Brian recalls his initial meeting with Benjamin, who smiled, yelled, stomped his feet, screamed and refused to talk. In fact, experts had predicted that Benjamin might never speak…At their first meeting, Brian sat quietly across the room, holding a teddy bear and a book. After approaching him, giggling and running away repeatedly, little Benjamin shyly climbed into Brian’s lap, placed his hand on Brian’s face, and said, “Daddy!”

….It must have been a seminal moment for the little boy. When Brian recently asked Benjamin what his greatest memory is about the adoption process, he stated, “I remember calling you ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ because I was so excited.”

Voice For Adoption shared Brian and Benjamin’s story with members of Congress through its annual Adoptive Family Portrait Project.

Voice for Adoption is a national advocacy organization, based in Washington DC. Nicole Dobbins, it’s Executive Director, knows what she is talking about when she describes the children in foster care. A few years ago she was one of them.

She wrote, “Children in foster care especially deserve, and want more than anything, for someone to hold them close to their hearts, nurture and cherish them. It is amazing what miracles can do and how severe trauma can be overcome when these children are placed in such an environment where they are loved, embraced and given an opportunity to flourish.”

Click here for more information on Voice for Adoption.

Behavior management is a pretty cold term. Who wants to do behavior management? People don’t adopt in order to spend their time managing behavior. People adopt because they want relationships.

Jeffrey Haugaard, Ph.D, reported on research conducted at Cornell University. Behavior management (there’s that term again!) of two parent families who had adopted school aged children were studied.

Dr. Haugaard reported that couples who agree on their behavior management methods had success. Couples who disagreed were raising children whose behavior continued to get worse.

The research suggests that the method of behavior management is less important than agreeing.

So that might mean that adoptive couples would benefit more from intervention for themselves on how to arrive at agreement than they would from training on how to manage difficult behavior.

Like most things in life, the outcomes have everything to do with relationships.

Jake has visual proof of what happens over time. When you’re up close, the changes are almost imperceptible. But after a bit of time, if you step back and look again, you see it. The proof is right in front of you.

The proof is in the photographs Jake shows us.

Several years ago he and Sandra adopted a sibling group. Their first family photograph brought tears. Everyone was smiling. All of us who saw the picture couldn’t keep from smiling and crying.

All of their hope for the future is evident in Jake’s and Sandra’s smiles. You can see their confidence in their roles as parents. You can see how eager they are to grab those children and hold them close. We can’t help but share their pride.

The new children, on the other hand, are smiling for the camera. They like the attention they’re getting. They’ve been groomed and coached, and they’ve cooperated for the photographer. But they are not smiling from their hearts. All in all it is a great picture of a collection of two happy, hopeful adults posed with a sibling group of cooperative children.

I can imagine little clouds over the heads of each of the people in the picture like you see in cartoons. One of the boys is thinking “I can’t wait to go ride that big wheel again.” While Sandra is thinking, “I’ve been waiting for this moment. This is the culmination of many months of waiting and planning and paperwork.” Jake’s cloud tells us, “Well, here we are. We did it! They belong to us now.”

A year later the family photograph documents some changes. The children are quite a bit taller, and their smiles seem more relaxed. The cloud over Sandra’s head says, “I think they are learning to love me.” Jake’s says, “I’m a pretty good dad most of the time.”

A few years later it is strikingly evident. All of the attention created by the newness of the adoption has worn off. Friends and teachers let Jake, Sandra and the kids blend into the community. In this photograph the faces and body language reflect a real family.

On National Adoption Day Judge Boatright said, “Adoption is a promise acted out over a lifetime.” He got that right. A lot happens between photo-shoots. There are quarrels, disciplinary meetings at school, music lessons, family therapy, picnics, birthdays, home work, learning to ride bikes, report cards, hugs, packing lunches, flu shots, doing laundry, playing sports, and so on.

Becoming a family is not an event. It happens over time. Post-adoption services are available to help families keep their promises. Click here to learn about lending libraries, support groups, qualified therapists, training workshops, newsletters, and more.

It was a holiday week, and Tommye’s boys came to the office where they were waiting for their dad. He had the afternoon off, and was dropping by his wife’s office where she would hand over the child care for the period of her work day. The boys and their dad had plans to go to a game center.

As fate would have it my brother-in-law was in town and came by to say hello to me, and everyone arrived in our lobby at about the same time. They all made polite conversation when they were introduced.

Later it became clear to Tommye that her adopted sons had limited exposure to people of their own racial heritage. The family belonged to a support group for families who’d adopted children from Korea. So they had lots of friends in their own age group. But that’s as far as it went.

In the literal mind of a child, one of her boys connected the dots as he saw them: I am adopted….my Asian friends are adopted…therefore Asian children are adopted.

What Troy didn’t expect was to meet a fully grown Japanese adult in our office that day. That challenged his paradigm. In fact, it was a sort of awakening. So he had to go back and re-connect the dots. It became something like this: Asian children are adopted…this grown man is Asian…

And that’s where Troy needed help. So he asked his mom, “Is he adopted, too?”

Growing up adopted complicates the many layers of identify formation. Trans-racial adoption adds yet another variance. You can get some tips from FAIR, a great adoptive family support organization. If you are a trans-racial adoptive parent or adoptee and would like to, you can join the conversation with tips of your own.

Click Here for More Information

Books are good. But great advice can also be short, to the point, and easy to remember.

In September an adoptive mom had three pieces of advice for newly adopting parents:

• Make use of all of the resources available to you and your family;
• Create time for yourself; and
• Establish the life and schedule you want from the very beginning – don’t wait for everyone to settle in.

For recommended books and articles with more advice, click here.

Arta Banks has had plenty of what she calls “inside-out kind of days.” And she also has plenty of ability to turn those days around. She sees the beautiful things in life, and she shared some stories in a book she titled Wrong Feet First.*

So when Mike called this week to tell me how Arta’s book recently inspired and comforted him, I wasn’t really surprised. When a social worker asked her why she wanted to adopt older children with problems associated with previous abuses, Arta’s answer was, “Why not?”

And she quoted Jan Howard: “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”

One of Arta’s messages is that every one of us has something to learn and something to teach. And that’s how she lives her life.

*Wrong Feet First: A Gift of Stories for Your Inside-Out Kind of Day, Lovegifts Publishing, PO Box 201388, Denver, CO, 2001.

Adoption is a beautiful thing. But it isn’t just an ending. It is also a beginning.

It isn’t just wonderful. It is born of heartbreak.

Last week the court finalized the adoption of a seven year old, whose sisters had been adopted by another family. It was a warm occasion, with judge and caseworkers and parents smiling.

Someone asked the new adoptee how she felt. “Sad, happy and angry,” was her reply.

• Sad: She is separated from her siblings, and she lost her first family.

• Happy: She is loved and safe.

• Angry: She is afraid of what might happen, and she is just beginning to love the people who will have control of her life.

It makes sense that the children harbor a cauldron of conflicting emotions. That’s why support services and educational opportunities for adoptive parents and their children are so very important.

Click here to learn about post-adoption services

Born to a teenage mother, Tony was severely spanked as an infant for crying too much. Neighbors who were concerned about continued abuse and neglect alerted the social service agency, which intervened to protect him.

After failed attempts to help his birth mother develop skills to raise him, the agency placed Tony in foster care. By then he’d decided the world was a cold and hostile place. Smacking a babysitter or scuffling with a classmate was not uncommon.

And there were other problems. Tony lagged behind in developmental skills and vented his frustrations through long, loud temper tantrums.

Regarding him as a tough kid and a true survivor, Tony’s social worker saw promise. There was something really likeable about Tony. And so began his healing journey.

Despite therapy, Tony still had a lot of pent up hostility when he was placed for adoption. He feared rejection. He was only six, but he was able to upset a whole lot of people an awful lot of the time.

Years later Tony’s mom talks about the thrills of raising him and becoming a family. “Although Tony . . . made remarkable progress in every way, his most important achievement has been learning to trust.”

Read For the Love of Tony – A Mother’s Story in Adoption: Stories of Lives Transformed.

There is not a lot of material available on the subject. But it is something that every parent who is considering adoption thinks very seriously about: What about the children who are already in the family?

Like everything else in adoption, there isn’t one answer that fits every family, because adoption is a one-size-fits-one kind of thing. But there are predictable challenges and if the question is on your mind, then it makes sense to do a little exploration on the topic. There are also unpredictable outcomes.

I asked one mother (by birth and adoption) how adoption impacted birth children in her family. She smiled and responded, “My only birth child is my youngest … so it was never an issue for him. Of course he’s had to live with all of the challenges the others have experienced. But he has substantial challenges of his own.”

The Adoption Exchange and the Utah Department of Children and Family Services have teamed up to create a free lending library. And in that library is a book you might want to read, called Brothers and Sisters in Adoption, by Arleta James.

Melissa Ritz’ narrative caught my attention: “Like all adoptive parents, the path traveled to reach our children was long, and it was winding…During this time I had no idea that less than five miles away my children were alive and living the kind of life I could never bear to imagine.”

Every word is worth repeating.

Her story is titled “Why I Chose Foster Care.” You can read it and download the entire newsletter here.