Gregory C. Keck and L. Gianforte - Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong: Strategies for Success

With Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong , Keck and Gianforte deliver a timely and incredibly helpful resource for those beginning the journey of adoption and professionals working in the field. The book gives an honest look at what to expect when adopting from foster care, and it is armed with realisticrather than romanticizedexpectations that give parents the keys to successfully overcome the inherent challenges. Consistent with our organizations experiences working within the largest foster care system in the US, Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong shows that adoption wont be easy, but is a journey well worth taking for anyone with room in their heart to change the course of a childs life.

Janis Spire, President and CEO, Alliance for Childrens Rights, Los Angeles

Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong combines all the essential elements that make up an important bookknowledge, insight, experience, honesty, and heartinto one very accessible and readable volume. I believe it will genuinely help a lot of people, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to professionals and families alike.

Adam Pertman, President of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency and author of Adoption Nation

Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong is a valuable tool for prospective adoptive parents. Traumatized children often bring with them more than anyone can see. This book brings all possibilities to the forefront. It is a true and real account of what adoptive families may endure as they adjust to creating and becoming a family. Having adopted three children, two of whom experienced trauma in their young lives, my husband and I consider this book a godsend. Adoption is an incredible journey, and resources such as this will benefit not just parents, but adoptive children as well, helping them to understand where they came from and what they bring to their new families.

Missy Hokanson, adoptive mother

Although adoption offers the hope of a forever family, nave good intentions and wishes for happy ever after can leave families alone inand blamed fortheir predictable crises. The authors provide a balanced approach that honestly explores the challenges and riskswhile still offering reassurance and hopeby highlighting strategies that can help resolve traumatic reactions and forge resilient connections. This book should be a must read for anyone involved in adoption, whether as a parent or professional.

Vicky Kelly PsyD, MSW, MHA Director, Delaware Division of Family Services

Keck and Gianforte speak directly, with great honesty, empathy, wisdom and humor, to those most closely involved in adoption: adopters themselves and their professional supporters. They attempt to unpick the myths, misconceptions, and misplaced attributions of blame surrounding the placement and support of children and adolescents in adoptive families. Their practical, user-friendly, no-nonsense approach goes right to the heart of what it means, and how it feels to be, or to live with, a traumatized child. There are challenging lessons for all of us which the warmth, love, and hard-hitting humor of the authors allows us to hear and acceptto set in motion the systemic and personal changes needed for adopted youngsters to rebuild their lives and thrive.

Caroline Archer, adoptive parent, therapeutic parent mentor and co-author of Reparenting the Child who Hurts

Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong

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Keeping Your Adoptive Family Strong

Strategies for Success

GREGORY C. KECK AND L. GIANFORTE

FOREWORD BY RITA L. SORONEN

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

First published in 2015

by Jessica Kingsley Publishers

73 Collier Street

London N1 9BE, UK

and

400 Market Street, Suite 400

Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

www.jkp.com

Copyright Gregory C. Keck and L. Gianforte 2015

Foreword copyright Rita L. Soronen 2015

Front cover image source: Matthew Johnson, mattjohnsonink.com.

Author photograph source: Gregory C. Keck courtesy of Christopher Norris Photography. L. Gianforte courtesy of V. Christa Kaufmam.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.

Warning: The doing of an unauthorized act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A CIP catalog is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84905 784 4

eISBN 978 1 78450 028 3

To my grandson, Jacksonyou are the cutest and happiest little boy I know, and you are lucky to have parents who love you so much.

GCK

To my mother, my very first best friend.

LG

Contents

Foreword

RITA L. SORONEN

President and CEO, Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption

In Four Quartets, a mysteriously beautiful poem by T.S. Eliot, he notes, Home is where one starts from. As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated. For decades, scholars and weekend readers alike have dissected every phrase in the poem for meaning. To me, at many levels, the verse reflects the particularly complex landscape too many of our children experience as they make the arduous journey from abusive or neglectful homes to the confusion of foster care and finally into the strange and life-changing world of an adoptive family.

Yet their difficult trek does not end, but only just begins again, at adoption. Children and youth who have suffered trauma at the hands of the very adults who were supposed to keep them safe, who have moved multiple times while in foster care, who may have been separated from their siblings, who were re-abused while in care or who simply have not had ongoing support to address their very real nightmares, fears, and needscannot make the leap to adoption with ease. Nor should they. Survival is the lens through which a traumatized child views the adults and systems that surround him. Parents must be prepared to recognize, respect, and respond appropriately to a childs deep issues of loss, grief, anger, fear, and anxiety.