Help I've Been Adopted

Author: Speak

By Brenda McCreight

I have been in the adoption world a long time. I entered this life as the young adoptive mom of a 14 month old boy with undetermined “special needs”. Those special needs were later diagnosed as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, but at the time, so little was known about it that we couldn’t even get a diagnosis, let alone find any resources. Fortunately, as a family therapist, I was able to access the scientific research. I read what little I could find, and then I began putting on workshops for other parents and professionals so that they could learn to recognize the symptoms and create ways to help their children who carried the diagnosis that would soon become so common in the adoption field. Over the next 30 years, I adopted more children (12 so far) and I kept on top of the newest research on neuroscience so that I could help my own family as well as provide effective counseling, parent coaching, and training to others.

Still, there is always more to learn about what children need from us and about two years ago I realized that a lot of the newly placed children I was seeing in my private practice were experiencing a kind of “culture shock” that was leaving them overwhelmed by all the changes that a new family demands. Often, the new adoptive parents were equally overwhelmed and were struggling to find out what was holding them all back from transforming into the new family they were trying to become. I also realized that even children who had been in their adoptive families for a long time sometimes harbored a deeply buried confusion about how to develop a sense of belonging and that we, the parents and the professionals, weren’t providing the answers or the direction that the children needed. Hence, my new book “Help – I’ve Been Adopted”.

This book is written for all older child adoptees, for their parents, and for the professionals who work with them. The purpose of the book is to address the issues that aren’t given the time or attention that many young adoptees need in order to fit the past into its rightful place and to grasp onto the present. Understanding the past and living in the present is a life long struggle for many adoptees who experience pre-natal exposure to drugs and alcohol and who survive early neglect and abuse - this book gives them a place to start their own journey to emotional health.

“Help – I’ve Been Adopted” covers such issues as:  

• helping the child or teen understand attachment and what it means in their lives;
  
• answering questions about why kids get adopted;
  
• how to form a family identity;
  
• and how the hopes and dreams that everyone, including the child and the parents, has about the adoption don’t always match the reality.
  

Each chapter contains stories about how other children or youth overcame these issues and suggests ways the child and parent can communicate about these concerns.

The book is easy to read, and can be used by the family, by therapists, and by social workers to help the beginning stages of an adoptive placement go more smoothly, or, it can be used years later to help the family talk with each other about adoption issues that they wish they had discussed early on. 

Brenda McCreight, Ph.D., is a therapist, author, and consultant specializing in services for adoptive and foster families dealing with challenges such as FASD, ADHD, conduct disorder, attachment disorder, developmental delays, and cognitive impairment. Brenda is the author of “Recognizing and Managing Children with Fetal Alcohol/Syndrome” published by the Child Welfare League of America, and of “Parenting Your Older Adopted Child” published by New Harbinger Publications and “Eden’s Secret Journal: The Story of an Older Child Adoption” published by Adoption Press. Brenda sees clients at her office in Nanaimo, British Columbia and she provides distance parent coaching by phone and by email. Most importantly, she is the mother of fourteen children (12 by adoption) and seven grandchildren.

PR release

Help I've Been Adopted is being published by Tapestry Books, and will be sold through Tapestry Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, major wholesalers  and retail bookstores. TBR 03/2010

If you have questions or opinions about this book, or any of my other books, or if you want to talk about having me do a presentation or workshop in your area, you can contact me through my web site http://www.theadoptioncounselor.com or my blog http://www.theadoptioncounselor.com/Blog.