This book explores the reality of what it's like to live adoption-and open adoption specifically. Most people know very little about how contemporary US adoptions "work" - and this book draws back the curtain to reveal the vulnerabilities, strengths, challenges, and daily struggles and triumphs of adoptive families today. It does not shy away from tough subjects, like birth parents' mental illness and racial differences between adoptive parents and their children. Itaims to trace the challenging decisions and dynamics that adoptive parents "sign up for" when they pursue open adoption. It also aims to illuminate the unique benefits and joys of open adoption.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- 1. Getting to Adoption: The Path before the Path
- 2. Orienting to Open Adoption, Considering Contact, and Reflecting on Race: Pre-Adoption Perspectives and Preferences
- 3. "Meeting the Reality of Our Situation": Placement Experiences and Circumstances and Post-Placement Openness and Contact
- 4. Imagining and Enacting Birth Family Contact Over Time: Trajectories of Openness Among Private Domestic Adopters
- 5. Navigating Openness and Contact in Child Welfare Adoptions
- 6. Adoption Talk: Communicative Openness Throughout Childhood
- 7. Weaving a Family Narrative: Genetics Talk
- 8. Facebook as Facilitator or Foe: Boundaries and Birth Family Relationships on Social Media and Beyond
- 9. Absence and Ambivalence: How Birth Fathers Fit into Adoption Stories
- 10. Summing Up: Practical Strategies and Applications for Families
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- References
- Index
