Good Ideas for Adoptive Parents

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in the Counselor’s Office… (and I Was the Counselor!)

As I look back over the last 20-odd years of working with adoptive parents, I am awed and humbled by how little I knew about how to help people during these dramatic times until they themselves taught me.

In this article, I would like to share some “gems” I have learned from the folks who had to actually LIVE the process that I watched and, sometimes, facilitated.

For Adoptive Parents

1. Seek out and listen to someone who has had a rougher time than you. You’ll get perspective on your present situation, and maybe make some new friends.
2. Keep a journal of your years of fertility treatment and waiting for the placement. It will be such a gift for your child, and it will help you to write what you feel.
3. Do something fun at least once a week with your spouse that isn’t related to conceiving, birthing, parenting, or adopting. Also, get a hobby that will require your creative focus and keep at it (even during the pre-placement weeks).
4. Think up some funny answers (or at least some stock phrases) for the questions you always get asked. It helps if you consume a bottle of wine during this exercise.
5. Write a letter of thanks to the birth family and others who cared for, and about, your child on the days before your placement, and every birthday after that.
6. Celebrate the day you received your child and the day you finalized.
7. Make a real commitment to keep contact with a circle of friends who have children through adoption. In ten years it will be very important to your children.
8. Make a storybook with photos about your child’s life – birth parents, previous caretakers, your life before placement, anything you can think of that preserves connections for the child.