Adoptive parenting has this in common with regular old parenting: just when you start to feel like you’ve mastered a stage, like babyhood, toddlerhood, tweenhood, or beyond, your child keeps growing and enters a new stage. And you’re back at square one, learning the ropes all over again.
This is why it’s so important, all along the journey, to update and refresh your parenting credential — or at least the knowledge behind it. Sure, you can do this the hard way, as we all do, with the school of hard knocks. But do you really want to start from scratch with every new thing?
I didn’t. I wanted as many heads-ups as I could get. Creating a Family came on my radar early in my journey, and 15 years later, it is still a top resource for me and for others living adoption. For one thing, it offers a wealth of educational content on its website and through its podcast. And for another, it has a vibrant and well-moderated Facebook group that avoids being an echo chamber of similar voices that somehow narrow each other’s views rather than expand them.
Continue reading Dawn Davenport: Why Adoptive Parents Need to Be Continual LearnersAn unconscious expectation some adoptive parents have is this:
If we’re good enough parents, the adoptee will not have an interest in or need to think about their birth parents.
