watercolor illustrations. --Amazon.com
When You Were Born in China: A Memory Book for Children Adopted from China
An excellent book to read to your children to help explain what their story was before moving home. It discusses the social situation in China, why and how they got to the orphanage and up to the point of being adopted.
author:
Sara Dorow
We're Different, We're the Same
Who better to teach young children about racial harmony than the colorful crew from Sesame Street? Rhyming text celebrates the racial rainbow, without which the world would be so much less interesting and wonderful. Full-color illustrations.
Rechenka's Eggs
A warm tale of love and and the unexpected from the bestselling author of The Keeping Quilt. Old Babushka is preparing her eggs for the Easter festival when she takes in Rechenka, an injured goose, who shows her that miracles really can happen. A Reading Rainbow Feature Title. Full color. Amazon.com
The Moon Lady
On a rainy afternoon, three sisters wish for the rain to stoop, wish they could play in the puddles, wish for something, anything, to do. So Ying-Ying, their grandmother, tells them a tale from long ago. On the night of the Moon Festival, when Ying-ying was a little girl, she encountered the Moon Lady, who grants the secret wishes of those who ask, and learned from her that the best wishes are those you can make come true yourself. Amazon.com
Just Because I Am: A Child's Book of Affirmation
The children's book Just Because I Am is an excellent introduction to self-esteem. Easy to understand statements and enchanting full-color illustrations invite young readers ages 3-8 to love and accept themselves. They learn to respect their bodies and acknowledge their needs. They name their feelings, discover that everyone makes mistakes and hear that it's okay to say "yes" and "no". Just Because I Am is recommended for all libraries, day-care centers, and homes where children depend on adults for guidance and affirmation.
How I Was Adopted: Samantha's Story
Sam has a joyful story to tell, a story completely her own, yet common to millions of families. It is a story of how babies are born and how children grow, a story of what makes people different and what makes them the same. Most of all, this is a book about love that invites young readers to learn and to tell the stories of how they were adopted. Full color. -- Amazon.com
Horace
Horace, a leopard, is the adopted son of tiger parents. Every night at bedtime Mama tells him how he came to be their child. Horace always falls asleep before the story ends. As Horace grows older, he begins to wonder whether he belongs with his adoptive family. One night he proves his own ending to the story he has heard so often. Full-color illustrations. Amazon.com
Feelings
"Children often have difficulty articulating emotions. That fact is the underpinning for Aliki's catalog of feelings, be they happy, sad, or somewhere in between".--Booklist.
Did My First Mother Love Me?: A Story for an Adopted Child
In the issue-oriented book, Morgan again hears her birth mother's letter explaining how much she loves Morgan and why she made an adoption plan for her. Mediocre pencil sketches accompany the overly sentimental text, which includes a long afterword for adoptive parents that gives guidance on the complex issue. -- Copyright © 1995 The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved. -- This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title.
Over the Moon
Katz has written a book that is bright, happy and colorful about the adoption of their daughter from Central America. It is suggested for use between adults and children who have been adopted in similar situations and emphasizes the “forever family.” The book uses statements like “faraway place” and “Forever and always we will be your mommy and daddy. Forever and always you will be our child.” The birth mother is also mentioned and is described gently as a lady who “wasn’t able to take care of you”. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0960950435/childrenshopeint.org
Seeds of Love: For Brothers and Sisters of International Adoption
This book helps brothers and sisters of international adoption work through their feelings about being separated from their parents during the time of adoption. It also gives parents fun and practical ideas for easing their children's anxiety before adoption travel. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0965575314/childrenshopeint
Happy Adoption Day!
Here is a children’s book that focuses on international adoption and shows a couple flying off to get their child and bring the baby home “on that wonderful morn.” There is a song that goes with the book and many people have found great enjoyment singing the song with their children and celebrating their family’s beginning. The whole book is a celebration of family that is remembered each year on the child’s adoption day party. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0960950478/childrenshopeint
Mommy Far, Mommy Near : An Adoption Story
Although Elizabeth, a young Chinese girl, is secure in the love of her adoptive Caucasian American family, she still has questions. Why, if China is such a big country, wasn't there room for all the babies? Didn't her mother love her? Such questions surface in games with her younger Chinese sister, in loving give-and-take with her American mother, and in hurt feelings after seeing a Chinese mother and daughter at the playground. Decorated in floral patterns and colored in lush, velvety hues, the thickly stroked, realistic artwork expands on the text while heightening the emotions it conveys. Elizabeth's misgivings are met head-on by her adoptive mother's reassurance, love, and thoughtful responses. The mother's tender support not only reassures Elizabeth but will also benefit other adoptees, especially those from Third World countries, as it reinforces the efforts of all loving, adoptive parents. ~Ellen Mandel From Booklist.
author:
Carol Antoinette Peacock, illustrated by Shawn Costello Brownell
Launching a Baby's Adoption : Practical Strategies for Parents and Professionals
Launching A Baby's Adoption incorporates anecdotal material solicited from adoptive parents and professionals throughout North America. Launching a Baby's Adoption fills the need of single and coupled parents seeking to adopt for information that can assist them in practical ways to bring a baby into their families and into their lives. Launching A Baby's Adoption is a valuable addition to the parenting collections of community libraries and is "must" reading for anyone seeking adoption as a means to enhancing their family life.
author:
Midwest Book Review
The Primal Wound, Understanding the Adopted Child
A very interesting book. The author is very knowledgeable and insightful in exploring the process of being adopted. Although somewhat technical at times it addresses nearly every aspect of an adoptee’s world. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0963648004/childrenshopeint
The Broken Cord
A celebrated author gives his account of how he and his family search for answers in dealing with his adopted son with FAS. It is a heat-rending book giving you much to think and feel about. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060916826/childrenshopeint
Toddler Adoption, The Weaver’s Craft
Written by an adoptive mother, Hopkins-Best draws a magnificent job of exploring many issues never discussed before in adopting toddler children. It will prepare you for every aspect of adopting toddlers! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944934218/childrenshopeint
author:
Mary Hopkins-Best
Attachment
Bowlby's magisterial trilogy analyzes the impact of attachment, separation, and loss, and this first volume focuses on the critical role of the bond between mother and infant in emotional development. Allan Schore, whose pioneering synthesis of neurobiology with attachment research has shown how the brain gets into the act, contributes a foreword that catapults Bowlby's legacy into the new millennium.
Separation: Anxiety and Anger
The experience of separation and the ensuing susceptibility to anxiety, anger, and fear constitute the flip side of the attachment phenomenon. In an authoritative new foreword to Bowlby's classic study, Stephen Mitchell (who gives resonant voice to the relational perspective in psychoanalysis) bridges the distance between attachment theory and the psychoanalytic tradition.
Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children
This book spells out some of the trials foster and adoptive parents may find themselves up against with some concrete ideas to use to remedy negative situations. The book has ideas and strategies to help children with attachment disorders so that they can have the ability to function in a normal life.
author:
Denise A. Hughes
Adopting the Hurt Child: Hope for Families with Special Need Kids: A Guide for Parents and Professionals
Assists families in understanding children with special needs. Provides insight and support along with helpful ideas and suggestions. Very informative authors! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576830942/childrenshopeint
Handbook For Single Adoptive Parents
Information, encouragement and practical advice on the processes of adoption for singles, as well as financial aspects, life style changes, day care, and health care.
author:
Hope Marindin
Adoption Resource Book
An informed and practical guide to agency and independent adoption, both domestic and international and how they work. Includes state-by-state guide to adoption agencies. Also information about preparing for and raising the adopted child.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062730436%20/childrenshopeint
Raising Adopted Children: A Manual for Adoptive Parents
This book covers current adoption research in child development, psychology, sociology, and medicine, while focusing on the experiences of adoptive families. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060960396/childrenshopeint
Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries
This book is written by adult adoptees from Korea and captures their thoughts and feelings as adults.
author:
Susan Soon-Keum Cox
Talking With Young Children About Adoption
Current wisdom holds that adoptive parents should talk with their child about adoption as early as possible. But no guidelines exist to prepare parents for the various ways their children might respond when these conversations take place. In this wise and sympathetic book, a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, both adoptive mothers, discuss how young children make sense of the fact that they are adopted, how it might appear in their play, and what worries they and their parents may have. Accounts by twenty adoptive parents of conversations about adoption with their children, from ages two to ten, graphically convey what the process of sharing about adoption is like. --Amazon.com
A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China
The author, Amy Klatzkin; amyk@alumni.stanford.org, February 20, 1999
Writings from Families with Children from China
"A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China" began as an e-mail conversation among FCC newsletter editors. Within a few months that conversation had turned into a book of more than 100 articles from 24 adoptive family support groups in the U.S., Canada, and Britain.
The quality, range, and depth of the writing far exceeded my expectations. There's something in here for everyone whose life has been touched by adoption from China: adoptive parents, waiting parents, family, and friends.
author:
Amy Klatzkin
I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birthmothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children
I consider it an honor to be associated with this important book, unique because it invites the reader to hear and understand the voices of Korean women who have made the difficult decision to place their children for adoption. These letters are both heart-wrenching and hopeful. In editing this collection, I wanted to be mindful of the similarities of birth mother experiences across time and place, but also respectful of the unique context of Korea and of individual birth mothers. But most of all, I wanted the letters to speak for themselves--for adoptive parents and mature adoptees to be able to interact openly and thoughtfully with them. I hope that in the end this collection is both challenging and helpful.
author:
Sara Dorow
The Family of Adoption
Joyce Maguire Pavao dedicates her book The Family of Adoption in part to her two mothers, who died two weeks apart. "They both died of secrecy," she writes. "One could no longer talk, silenced by her disease. One could no longer think or remember.... I love and cherish what each of my mothers endured and imparted.... I refuse to have secrets and I work to change a system that perpetrates them."
As adoption becomes more discussed and less taboo, the emotional road maps become clearer for adoptive families, birth mothers, and children of adoption. The Family of Adoption is a gentle, essential addition to the literature that will help guide families of adoption along the path. --Ericka Lutz Amazon.com
Adopting the Older Child
This book discusses expectations for those who wish to open their hearts to an older waiting child. Issues explored include adoption decision-making and processes, adjustment, and behavior modification.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0916782093/childrenshopeint
Helping Children Cope with Separation and Loss
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558320512/childrenshopeint
A Child's Journey through Placement
This book provides the foundation and the tools to help professionals and parents support children for whom the journey through adoption is a part of the road to adulthood. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944934110/childrenshopeint
The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers, and Adoptedbook1.gif (39097 bytes) Daughters Tell Their Stories
Adoption has always been a woman's issue. With eloquence and conviction, more than 30 diverse birth mothers, adoptive mothers and adoptees tell their adoption stories and explore what is a deeply emotional, sometimes controversial, and always compelling experience that affects millions of families and individuals.
The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past
The Lost Daughters of China is that rare book that can be many things to different people. Part memoir, part travelogue, part East-West cultural commentary, and part adoption how-to, Karin Evans's book is greater than the sum of its parts. Evans weaves together her experience of adopting a Chinese infant with observations about Chinese women's history and that country's restrictive, if unevenly enforced, reproductive policies. She and her husband adopted Kelly Xiao Yu in 1997, and anyone curious about adopting from a Chinese orphanage--which houses girls and disabled boys--will learn about the mechanics and the emotional freight of the two-year process. Borrowing an image from Chinese folklore, Evans conveys herself, her husband, and their daughter as tethered by a red string that yoked them across an ocean and an equally awesome cultural divide. -- Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0944934110/childrenshopeint