Books on Building a Connection with Adopted Children
- Positive Parenting: An Essential Guide
- LifeBooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child
- The Essential Link: Attachment Information for Adoptive Parents
- Becoming a Family: Promoting Healthy Attachments with Your Adopted Child
- The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family
According to an article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the brains of humans evolved in ways that reinforce the formation of form deep bonds with the young, even those not born to them. This propensity for community connection is what makes adoption not only possible but highly beneficial. However, in some cases, adoptive parents may need a bit of help creating a bond with their chosen young. When oxytocin alone is not enough, several books on connection provide guidance and support.
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1. Positive Parenting: An Essential Guide
Until recently, the primary focus of books about parenting has been one of behavior. How to influence children to be good received greater attention than how parents could connect with their children as developing human beings. Rebecca Eanes offers her insights into how parents can build productive and healthy relationships with their children at every phase of development in this highly acclaimed audiobook. While there are many expert texts available on the subject of parenting, Eanes’ work stems not from years of clinical practice but from rearing two children of her own. It’s the perspective of a biological parent who faces the actual challenges of raising children and fostering healthy, lifelong emotional bonds.
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2. Becoming a Family: Promoting Healthy Attachments with Your Adopted Child
Whether an adoption takes place at birth or brings parents together with children at an older age, fostering a sense of connection can be a challenge. For those who spend time in any institutional or foster care setting, the challenge may be even more significant. Bringing an older child into the fold of family means that simple nurturing behavior may not be enough to reassure them or to heal some of the wounds that their experience has inflicted upon them. But with support and patience, adoptive parents can build these essential bonds of family. This book offers potential parents insights that will help them assess any problem areas before adoption, provides helpful guidance to heal any damage in an otherwise healthy child, and ways in which they can offer reassurance to their newest family member.
3. LifeBooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child
One of the persistent stumbling blocks for children who are adopted later, coming from institutional settings or a foster home, is their lack of a firm sense of belonging. When everything is temporary, and nothing belongs to them, they may demonstrate a decided reticence to bond with adoptive parents. This book permits family bonds to grow by helping parents create a clear sense that the child is wanted, welcome, and cherished. By creating a life book, a family provides an anchor, a memento through which significant moments and milestones can be remembered. This is a crucial step in creating a deep bond of familial love.
4. The Essential Link: Attachment Information for Adoptive Parents
While heartwarming personal stories or hard-earned personal wisdom is often most approachable, there are times when practical and information-based guides provide necessary aid. Susan M. Ward offers such a guide to prospective adoptive parents in her text, which deals primarily with the topic of attachment. How is it built? How can parents approach adopted children with difficult backgrounds with confidence and care? What is the current literature saying about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), a behavioral state in which children avoid forming emotional attachments out of fear of impermanence?
5. The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family
Written by two renowned research psychologists, this book is all about creating and strengthening the bond between adoptive parents and their children. It offers practical and intelligible advice. The text supplies both support and research-based, empirically-proven techniques through which parents can form a deep connection with their child, provide discipline without shame or resentment, and address any learning or behavioral issues. However, it also offers reassurance to adoptive parents, which can make all the difference when they are confronted with the challenges of raising a child they have chosen.
While adoption presents different challenges to parents, it is still a labor of love. Showing that love and building a foundation of trust, respect, and deep connection is the chief aspect of such a task. Books can often provide essential information, perspective, and much-needed support, helping parents to navigate the complex and often emotionally subtle process of adoption.
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