A true story about resilience, and the journey of a lifetime for a pair of brothers and their new father against the sometimes all too uncompromising realities of international adoption.

Lisa A. Mazzeo, LCSW, BCD is a veteran social worker who brings to life for readers her 30 years of working with children and youth in the foster care system. She takes readers on a journey inside of the system and shows us the children and families that the system touches. The outcomes of youth that leave foster care without a family are abysmal - many end up homeless, in jail, unemployed, and suffering from mental illness. Lisa shows us how we can change outcomes through the curative power of love, kindness and nurturing parenting. As she "catches the moon" for these youth, she leaves readers with a sense of hope and inspires them to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable youth everywhere. www.whocancatchthemoon.com "This book is not just for people in the profession, the general population needs to read these heartfelt accounts in order to understand the most neglected in this country: our children. Who Can Catch the Moon? so brilliantly shows that it takes all of us together to make a difference in the lives of children." Maria C. Castillo, LCSW Contributing author in "Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing Power of Past-Life Memories" by Brian L. Weiss, MD and Amy Weiss, MSW "Share the tears and laughter of adopted and foster kids and their caring, creative, life-changing therapist. Don't miss this riveting look inside the world of human resilience and healing." Elizabeth Murdoch, LCSW Director of Behavioral Health, Family and Children's Agency "With joy, humor and real understanding, Lisa Mazzeo generously shares her memories and lessons with us in Who Can Catch the Moon?. She is a dedicated and honest social worker - and now author. Lisa presents this collection of stories as a gift, to help us to connect with her, with her experience, hopes and challenges as a social worker and, most importantly, with the children she has loved and cared for for so many years. We are so grateful." Meghan Lowney, MSW Former Executive Director, Operation Hope of Fairfield, Inc. Founder, Ripple Effect Consulting

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case "Adoptive Couple vs. Baby Girl," which pitted adoptive parents Matt and Melanie Capobianco against baby Veronica's biological father, Dusten Brown, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Veronica's biological mother had relinquished her for adoption to the Capobiancos without Brown's consent. Although Brown regained custody of his daughter using the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Capobiancos, rejecting the purpose of the ICWA and ignoring the long history of removing Indigenous children from their families. In "A Generation Removed," a powerful blend of history and family stories, award-winning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post-World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families. Jacobs also reveals the global dimensions of the phenomenon: These practices undermined Indigenous families and their communities in Canada and Australia as well. Jacobs recounts both the trauma and resilience of Indigenous families as they struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.

The Ugly One in the Middle is Alex Stan Campbell's story of the fifty-year search for two people; His birth mother, and the angelic, sensual woman of his dreams. Kind of romantic, right? But, wait. There's humor, mystery and intrigue. Just before Stan's sixteenth birthday, his Aunt Patsy let it slip that his mom and pop did not conceive him. Quel horror His adoptive mom knew something dark, but she wasn't talking. It didn't matter much...then.Stan's top priorities of the day were drowning his bashfulness in wine and rubbing alcohol. That didn't work. He threw up and fell down a lot.

From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.

Everyone has an opinion of fifteen year old Katherine Beagan. To her therapist she's emotionally disturbed, while her vice principal thinks she is a trouble maker. To her classmates she's a runt, while her social worker thinks she's a punk. But when the Portland police call her an arson, her only escape is to pretend to be someone else, and that is when her real trouble begins....

Foster care is a temporary living arrangement for children who cannot remain safely in their own homes. For nearly every child who enters foster care, a first goal of the child welfare agency is to ensure necessary services are identified, and provided, so that the child can quickly and safely return to his or her parents. Most children who leave foster care do so to be reunited with parents or other family members. For some children, however, this is not possible. In those cases, the child welfare agency must work to find a new permanent home for these children and this may be accomplished through adoption or legal guardianship. This book examines Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, which declares that states, territories, and tribes are entitled to claim partial federal reimbursement for the cost of providing foster care, adoption assistance, and kinship guardianship assistance to children who meet federal eligibility criteria. The Title IV-E program, provides support for monthly payments on behalf of eligible children, as well as funds for related case management activities, training, data collection, and other costs of program administration.

For nineteen straight years, the all-Hispanic boys' soccer team from Oregon's Woodburn High has made the playoffs. As they prepare to make it twenty, one thing will become clear: Los Perros play the beautiful game with heart, pride, and their lives on the line. Their spirited drive gives a rare sense of hope and unity to a blue-collar farming community that has been transformed by waves of immigrants over recent decades, a town locals call "Little Mexico." Watched over by a south Texas transplant--a surrogate father to half the squad--this band of brothers must learn to come together on the field and look after each other off it.
More than just riveting sports writing, "The Boys from Little Mexico" is about the fight for the future of the next generation--and a hard, true look at boys dismissed as gang-bangers, told to "go home" by lily-white sideline crowds. The wins and losses they notch along the way spin a striking tale about what it takes to capture the American Dream.

A book about adoption that celebrates the miracle of family and addresses the difficult issues as well. With charming, exuberant illustrations and a diverse representation of families, ABC, Adoption & Me will warm hearts, deepen understanding of what it means to be an adoptive family and provide teaching moments that bring families closer, connected in truth, compassion, and joy.

In the spring of 1983, a North American couple who were hoping to adopt a child internationally received word that if they acted quickly, they could become the parents of a boy in an orphanage in Honduras. Layers of red tape dissolved as the American Embassy there smoothed the way for the adoption. Within a few weeks, Margaret Ward and Thomas de Witt were the parents of a toddler they named Nelson--an adorable boy whose prior life seemed as mysterious as the fact that government officials in two countries had inexplicably expedited his adoption.

In Missing Mila, Finding Family, Margaret Ward tells the poignant and compelling story of this international adoption and the astonishing revelations that emerged when Nelson's birth family finally relocated him in 1997. After recounting their early years together, during which she and Tom welcomed the birth of a second son, Derek, and created a family with both boys, Ward vividly recalls the upheaval that occurred when members of Nelson's birth family contacted them and sought a reunion with the boy they knew as Roberto. She describes how their sense of family expanded to include Nelson's Central American relatives, who helped her piece together the lives of her son's birth parents and their clandestine activities as guerrillas in El Salvador's civil war. In particular, Ward develops an internal dialogue with Nelson's deceased mother Mila, an elusive figure whose life and motivations she tries to understand.

When Pat McMahon risks the love of the mother who raised him by seeking out the mother who gave him away, he transforms from a mild-mannered engineer into a frenetic detective. After he overcomes the challenges of existential angst, bureaucratic roadblocks, and unemployment, the phone call to his first mother releases a torrent of long-buried feelings. During a sometimes turbulent long-distance unfolding, he absorbs her shocking revelations and comes out as gay once again. Their eventual reunion creates a profound bond, even as he navigates waves of conflicting emotions, merges past with present, and embarks on a new future rooted in truth and insights into the universal quest for identity and human connection. He is Becoming Patrick.

"An adoption professional once told me, 'At its best, there is no adoption system as good as Guatemala's. At its worst, there is none worse.'"--from the foreword by Kevin Kreutner
In "Between Light and Shadow" veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation's poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie's abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers--unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.
Following Ellie's journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms--and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.

Resulting from collaboration between leading academics and the national charity the Fostering Network, this book captures the debates on the provision of foster care in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This collection of papers offers critical comment on current governmental policy, reports on empirical research, and offers theoretical reflections on practice. The context for the policy and the debates is provided by a narrative that traces the origins of child care from the Elizabethan Poor Law, and asks questions about the provision of care in the future. Key themes covered in the chapters: Politics and policy - the ideological foundations of recent initiatives and the implications for the care of children and young people Service delivery - public and private approaches to provision and the professionalization of foster care Service users - the needs of children and young people and the barriers to their social inclusion on leaving care Diversity, identities and perspectives - kinship care, sexualities and the foster carer's perspective

What happens when your child doesn't speak your native language? How do you maintain cultural traditions while living outside your native country? And how can you raise a child with two cultures without fracturing his/her identity? From our house to your house - to the White House - more and more mothers are facing questions such as these. Whether through intercultural marriage, international adoption or peripatetic lifestyles, families these days are increasingly multicultural. In this collection, women around the world, such as Xujun Eberlein, Violet Garcia-Mendoza, Rose Kent, Sefi Atta, Christine Holhbaum, Saffia Farr, and others, ponder the unique joys and challenges of raising children across two or more cultures. Suzanne Kamata's short work has appeared in over 100 publications. She is the author of a novel, LOSING KEI, and a picture book, PLAYING FOR PAPA, both of which concern bicultural families. She is also the editor of two previous anthologies - THE BROKEN BRIDGE: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and LOVE YOU TO PIECES: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, and is currently fiction editor of "Literary Mama." Born and raised in Michigan and most recently from South Carolina, she now lives in rural Japan with her Japanese husband and bicultural twins.

Most Americans assume that shared genes or blood relationships provide the strongest basis for family. What can adoption tell us about this widespread belief and American kinship in general? Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love examines the ways class, gender, and race shape public and private adoption in the United States. Christine Ward Gailey analyzes the controversies surrounding international, public, and transracial adoption, and how the political and economic dynamics that shape adoption policies and practices affect the lives of people in the adoption nexus: adopters, adoptees, birth parents, and agents within and across borders. Interviews with white and African-American adopters, adoption social workers, and adoption lawyers, combined with her long-term participant-observation in adoptive communities, inform her analysis of how adopters' beliefs parallel or diverge from the dominant assumptions about kinship and family. Gailey demonstrates that the ways adoptive parents speak about their children vary across hierarchies of race, class, and gender. She shows that adopters' notions about their children's backgrounds and early experiences, as well as their own "family values," influence child rearing practices. Her extensive interviews with 131 adopters reveal profoundly different practices of kinship in the United States today.

Moving beyond the ideology of "blood is thicker than water," Gailey presents a new way of viewing kinship and family formation, suitable to times of rapid social and cultural change.

"In Their Siblings' Voices" shares the stories of twenty white non-adopted siblings who grew up with black or biracial brothers and sisters in the late 1960s and 1970s. Belonging to the same families profiled in Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda's "In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories" and "In Their Parents' Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees," these siblings offer their perspectives on the multiracial adoption experience, which, for them, played out against the backdrop of two tumultuous, politically charged decades. Simon and Roorda question whether professionals and adoption agencies adequately trained these children in the challenges presented by blended families, and they ask if, after more than thirty years, race still matters. Few books cover both the academic and the human dimensions of this issue. "In Their Siblings' Voices" helps readers fully grasp the dynamic of living in a multiracial household and its effect on friends, school, and community.

Since the early 1990s, close to 250,000 children born abroad have been adopted into the United States. Nearly half of these children have come from China or Russia. "Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference" offers the first comparative analysis of these two popular adoption programs.

Heather Jacobson examines these adoptions by focusing on a relatively new social phenomenon, the practice by international adoptive parents, mothers in particular, of incorporating aspects of their children's cultures of origin into their families' lives. "Culture keeping" is now standard in the adoption world, though few adoptive parents, the majority of whom are white and native-born, have experience with the ethnic practices of their children's homelands prior to adopting.

Jacobson follows white adoptive mothers as they navigate culture keeping: from their motivations, to the pressures and constraints they face, to the content of their actual practices concerning names, food, toys, travel, cultural events, and communities of belonging. Through her interviews, she explores how women think about their children, their families, and themselves as mothers as they labor to construct or resist ethnic identities for their children, who may be perceived as birth children (because they are white) or who may be perceived as adopted (because of racial difference).

The choices these women make about culture, Jacobson argues, offer a window into dominant ideas of race and the "American Family," and into how social differences are conceived and negotiated in the United States.

Since the early 1990s, close to 250,000 children born abroad have been adopted into the United States. Nearly half of these children have come from China or Russia. "Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference" offers the first comparative analysis of these two popular adoption programs.

Heather Jacobson examines these adoptions by focusing on a relatively new social phenomenon, the practice by international adoptive parents, mothers in particular, of incorporating aspects of their children's cultures of origin into their families' lives. "Culture keeping" is now standard in the adoption world, though few adoptive parents, the majority of whom are white and native-born, have experience with the ethnic practices of their children's homelands prior to adopting.

Jacobson follows white adoptive mothers as they navigate culture keeping: from their motivations, to the pressures and constraints they face, to the content of their actual practices concerning names, food, toys, travel, cultural events, and communities of belonging. Through her interviews, she explores how women think about their children, their families, and themselves as mothers as they labor to construct or resist ethnic identities for their children, who may be perceived as birth children (because they are white) or who may be perceived as adopted (because of racial difference).

The choices these women make about culture, Jacobson argues, offer a window into dominant ideas of race and the "American Family," and into how social differences are conceived and negotiated in the United States.

Aching to expand from a couple to a family, Jeff Gammage--a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer--and his wife, Christine, embarked upon a journey that would carry them across a shifting landscape of emotion and through miles of red tape and bureaucratic protocol. On the other side of the world--in the smog-choked city of Changsha in Hunan Province--a silent, stoic little girl was waiting for them: Jin Yu, their new daughter. Now they would have to learn how to fully embrace a life altered beyond recognition by new concerns and responsibilities--and by a love unlike any they'd ever felt before.

Alive with insight and feeling, China Ghosts is an eye-opening depiction of the foreign adoption process and a remarkable glimpse into a different culture. Most important, it is a poignant, heartfelt, and intensely intimate chronicle of the making of a family.

A true love story that will touch your heart
~A soulful and heart-filled story that doesn't shy away from the often harsh, heartbreaking realities of adoption; a must for potential parents in preparation for the adoption process.~ Karen H, LSW former adoption counselor and hospice counselor
~It is an absolutely amazing weave of many facets of the adoption journey; raw, honest, and deeply touching. You truly have reached the 'soul'; of the adoption triad. I feel so privileged to be a part of your amazing story!~ Lori Teeter, BSW, Adoption Counselor
~This book offers real feelings and thoughts from an adoptee perspective, but it also offers serious feelings, challenges, questions, and the emotional ups and downs that anyone who is thinking about adopting goes through.~ Sharon Bumbarger, parent and fellow adopter.

This is a personal and touching story of one women's journey to find a child.Tamra spent 8 years pursuing a child through fertility clinics without success. Her body would not cooperate and give her the child she wanted. The need for a child was so overwhelming they turned to adoption. Their adoption journey from start to finish took three years, while reading the story you will learn of the many pitfalls they had to overcome. The story has a happy ending with the adoption of their daughter.

Native American Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories presents twenty interviews with Native American adoptees raised in non-Native homes. Through the in-depth interviews they conduct with each participant, the authors explore complex questions of cultural identity formation. The participants of the study represent a range of positive and negative experiences of transracial adoption. Regardless of their personal experiences, however, all twenty respondents indicate that they are supporters of the Indian Child Welfare Act and that they believe that Native children should be raised in Native households whenever possible. However, eighteen of the twenty respondents concede that non-Native families can raise Native children to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted adults. Through the interviews, Simon and Hernandez allow readers to better understand the different experiences of Native American adoptees.