From Adoptalk 2018, Issue 2; Adoptalk is a benefit of NACAC membership By Phyllis J. Stevens Phyllis Stevens is a foster and adoptive parent and founder of Together As Adoptive Parents, an adoptive parent support network, in Pennsylvania. She also helped start the Philadelphia Resource Parent Association and currently works for the Youth Law Center… Read more
Children who have been adopted are part of at least two families—their birth or first family and their adoptive family. Many, especially those adopted at an older age, have connections to their birth parents or other members of their birth family. Adoptive parents often need help navigating these relationships or even answering questions about birth… Read more
In 1999, the California Department of Social Services and Consortium for Children partnered to launch an innovative new program—Permanency Planning Mediation. The partners were looking for an effective way to use openness to shorten a child’s time in foster care by avoiding costly and time-consuming contested termination of parental rights hearings while also helping maintain… Read more
I have been parenting adopted kids for 28 years now. I’ve had the chance to raise 12 children (8 adopted) to adulthood. In addition, I’m connected with dozens of my former foster kids who were reunified with their birth parents. My experiences, especially those of my adult children and their birth families, have led me… Read more
When I ask children in my Adoption Playshop sessions what they like best and least about their family, their answers reflect the importance of sibling relationships—real, imagined, yearned for, or lived-at-a-distance. They speak of siblings with affection, sadness, anger, longing, resentment, envy, gratitude, guilt, or bitterness. No matter what they share, it is clear that… Read more
When my parents adopted in the early ’60s, society accepted adoption, but it was not something most adoptive parents (whose infants were matched with the family by skin, eye, and hair color) shared publicly. Today, parents who adopt children from foster care cannot pretend their children were always a part of the family, and most… Read more