When Parents Struggle to Attach to Their Adopted Child

Question: We are close to adopting two kids from foster care. Is there somewhere that shows the possible options for things we should ask for in adoption assistance?  I don’t want to rely just on the child welfare office to hopefully tell us all the possible options.

Resources:

• Josh Kroll, Adoption Subsidy Resource Center, Families Rising (Formerly NACAC)
  • joshk@nacac.org
  • 651-644-3036, extension 115
• Foster Care Subsidies: What is Reasonable and How to Negotiate (On-Demand course on CreatingaFamilyEd.org)

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Are you thinking about domestic infant adoption? This is an interview you must listen to! We talk with adoption medicine pediatrician, Dr. Todd Ochs, about common risk factors you should know about before adopting an infant.

In this episode, we cover:

• Common Risk Factors in Domestic Infant Adoption
  • Lack of prenatal care.
    • Why do expectant moms who are considering making an adoption plan often have limited prenatal care?
    • What is covered in prenatal care and how might a lack of prenatal care impact a baby?
  • Prematurity
    • What causes a premature birth?
    • Poor prenatal care?
    • Are expectant moms who are considering making an adoption plan more likely to have a premature birth?
    • What are the risks with a premature birth based on the degree of prematurity?
  • Prenatal exposure
    • Alcohol
      • What are some red flags that a mom might have abused alcohol during her pregnancy?
      • Does the degree of impact differ depending on when alcohol was consumed in the pregnancy?
      • What are the long- and short-term impacts of alcohol consumption on a child exposed prenatally?
      • Very often, you will not have a diagnosis of FASD and won’t be detected in the hospital post-natally.
      • Resources to help parents of a child exposed to alcohol. Creating a Family has a facilitated interactive training for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents to help recognize kids who may have been prenatally exposed to alcohol or drugs, and best practices for helping this child thrive, on-demand courses, and additional resources on the long- and short-term impacts of prenatal substance exposure – visit the Raising a Child with Prenatal Exposure for find more information. 
    • Opioids 
      • List of opioid drugs in increasing degree of strength
        • Codeine.
        • Hydrocodone (Vicodin, Hycodan)
        • Morphine (MS Contin, Kadian)
        • Oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percoset)
        • Hydromorphone (Dilaudid)
        • Heroin
        • Methadone, Suboxone
        • Fentanyl (Duragesic)
      • Does the degree of impact differ depending on when in the pregnancy the opioid was used?
      • Does the degree of long-term impact differ depending on whether the baby was born dependent or with a diagnosis of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome?
      • What are the long- and short-term impacts of opioid exposure on a child exposed prenatally?
      • Does the impact differ depending on what drug was involved or whether it was a legal or illegal drug?
  • Methamphetamine 
  • Cocaine
  • Marijuana
  • Hallucinogens, including Ecstasy
• Mental Health Issues
  • What is the genetic connection for the following mental health disorders? How heritable are these mental illnesses?
    • Anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and phobias.
    • Depression, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders.
    • Personality disorders (antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive)
    • Psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia
    • ADHD
  • Autistic Spectrum Disorders
• Legal Risk Factors
  • Most often in domestic infant adoption, the primary legal risk factor is an unknown or unidentified birth father
  • Controlled by state law
  • Work with your agency or attorney to understand the risk and what must be done to reduce your risk.

Please review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

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Listener Response: An aspect of adopting that we didn’t hear about was how your mental health is challenged throughout the process. It’s a roller coaster of emotions, and this isn’t discussed as often as organic issues such as drug or alcohol use.

Resources:

• Creating a Family Online Support Group
• Adoption Process & Important Considerations
• Self-Care for Parents and Caregivers

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Do you want to raise a child that can bounce back from all the hard stuff life throws at them? Join us to talk about this with Dr. Caroline Leaf, a communication pathologist and clinical and cognitive neuroscientist. She is the author of several books, including Switch on Your Brain, Think Learn Succeed, and How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess.

In this episode, we cover:

• The mind/brain/body connection.
• The neurocycle.
• 5-step process to build resilience in your child.
• How to apply this process to children who have experienced trauma?
• How can social media affect a youth’s resilience?

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Question: We’ve been waiting for a little over a year, and so far, no birth mom has asked to meet with us. I think we need to revamp our profile book.

Resources:

• What is an Adoptive Parent Profile? (Resource page)
• Understanding the Birth Parent's Experience (Resource page)
• Adoption Process & Important Considerations (Resources)

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know, has done it again with another wonderful memoir about growing up as a transracial adoptee and then losing both her adoptive parents. A Living Remedy is a story about family love and loss, regardless of how the family is formed.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Family love. 
  • You were well, if not always perfectly, loved.
  • You were temperamentally different from your parents, especially your dad. This may be more common in adoption. How did these differences impact you growing up?
  • Things my mom sent me, I sent my mom, my mom gave me. 
• Growing out of the socioeconomic level you were raised in.
  • Your mother thought you were ashamed of them. 
• What is middle class?
  • There is a big difference between being working class and middle class.
  • “Our “broke” bore no resemblance to my parent's “broke.” …We always had options.
• The impact of lack of money on health.
• Impact of Covid on families trying to care for loved ones.
• Your sister Cindy. 
  • Cindy wasn’t well-loved. How did she deal with the differences in her life vs your life?

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Question: We are adopting an 8-year-old little girl from the country of Georgia. I would love some concrete tips on how our family (four bio kids) can best communicate with her and foster attachment despite the language barrier. Are there any tools you can recommend or strategies to help non-English speaking adoptees feel more comfortable in their new environment?

Resources:

• Creating and Cultivating Attachment (Resource Guide)
• Sibling Relationships (Resource Guide)
• Traveling With Newly Adopted Children (Podcast)
• Preparing Children for the Adoption of a Sibling (Suggested Books)

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

We talk to our kids all day, but how can we use these conversations to help them reach their full potential? Our guest is Rebecca Roland, a speech pathologist, Harvard lecturer, and author of the book The Art of Talking with Children.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What is rich talk, and why is it important?
• You talk about different types of conversations. What are some of the different conversations we should have with our children?
• Conversations for learning.
• Conversations for empathy.
• Conversations for social skills.
• Conversations for confidence and independence.
• Conversations for building relationships.
• Conversations for openness.
• Conversations to promote joy and creativity.

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Question: Last week my husband and I flew across the country to meet our potential adoptive baby. We had been matched 5 weeks earlier and were full of happiness. We’ve always known the risks of having a fall through but based on the case, we didn’t think it would be the case. It was.  Despite being in contact with birthmom via email and text, getting her updates and baby pictures, she ghosted us and the agency. We met her and birthfather, she let us take pictures holding the baby and gave the agency’s social worker some missing paperwork. She had a change of heart last minute which is fine, but what made things more painful was that she never informed us.

Resources:

• Failed Adoption Matches: How Common? How Costly? How to Survive?
• Twelve Signs that an Adoption May Fail
• A Panel of Birth Moms Talk About Adoption

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

What are the microaggressions or stigmas in the world of adoption and how do they impact adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents?  We talk with Dr. Amanda Baden, a Professor and the Doctoral Program Director at Montclair State University in the graduate counseling program and a licensed psychologist in private practice in Manhattan. She is an adult adoptee from Hong Kong and an adoptive parent of a daughter from China.

In this episode, we cover:

• What are microaggessions in general and how do they apply to adoption? 
• These microaggressions apply to all members of the adoption kinship network (adoptees; adoptive parents, grandparents, siblings; first/birth parents/grandparents).
• Where do some of the unconscious attitudes and stigmas toward adoption come from? 
• Common microaggression themes for adoptees:
  • biology is best/normative is based upon the belief that biological ties are superior, more permanent, and more authentic than ties formed through adoption or foster care 
  • bad seed adoptees or damaged goods
  • grateful adoptees, a third theme, refers to the idea of adoptees as both lucky and privileged to have been adopted 
  • cultural limbo and invalidation of heritage 
• What are some of the microagressions against birth parents?
• What are some of the microaggressions against adoptive parents?
• Lack of intent to hurt.
• How can microsaggressions impact the mental health?

Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily

Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily