All About Adoption: How Families Are Made & How Kids Feel About It

Overall, this book is very well done. Despite its focus on a particular type of adoption story, it normalizes the feelings and questions that almost all adoptees have and provides reassurance that all of that is normal, and that the children are loved and worthy of love. It also explains some key terms and concepts related to adoption in ways that are easy for children to understand and adults to remember and reinforce (e.g., legal means "just right and for keeps"). It's not perfect, but I think this book is worth everyone's time.The illustrations are lovely and feature diverse groups of characters engaged in everyday activities. Unfortunately, almost all of the adoptive parents, birth parents and adopted children who are centered by the story seem to be Caucasian (on pages showing lots of different options, like lots of different ways children feel about adoption or lots of different people who might adopt a child, people of color are represented). Other than an occasional single parent in one of those "lots of different options" pages, all the birth parents and adoptive parents are couples consisting of one mom and one dad.The authors begin with a token nod to different family configurations ("There are lots of different ways to have a baby. Some parents have one baby. Some parents have one baby at a time. And some parents have two or three (or more!) babies all at once."). Next they do an excellent job explaining not just "adoption" but also "adoptive parents" and "adopted".The 3rd page spread begins: "So how does adoption start? Adoption has two starts." Start #1 is when "Your birth parents begin to realize that they might not do a good job taking care of a child." The birth parents think about all the things a child needs, including good food, good schools, and good doctors. Start #2 is when "your adoptive parents wanted a child to love and care for." The authors do a great job of explaining the standard adoption process, defining "adoption agency", "legal", and "home study" along the way and mentioning both domestic and international adoption. Everyone gets the help the need to make good decisions, and the birth parents have no feelings beyond wanting the best for their unborn child.The 8th page spread explains, "Some parents adopt children when they are babies" and "Some parents adopt children who are older", but there is no mention of how the two starts might be different when a child is adopted at an older age. This is my main irritation with this book: there is no reference to anything bad that might have happened prior to the adoption. Imagine children adopted at an older age after being in foster care for a while; are these children to believe that their birth parents realized that they couldn't take good care of them and decided to arrange for their adoption, as explained in Start #1? And what about all the adoptive parents who didn't necessarily start out with the goal of adoption, but ended up deciding to adopt a relative or foster child?However, the rest of the book redeems it for me. All the different feelings that come with meeting a new family and adjusting to a new life are acknowledged, along with the reassurance that it's completely normal to feel all those feelings, and that adoptive parents feel a lot of those feelings, too. The authors emphasize "LEGAL = just right and permanent. That means for keeps."The authors list questions that children might have when they first move into their new home, and things they have to get used to, calling this the "getting to know you" part of adoption. "Kids can have a lot of feelings right about now. These feelings can go up and down and change quickly. It can feel like being on a roller coaster, and that can be pretty confusing." The illustration shows 6 kids on a roller coaster named "Feelings Flyer," which I think is a great metaphor. The next page shows a wooded area with two signs posted on trees. The first says, "Important Notice. It takes time to feel close to your new family." The second says, "Second notice. It does happen."The next several pages do a very good job covering feelings and questions that continue forever - sometimes children feel sad when they think about their birth parents, sometimes kids wonder if it was their fault ("They may know this isn't true, but they worry about it anyway."), and sometimes kids wonder what their birth parents were like. This is another area where the authors seem not to have considered adoption from foster care: "Most moms and dads have never met the birth parents." But the end of the paragraph is almost perfect: "Kids can ask their mom and dad whenever they feel curious." (We change this to "mom or dad" in our family.)The last several pages contain really good tips for parents. As in the rest of the book, the authors emphasize how normal it is for adoptees to question, wonder, and feel all the big feels. They acknowledge common challenges and offer tips for handling those challenges with grace and compassion.I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, but overall I think it's useful. Adoptive families can use it to open conversations and talk about how their story is the same as in the book and how it's different. There aren't enough books that emphasize how normal it is for adopted children and adoptive parents to feel things other than happy and grateful, and this book does that really well.

I am a therapist and I bought this book because I was looking for something to use with a family who has a foster child they are considering adopting. I had read that this book covered foster care as well, so I thought it sounded like a good option. Unfortunately, I was not able to use it. The book begins with a warm and fuzzy intro about how an adopted child's biological family chose adoption because they wanted their child to have a better life than they could offer. The book mostly focuses on this type of situation, though it does mention that sometimes older children may have lived in a foster home or a group home before being adopted. Most foster children are in foster care because they have been removed from a situation of abuse or neglect. I was not comfortable using this book because the child I am working with was severely abused by his parents and I did not want to present a book that made it sound like most parents choose adoption because they have the child's best interest in mind. This would be hurtful and confusing for him. If you want to talk to your child about adoption and he or she was adopted at a very young age, this book would be great. I would not recommend it for older children adopted through the foster care system.

We have a 5 year old son and are planning to adopt a child through county DHR. We looked everywhere to find a book that explains adoption to our birth child. This one did the trick. It is written to the adopted child but we were able to use it with our birth child. It is full of facts instead of just being a sweet family story. It also points out that children don't have to look like the rest of the family.

So, so helpful to my 7 year old (adopted at 23 months) who's really struggling with understanding the concept of adoption from why he's not with his birth parents through to the fact that he's not the only child in the world who's been adopted. We read this book together - a few pages at a time each night so that we could talk it over and absorb it properly. He said he loved this book once we'd gotten through it.

Cute book. Great explanations. Really targeted towards a middle-late elementary age.

I am a therapist working with foster kids. I found this book to be very helpful to kids who are on the brink of being adopted. Children I've read this book with are attentive because they can identify with the information presented.

wonderful book

This book gives a brief overview of all types of adoption and the emotions that are felt by parents and children alike. It might be more valuable in a school library rather than a home bookshelf, as it is so broad it lacks personal connection.

It feels like this book "gives us permission" to experience all of our feelings about how our family came about, no matter what kind of emotions they are and where on the spectrum they lie. For our son, it has eased his expression of these and has opened new dialogue. A lot of his intense anger has fallen away since we started reading the book together. He shows us his favourite pages and asks us to read them again and again, listening calmly and quietly (which is not always the case at storytime!). I don't agree with all of the recommendations to parents (like not celebrating the day we became a family, just his birthday instead) but that's ok, no family is the same, we take so much from the book in other ways. Thank you to everyone involved in bringing this book into the world - we have adopted it with open arms into our family!

It was an ok book. most of the stuff my son doesn't understand yet but will keep reading to him. It should also have something in it about absent fathers / step parent adoptions.