All about Adoption: How Families Are Made & How Kids Feel about It Book

Overall, this book is very well done. Despite its focus on a particular type of adoption story, it normalizes the feelings and questions that almost all adoptees have and provides reassurance that all of that is normal, and that the children are loved and worthy of love. It also explains some key terms and concepts related to adoption in ways that are easy for children to understand and adults to remember and reinforce (e.g., legal means "just right and for keeps"). It's not perfect, but I think this book is worth everyone's time.

The illustrations are lovely and feature diverse groups of characters engaged in everyday activities. Unfortunately, almost all of the adoptive parents, birth parents and adopted children who are centered by the story seem to be Caucasian (on pages showing lots of different options, like lots of different ways children feel about adoption or lots of different people who might adopt a child, people of color are represented). Other than an occasional single parent in one of those "lots of different options" pages, all the birth parents and adoptive parents are couples consisting of one mom and one dad.

The authors begin with a token nod to different family configurations ("There are lots of different ways to have a baby. Some parents have one baby. Some parents have one baby at a time. And some parents have two or three (or more!) babies all at once."). Next they do an excellent job explaining not just "adoption" but also "adoptive parents" and "adopted".

The 3rd page spread begins: "So how does adoption start? Adoption has two starts." Start #1 is when "Your birth parents begin to realize that they might not do a good job taking care of a child." The birth parents think about all the things a child needs, including good food, good schools, and good doctors. Start #2 is when "your adoptive parents wanted a child to love and care for." The authors do a great job of explaining the standard adoption process, defining "adoption agency", "legal", and "home study" along the way and mentioning both domestic and international adoption. Everyone gets the help the need to make good decisions, and the birth parents have no feelings beyond wanting the best for their unborn child.

The 8th page spread explains, "Some parents adopt children when they are babies" and "Some parents adopt children who are older", but there is no mention of how the two starts might be different when a child is adopted at an older age. This is my main irritation with this book: there is no reference to anything bad that might have happened prior to the adoption. Imagine children adopted at an older age after being in foster care for a while; are these children to believe that their birth parents realized that they couldn't take good care of them and decided to arrange for their adoption, as explained in Start #1? And what about all the adoptive parents who didn't necessarily start out with the goal of adoption, but ended up deciding to adopt a relative or foster child?

However, the rest of the book redeems it for me. All the different feelings that come with meeting a new family and adjusting to a new life are acknowledged, along with the reassurance that it's completely normal to feel all those feelings, and that adoptive parents feel a lot of those feelings, too. The authors emphasize "LEGAL = just right and permanent. That means for keeps."

The authors list questions that children might have when they first move into their new home, and things they have to get used to, calling this the "getting to know you" part of adoption. "Kids can have a lot of feelings right about now. These feelings can go up and down and change quickly. It can feel like being on a roller coaster, and that can be pretty confusing." The illustration shows 6 kids on a roller coaster named "Feelings Flyer," which I think is a great metaphor. The next page shows a wooded area with two signs posted on trees. The first says, "Important Notice. It takes time to feel close to your new family." The second says, "Second notice. It does happen."

The next several pages do a very good job covering feelings and questions that continue forever - sometimes children feel sad when they think about their birth parents, sometimes kids wonder if it was their fault ("They may know this isn't true, but they worry about it anyway."), and sometimes kids wonder what their birth parents were like. This is another area where the authors seem not to have considered adoption from foster care: "Most moms and dads have never met the birth parents." But the end of the paragraph is almost perfect: "Kids can ask their mom and dad whenever they feel curious." (We change this to "mom or dad" in our family.)

The last several pages contain really good tips for parents. As in the rest of the book, the authors emphasize how normal it is for adoptees to question, wonder, and feel all the big feels. They acknowledge common challenges and offer tips for handling those challenges with grace and compassion.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, but overall I think it's useful. Adoptive families can use it to open conversations and talk about how their story is the same as in the book and how it's different. There aren't enough books that emphasize how normal it is for adopted children and adoptive parents to feel things other than happy and grateful, and this book does that really well.