This book is an account of the authora s experiences as a Foster carer, and in particular as a Foster carer of teenage children, over a period of more than twenty years. It is intended to dispel the notion set out over the years in the many recruitment advertisements that Fostering is a life of enduring happiness and contentment for both carers and children. It is never that glamorous. It can, however, over time, be a rewarding and fulfilling experience for both. The author and his wife have been Foster carers since 1997 and are still Foster carers to this day.

International media regularly features horrific stories about Chinese orphanages, especially when debating international adoption and human rights. Much of the popular information is dated and ill-informed about the experiences of most orphans in China today, Chinese government policy, and improvements evident in parts of China. Informal kinship care is the most common support for the orphaned children. The state supports orphans and abandoned children whose parents and relatives cannot be found or contacted. The book explores concrete examples about the changing experiences and future directions of Chinese child welfare policy. It is about the support to disadvantaged children, including abandoned children in the care of the state, most of whom have disabilities; HIV affected children; and orphans in kinship care. It identifies how many orphans are in China, how they are supported, the extent to which their rights are met, and what efforts are made to improve their rights and welfare provision. When our research about Chinese orphans started in 2001, these children were almost entirely voiceless. Since then, the Chinese government has committed to improving child welfare. We argue that a mixed welfare system, in which state provision supplements family and community care, is an effective direction to improve support for orphaned children. Government needs to take responsibility to guarantee orphans' rights as children, and support family networks to provide care so that children can grow up in their own communities. The book contributes to academic and policy understanding of the steps that have been taken and are still required to achieve the goal of a child welfare system in China that meets the rights of orphans to live and thrive with other children in a family.

Beneath the Tapestry devotional walks alongside hopeful adoptive parents and families through the process of adoption and beyond. Natalie Schram shares her family's stories of completing their first home study, finding adoption experts to support them, walking through the tangled mess of fear and unknowns, battling through spiritual warfare, experiencing unsightly beauty, and navigating life after placement. Beneath the Tapestry shares many details of how God weaved four adoptions into the masterpieces that they are. It's through these honest stories that many have found hope and healing. Natalie shares how each adoption holds unique details all their own, but the universal characteristic in every adoption is that it comes from a broken place and therefore carries that brokenness with it. Beneath the Tapestry reveals as many details about the Schram's adoption journeys as possible and in a very real, honest, unique, and vulnerable way. Natalie Schram draws you in and speaks to you directly. You will feel as if you are in an actual conversation with her. You will be guided and supported through scripture, real life stories, and prayer as Natalie teaches you to love and live selflessly through the process. Journeying through adoption four times has allowed the Schram family the joy of growing deeper in Christ while seeking God's Will for expanding their family. Beneath the Tapestry goes beyond offering support during the adoption journey and seeks to reach the heart of the reader. Through Beneath the Tapestry Natalie's hopeful prayer is for each reader to seek a deeper relationship with Christ, grow in their faith, and learn how to love and support others selflessly, in the midst of their journey

This comprehensive resource offers a detailed framework for fostering resilience in families caring for their older members. Its aim is to improve the quality of life for both the caregivers themselves as much as for those they support. Robust interventions are presented to guide family members through chronic and acute challenges in areas such as emotional health, physical comfort, financial aspects of care, dealing with health systems, and adjusting to transition. Examples, models, interviews, and an extended case study identify core concerns of caregiving families and avenues for nurturing positive adaptation. Throughout, contributors provide practical applications for therapists and other service providers in diverse disciplines, and for advancing family resilience as a field. Included in the coverage: Therapeutic interventions for caregiving families. Facilitating older adults' resilience through meeting nutritional needs. Improving ergonomics for the safety, comfort, and health of caregivers. Hope as a coping resource for caregiver resilience and well-being. Perspectives on navigating care transitions with individuals with dementia. Planning for and managing costs related to caregiving. Family Caregiving offers a new depth of knowledge and real-world utility to social workers, mental health professionals and practitioners, educators and researchers in the field of family resilience, as well as scholars in the intersecting disciplines of family studies, human development, psychology, sociology, social work, education, law, and medicine.

"The book chronicles not only the adoption of their three children abroad, but follows each of their children (including their biological son) into young adulthood. It vividly depicts their difficulties in raising teenagers in a cross-cultural, transracial home, and also exposes the frightening conditions facing today's kids in our public schools, including gang issues, drop outs, and culture clashes. It provides valuable insights to parents and non-parents as well. This book was a real eye-opener and awakened me to the harsh realities our teens must face in what I would have thought were quality schools. Although told from a parent's point of view, they very effectively explored the emotions, indeed the angst, of their teenage children."
--Jo-Anne Weaver, adoptive parent of a Chinese daughter placed by Los Ninos International, and Senior Acquisitions Editor of Education and Developmental Psychology for Harcourt Brace.

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are home to more than 90,000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography provides a unique perspective on how these transracial adoptees conceptualize and construct their sense of identity along the intersection of ethnicity, family, and national lines.

Normally, our relationships with our brothers and sisters are the longest relationships in our lives, outlasting time with our parents, and most marriages today. The sibling relationship is emotionally powerful and critically important, giving us a sense of continuity throughout life. So what happens when a child loses contact not only with his or her parents, but with siblings too? That is what happens in thousands of cases each year inside the child welfare system. Children are surrendered by parents - or taken by the government - and placed in the foster care system. There, they are often separated and sent to different foster families, or adopted by different couples. In this work, a team of top experts details for us how this added separation futher traumatizes children. This stellar team of internationally known researchers - some of whom are themselves adoptees - shares with us hard, poignant, and personal insights, as well as ways we might act to solve this widespread problem.

Contributors address not only the importance of nurturing sibling bonds and mental health strategies to support those relationships, but also the legal rights of siblings to be together, as well as issues in international adoptions. Emerging and standing programs to encourage and facilitate adoptions that keep siblings together are featured, as are programs that at least enable them to stay in contact.

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption--specifically, the adoption of Asian children--has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge. Catherine Ceniza Choy is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the award-winning book Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History.

The true story of 2 year-old Anna, abandoned by her natural parents, left alone in a neglected orphanage. Elaine and Ian had travelled half way round the world to adopt little Anna. She couldn't have been more wanted, loved and cherished. So why was she now in foster care and living with me? It didn't make sense. Until I learned what had happened. ... Dressed only in nappies and ragged T-shirts the children were incarcerated in their cots. Their large eyes stared out blankly from emaciated faces. Some were obviously disabled, others not, but all were badly undernourished. Flies circled around the broken ceiling fans and buzzed against the grids covering the windows. The only toys were a few balls and a handful of building bricks, but no child played with them. The silence was deafening and unnatural. Not one of the thirty or so infants cried, let alone spoke.

This book explores what a sense of belonging-its components and state-means for the adopted children and those in care. It contributes to reader's understanding of these children's emotional well-being, mental health, and potential for success in life through education and beyond.

* What is trauma? * How does it affect children? * How can adults help? Providing straightforward answers to these complex questions, The Simple Guide to Child Trauma is the perfect starting point for any adult caring for or working with a child who has experienced trauma. It will help them to understand more about a child's emotional and behavioural responses following trauma and provides welcome strategies to aid recovery. Reassuring advice will also rejuvenate adults' abilities to face the challenges of supporting children.

When parents form families by reaching across social barriers to adopt children, where and how does race enter the adoption process? How do agencies, parents, and the adopted children themselves deal with issues of difference in adoption? This volume engages writers from both sides of the Atlantic to take a close look at these issues.

It is now over 20 years since 'open adoption' was first introduced, but it remains a controversial and contested part of social work practice. This innovative and far ranging book sets out to understand why the practice of keeping adopted children in touch with their kinship origins is still so questioned in contemporary adoption work. Written by an experienced practitioner in the field, this book applies, for the first time, Foucauldian methodology to analyze and understand adoption social work, making it essential reading for a wide audience in the social sciences.

'The best piece of nature writing since H is for Hawk, and the most powerful work of biography I have read in years' Neil Gaiman 'Wonderful - I can't recommend it too highly' Helen Macdonald 'One of those rare, enchanted books' Isabella Tree 'Beautiful - it made me cry' Simon Amstell 'I was entranced' Cathy Rentzenbrink This is a story about birds and fathers. About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair... About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night. It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own. It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest. And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.