Summary
This groundbreaking book uses the poignant, powerful voices of adoptees and adoptive parents to explore the experience of adoption and its lifelong effects. Full description
- Prologue
- Our six themes
- Voices of adoptees
- Personal note
- Introduction: the context of adoption
- Adoption: solution or risk?
- Losses of adoption
- Lifelong search for self
- Adoption adjustment across the life span
- Impact of open adoption and other variations
- part 1
- Adopted child
- Infancy
- the first year of life
- Sense of self, the growth of trust
- Setting the stage for adoption adjustment
- Word about bonding
- Attachment: the essential bond
- Vagaries of temperment
- Different style of family building
- Part II
- The Adopted adult
- When are you a "grown-up"?
- Search for identity continues
- Seeking and achieving intimacy
- Parenthood: undoing past mistakes
- Acceptance about being adopted
- Part III
- Conclusions
- Implications of international adoptions
- Special needs: the new euphemism
- How open is open enough?