If you haven’t adopted yet, it’s hard to know the benefits of open adoption and what it’s like to have this relationship with your child’s birth family. The value in that is just huge.

— Tim Elder, Adoptive Dad of 3 and founder of InfantAdoptionGuide.com —

↑ Listen right here! ↑

The journey of adopting a baby can be so uncertain and feel so all-consuming that at times you can’t even see past it. It’s hard to look to what comes next when you don’t even know that there will be a next.

Yet adopting parents must not be short-sighted.

In Episode 203 of Adoption: The Long View, I talk with Tim Elder, founder of the Infant Adoption Guide, about the convergence of the part of the journey he focuses on — adopting — and the part of the journey I focus on — adoptive parenting. What does it take to make a smooth transition from hoping to be a parent to actually being a parent?

Tim Elder on Surprises, Imbalances, Dishonesty, and More

Listen in as we talk about:

• What surprised Tim about the “adoptive” part of adoptive parenting;
• What to do when one child has more contact with their birth parents than another child does with theirs;
• Dishonesty in the adoption process — scammers one one side, and bait-and-switchers on the other;
• Tim’s best advice for adopting well and for adoptive-parenting well.

Continue reading Adopting Parent to Adoptive Parent: How To Successfully Make the Leap →

Adoptive parents don’t always realize that raising an adoptee comes with this extra layer of emotional work that you’re going to have to do.

— Katie Biron, STAR Adoptive Parent group facilitator —

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Adoptive parent support professionals Katie Biron and Kara Andersen are my guests on this new episode of Adoption: The Long View. Both are absolutely amazing in their abilities to coach adoptive parents with wisdom and compassion.

What Adoptees Really Need From Their Parents

I worked closely with Katie and Kara, along with Angela Tucker (Ep 105) to create a new tool — a short animated video — that helps adoptive parents understand what adoptees really need from their parents.

The four of us recently unveiled our video courtesy Amara, a Seattle-based nonprofit that focuses on the needs of children within families formed through adoption.

Listen in as we:

Continue reading How to Be the Adoptive Parent Your Child Needs You to Be →

The agency branded these premium babies
that would go to premium parents.

But behind the scenes…none of those things
[the agency said] were true.

In fact, the agency routinely kept babies for at least six months in order to conduct a series of really horrific experiments on them, in order to produce the same matching I described earlier.

— Gabrielle Glaser,
journalist and bestselling author
of American Baby —

↑ Listen right here! ↑

Think of the Closed Adoption Era as the “Good Old Days”? Think Again.

“Closed” means a lot of things when applied to adoption. At its heart, it means that things were done in secret, realities were not faced, records were closed to forever separate original and forever families, and hearts and minds had to cauterize (close) around an unacknowledged wound.

My guest in this month’s podcast, Gabrielle Glaser, has written brilliantly about all of this in her new bestselling book American Baby.

With this Season 2 opener of Adoption: The Long View, Gabrielle and I talk about the various effects of closedness. During the Closed Adoption Era, adoption professionals were able to operate behind closed doors, in secrecy, wielding unchecked power in the dark.

Bad things can happen to vulnerable people when powerful people have that much cover.

Who Is Vulnerable in Adoption?

Certainly the “unwed mother,” cast out from her family and social circles.

Also the adopting parents, who so desperately want to build a family, often after being thwarted by infertility.

In both cases, desperation makes a person easy prey for a predator.

But perhaps the person most vulnerable in adoption is the newborn baby at the center.

Continue reading Gabrielle Glaser on the Impact of Harmful Adoption Practices Then & Now →