There are thousands of grandparents raising their grandchildren in the United Kingdom, the majority as a consequence of parental drug use or mental health issues. This book recounts the real-life stories of grandparent carers who chose to put their own lives on hold so that their loved ones can be properly cared for. Whilst most grandparent carers remain as unsupported informal carers, some seek to formalise their position by becoming Social Services Kinship Carers or achieve legal routes to independent care as Special Guardians or with a Child Arrangement Order. Whether formal or informal, full-time grandparent carers face life-changing futures. Immediate concerns are work, child care, the behaviour of the child, contact with the birth parents and financial support, and there is often no clear path to learning their rights and available support. There is also the challenge involved in balancing their bonds with their adult children while protecting their grandchildren. In this book, grandparents talk in detail about these issues and of how professionals and services have at times helped and not helped. These candid stories also explore how moving to live with grandparents can be experienced by both child and carer as simultaneously a gain and a loss. The stories offer support, and the book also includes professional advice to encourage grandparents to acknowledge their value, accept their limitations, develop realistic expectations about what they can and cannot achieve, and recognise that all successes should be celebrated.

Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through "the system." The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out. In depictions of foster care and adoption, stories tend to cluster at the dark or light ends of the spectrum, rather than telling the day-to-day successes and failures of families working to create themselves. Who raises other people's children? Why? What's money got to do with it when the love on offer feels so real? And how does the particular setting of Appalachia-itself so frequently oversimplified or stereotyped-influence the way these questions play out? In Fall or Fly, Welch invites people bound by a code of silence to open up and to share their experiences. Less inspiration than a call to caring awareness, this pioneering work of storytelling journalism explores how love, compassion, money, and fear intermingle in what can only be described as a marketplace for our nation's greatest asset.

The overwhelming majority of children and young people in care today are fostered, but for some this only increases their problems through untreated trauma, ill-judged placements, poorly supported foster carers and multiple moves. This practical and evidence-based book outlines the principles of family placement on the basis of planning and evidence, and explores the qualities, skills and insights that create positive placement outcomes. Fostering a Child's Recovery shows how the key to good fostering is well-trained and skilled foster carers who form part of a team of professionals who surround the child. This book will benefit all professionals and parents involved in providing recovery for traumatized children and young people in ensuring successful placements.

"Every child's way of being can open doors to wisdom, compassion, and human connection. We need only to listen." This is among the conclusions that the authors, one of whom is an experienced foster parent and the other a professor of developmental psychology, draw as a result of working with a diverse range of children and families. Inspired by their relationships with families in crisis, the authors began to rethink the traditional foster care models and developed an innovative practice that afforded birth parents the opportunity to reside, under supervision, with their children during evaluation and treatment. Drawing on over 20 years of work in foster care, along with current attachment research and theory, this book conveys the foster care experience with recommendations for improved models of care and intervention strategies. Engaging case studies depict the challenging nature of determining the best outcome for a child and of supporting the adult's journey as a parent. Written in a narrative style and supported by in-depth research, this book will aid social workers and foster care professionals to better understand families in crisis and to further develop their practice.

International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not ""in the best interests"" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their ""birth culture,"" threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view-that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.

From understanding what adoption is, through to step by step guidance on the entire process and the challenges that come up along the way, this is the only book you will need to read on adoption. Written by an author who was adopted herself, who has looked after over twenty children and who works with a fostering and adoption agency that deals specifically with breakdowns, this book will teach you how to confidently navigate the system and build a strong and lasting relationship with your child. Whilst very much being the unvarnished truth, this is an empowering guide that will ensure you feel in control and know where to turn to for help no matter what: With a positive attitude and the right tools, adopting a child can be very rewarding - don't try to overthink it, don't try to love, just do right by them and as you learn about each other the love, kindness and acceptance will grow.

Working from within the contours of Christian faith, this book examines the relation between two ways of forming families-through nature (by procreation) and through history (by adoption). Christians honor the biological tie between parents and children, for it is the work of God in creation. Yet Christians cannot forget that it is adoption, and not simply natural descent, that is at the center of the New Testament's depiction of God's grace. Gilbert Meilaender takes up a range of issues raised by the practice of adoption, always seeking to do justice to both nature and history in the formation of families, while keeping at the center of our vision the truth that it is not by nature but by grace that we can become adopted children of the one whom Jesus called his Father. Meilaender begins with reflection on the puzzling relation of nature and history in forming families and proceeds to unpack the meaning of huiothesia, the word used in the New Testament to name the grace by which a follower of Jesus becomes an adopted child of God. That perspective is applied to a range of questions that regularly arise in Christian theological discussions of adoption: Is adoption only for the infertile? Should single persons adopt? Is it wise for adoption to take place across racial or national boundaries? Special attention is paid to the relation between adoption and new reproductive technologies and to what is called "embryo adoption." Interspersed between the chapters are letters written by the author to his own son by adoption. But if the argument of the book is taken seriously, these letters are written not to one who falls within a special category of "adopted son or daughter," but to one who is, simply and entirely, a son or daughter.

Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through "the system." The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out. In depictions of foster care and adoption, stories tend to cluster at the dark or light ends of the spectrum, rather than telling the day-to-day successes and failures of families working to create themselves. Who raises other people's children? Why? What's money got to do with it when the love on offer feels so real? And how does the particular setting of Appalachia-itself so frequently oversimplified or stereotyped-influence the way these questions play out? In Fall or Fly, Welch invites people bound by a code of silence to open up and to share their experiences. Less inspiration than a call to caring awareness, this pioneering work of storytelling journalism explores how love, compassion, money, and fear intermingle in what can only be described as a marketplace for our nation's greatest asset.

The first comprehensive book for children born through donor conception and their families
More than one million people have been born in the U.S. through donor sperm or eggs, including Wendy Kramer's son. Realizing the unique concerns of being or parenting a donor-conceived child, Kramer launched what would become the world's largest database for connecting donor-conceived people, the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), which receives up to two million hits per month.
"Finding Our Families "provides additional support for this growing community. With compassion and insight, the authors draw on extensive research to address situations families face throughout a donor-conceived child's development, including the search for a biological parent or half-sibling, and how to forge a healthy self-image.

Sharing the daily struggles of children and families residing in transitional situations (homelessness or because of risk of homelessness, being connected with the child welfare system, or being new immigrants in temporary housing), this text recommends strategies for delivering mental health and intensive case-management services that maintain family integrity and stability. Based on work undertaken at the Center for the Vulnerable Child in Oakland, California, which has provided mental health and intensive case management to children and families living in transition for more than two decades, this volume outlines culturally sensitive practices to engage families that feel disrespected by the assistance of helping professionals or betrayed by their forgotten promises. Chapters discuss the Center's staffers' attempt to trace the influence of power, privilege, and beliefs on their education and their approach to treatment. Many U.S. children living in impoverished transitional situations are of color and come from generations of poverty, and the professionals they encounter are white, middle-class, and college-educated. The Center's work to identify the influences or obstacles interfering with services for this target population is therefore critical to formulating more effective treatment, interaction, and care.

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea's "economic miracle," adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they have come into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as Korean children have continued to leave to be adopted in the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to Korea to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.

When Maggie's latest placement arrives on her doorstep, it is clear that Sean, Dougie and their big sister Mary have been through unspeakable traumas in their short?lives. Violent and malnourished,?the siblings have been left to fend for themselves by their drug-addicted parents. Maggie must use all of her skills and experience as a foster carer to help these damaged siblings to learn to be children again. With much love, care and patience, their behaviour gradually starts to improve and social services start looking for a forever family for them. But alarm bells start to ring when Maggie meets the couple who have been matched to adopt the siblings. It is clear that they're looking for the perfect, ready-made family, and they're not going to get it with these vulnerable brothers and sister. Despite raising her concerns with social services, Maggie is powerless to prevent the adoption from going ahead and she must put aside her own fears to help the siblings settle in with their new parents. But she can't shake the feeling of dread as she waves them goodbye. A few months later, Maggie's worst nightmares come true when she learns that the children have been handed back to the care of social services following the breakdown of the adoption. Maggie must fight to get the children returned to her, but is it too late to undo the damage that has been done?

When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time. In Counting Down, Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system. We meet social workers, a birth mother with the courage to give her children the childhood she never had herself, and a father parenting from prison. We also encounter members of a remarkable fellowship of Appalachian foster parents-gay, straight, right, left, evangelical, and atheist-united by love, loss, and quality hand-me-downs. Gold's memoir is one of the few books to deliver a foster parent's perspective (and, through Michael's own poetry and essays, that of a former foster child). In it, she shakes up common assumptions and offers a powerfully frank and hopeful look at an experience often portrayed as bleak.

A celebration of the work of Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta, this collection of essays describes the agency's bold new model that integrates First Peoples' adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations. Now expecting closure to the long debate in Canada over adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families, the authors provide stories of good and bad adoptions over the years--and recommend ways to implement the new policies and practices.

While the topic of gay marriage and families continues to be popular in the media, few scholarly works focus on gay men with children. Based on ten years of fieldwork among gay families living in the rural, suburban, and urban area of the eastern United States, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship presents a beautifully written and meticulously argued ethnography of gay men and the families they have formed. In a culture that places a premium on biology as the founding event of paternity, Aaron Goodfellow poses the question: Can the signing of legal contracts and the public performances of care replace biological birth as the singular event marking the creation of fathers? Beginning with a comprehensive review of the relevant literature in this field, four chapters-each presenting a particular picture of paternity-explore a range of issues, such as interracial adoption, surrogacy, the importance of physical resemblance in familial relationships, single parenthood, delinquency, and the ways in which the state may come to define the norms of health. The author deftly illustrates how fatherhood for gay men draws on established biological, theological, and legal images of the family often thought oppressive to the emergence of queer forms of social life. Chosen with care and described with great sensitivity, each carefully researched case examines gay fatherhood through life narratives. Painstakingly theorized, Gay Fathers, Their Children, and the Making of Kinship contends that gay families are one of the most important areas to which social scientists might turn in order to understand how law, popular culture, and biology are simultaneously made manifest and interrogated in everyday life. By focusing specifically on gay fathers, Goodfellow produces an anthropological account of how paternity, sexuality, and masculinity are leveraged in relations of care between gay fathers and their children.

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.

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.

Working with children in foster care is a demanding and rigorous aspect of social work practice. Difficult decisions in fast-moving and often complex situations have to be made, and for students and practitioners alike, there is a vast array of legislation, law and social policy to understand.

This book is written to help social workers and social work students get to grips with the complexity of foster care. The child is placed at the heart of the text and there are substantial chapters on law, policy frameworks and the overreaching theoretical and research evidence to support good practice. There is also a strong focus on practical skills such as empathy and relationship-based practice. This is an essential text for experienced social workers or those currently in training.

This volume examines adoption as a way of understanding the practices and ideology of kinship and family more generally. Adoption allows a window onto discussions of what constitute family or kin, the role of biological connectedness, oversight of parenting practices by the state, and the role of race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class in the building of families. The book focuses primarily on adoption practices in the United States but will also use examples of adoption and fostering across cultures to put those American adoption practices into a comparative context. While reviewing practices of and issues surrounding adoption, the authors' goal is to highlight the ways these practices and discussions allow us greater insight into overall practices of kinship and family.

The practice of adoption has changed dramatically over the past half century, with profound implications for children and families. Perhaps the most remarkable and controversial transformation during this time has been the growing willingness of adoption professionals to place children with sexual-minority individuals and couples. Yet, despite considerable research showing that lesbians and gay men can make good parents, they continue to experience difficulties and barriers in many parts of the country in their efforts to adopt and raise children. Indeed, while progress in this area has been significant, it has been impeded by the homophobia and heterosexist attitudes of adoption professionals and the judiciary; by numerous stereotypes and misconceptions about parenting by lesbians and gay men, and by a lack of adequate guidelines and training for establishing best practice standards in working with this rapidly growing group of adoptive parents. Adoption by Lesbians and Gay Men explores the gamut of historical, legal, sociological, psychological, social casework, and personal issues related to adoption by sexual-minority individuals and couples. Leading experts in a variety of fields address-and often shatter-the controversies, myths, and misconceptions hindering efforts by these individuals to adopt and raise children. What makes this book all the more valuable is that it provides insights and specific recommendations for establishing empirically validated best practices for working with an important sector of our society, for treating all prospective and current parents fairly and equally, and, perhaps most importantly, for increasing a still largely untapped resource for providing families for children who need them.