Adopting the Hurt Child

Adopting the Hurt Child

Author: Gregory Keck

Publisher: Tyndale House

Published: 2014-02-27

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 161521447X

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Without avoiding the grim statistics, this book reveals the real hope that hurting children can be healed through adoptive and foster parents, social workers, and others who care. Includes information on foreign adoptions.


Familial Fitness

Familial Fitness

Author: Sandra M. Sufian

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-21

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 022680867X

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The first social history of disability and difference in American adoption, from the Progressive Era to the end of the twentieth century. Disability and child welfare, together and apart, are major concerns in American society. Today, about 125,000 children in foster care are eligible and waiting for adoption, and while many children wait more than two years to be adopted, children with disabilities wait even longer. In Familial Fitness, Sandra M. Sufian uncovers how disability operates as a fundamental category in the making of the American family, tracing major shifts in policy, practice, and attitudes about the adoptability of disabled children over the course of the twentieth century. Chronicling the long, complex history of disability, Familial Fitness explores how notions and practices of adoption have—and haven’t—accommodated disability, and how the language of risk enters into that complicated relationship. We see how the field of adoption moved from widely excluding children with disabilities in the early twentieth century to partially including them at its close. As Sufian traces this historical process, she examines the forces that shaped, and continue to shape, access to the social institution of family and invites readers to rethink the meaning of family itself.


Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child

Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child

Author: Linda Anne Babb

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1997-05-28

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child bridges the gap between the desire to help a waiting child and the reality of America's special needs adoption system. It is designed to be used by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, to help them get started, keep going, and locate whatever additional information and support they need. The authors are adoption professionals, long-time support volunteers, child advocates, and mothers of a total of 21 children, 13 of them adopted children with special needs. Tens of thousands of children in the United States alone are waiting in foster care for parents, and many Americans, single and married, want to open their hearts and homes to these children who wait. A landmark 1980 federal law made adopting and raising special needs children affordable even for people of limited means. What could be easier than matching these kids to these families? The reality is that many prospective adopters never complete the adoption process because of red tape, regulations, and institutional lethargy. Among the adults who complete a homestudy or placement, lack of support services and advocacy training sometimes leads to heartbreak and adoption failure—not a happy ending. Adopting and Advocating for the Special Needs Child bridges the gap between the desire to help a waiting child and the reality of America's special needs adoption system. It is designed to be used by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, to help them get started, keep going, and locate whatever additional information and support they need. The authors are adoption professionals, long-time support volunteers, child advocates, and mothers of a total of 23 children, 14 of them adopted children with special needs.


Attaching in Adoption

Attaching in Adoption

Author: Deborah D. Gray

Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1849058903

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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.


Our Own

Our Own

Author: Trish Maskew

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9780966970159

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Based on personal experiences, research, and interviews, the author presents "practical tips, advice, and real-life stories for anyone who is adopting, or hopes to adopt, an older child."--Cover.


The Life We Never Expected

The Life We Never Expected

Author: Andrew Wilson

Publisher: Crossway

Published: 2016-06-14

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1433551020

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Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Andrew and Rachel Wilson know what it means to live a life they never expected. As the parents of two children with special needs, their story mingles deep pain with deep joy in unexpected places. With raw honesty, they share about the challenges they face on a daily basis—all the while teaching what it means to weep, worship, wait, and hope in the Lord. Offering encouragement rooted in God's Word, this book will help you cling to Jesus and fight for joy when faced with a life you never expected.


Parenting Matters

Parenting Matters

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 0309388570

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Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.


Saving International Adoption

Saving International Adoption

Author: Mark Montgomery

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0826521746

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018 International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.


Mental Health and the Church

Mental Health and the Church

Author: Stephen Grcevich, MD

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2018-02-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0310534828

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The church across North America has struggled to minister effectively with children, teens, and adults with common mental health conditions and their families. One reason for the lack of ministry is the absence of a widely accepted model for mental health outreach and inclusion. In Mental Health and the Church: A Ministry Handbook for Including Children and Adults with ADHD, Anxiety, Mood Disorders, and Other Common Mental Health Conditions, Dr. Stephen Grcevich presents a simple and flexible model for mental health inclusion ministry for implementation by churches of all sizes, denominations, and organizational styles. The model is based upon recognition of seven barriers to church attendance and assimilation resulting from mental illness: stigma, anxiety, self-control, differences in social communication and sensory processing, social isolation and past experiences of church. Seven broad inclusion strategies are presented for helping persons of all ages with common mental health conditions and their families to fully participate in all of the ministries offered by the local church. The book is also designed to be a useful resource for parents, grandparents and spouses interested in promoting the spiritual growth of loved ones with mental illness.


Special Kids Need Special Parents

Special Kids Need Special Parents

Author: Judith Loseff Lavin

Publisher: Berkley

Published: 2001-03

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13:

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Parents of children with special needs face unique emotional and practical challenges that are seldom addressed by the medical community. In Special Kids Need Special Parents, Judith Loseff Lavin -- herself the parent of a child with special needs -- draws on interviews with health care professionals, nationally recognized authorities, and other parents to give readers the answers, advice, and comfort they crave.-- Coping with chronic pain, sleep problems, and frequent hospitalizations -- Dealing with feelings of grief and anger -- Choosing a therapist -- Finding suitable, reliable childcare -- How to cope with teasing -- The impact a special needs child can have on a marriage, siblings, and grandparents -- Finding cosmetic, prosthetic, and orthotic help -- and more.