Category: Adoptive Families
What Open Adoption Actually Looked Like for One Family (Hint: Not What You’d Expect)
Most of what you can find online about open adoption focuses on the beginning. The match meeting. The hospital. The first few visits. The careful, hopeful, nerve-wracking early phase where two families are figuring out how to exist in each other’s lives. What...
Three Failed Adoption Matches and What They Taught One Family About the Wait
Nobody tells you about failed adoption matches before you start the process. Not really. They mention it might happen, somewhere in a pamphlet, in a single paragraph, in the tone of a footnote nobody reads. But the actual experience of matching with a birth family,...
What to Do When You’ve Chosen the Wrong Adoption Agency
Nobody sets out to choose the wrong adoption agency. You do your research. You compare the wait times, the costs, the reach. You pick the one that looks strongest on paper. And sometimes, that is exactly the problem: paper cannot tell you how you are going to be...
What LGBTQ+ Couples Should Know Before Choosing an Adoption Agency
If you’re an LGBTQ+ couple who has started researching adoption, you already know the drill. You’ve hit at least one agency website that made you feel like an afterthought. You’ve encountered at least one ‘we welcome all families’...
Raising a Transracial Family: What Meredith and Adam Wish They’d Known Before Day One
Two years of infertility. One decision to stop asking ‘why isn’t this working’ and start asking ‘what puzzle are we actually supposed to be solving?’ And one month between matching with their son Theo’s birth mother and the day Theo...
Should You Tell Your Family You’re Adopting? Weighing the Pros and Cons
Check out the video on my YouTube channel HERE. So you’re starting your adoption journey and wondering whether to spill the beans to your family right away, or wait until you’re on the way to bring your child home. This is actually a bigger decision than you...
The Hardest Decision in Family Building: When to Stop Treatment and Start Adopting
Check out the video on my YouTube channel HERE.  We need to talk about one of the hardest parts of family building: moving from infertility to adoption. This is heavy stuff, and if you’re drowning in this decision right now, I see you. There’s no...
Introducing The Forever Nest
Save a Copy of this Blog for Later A Children’s Book to Support Adoptive Families This is a guest post by Dr. Julie Nathan and Dr. Lori Woodring. As psychologists, we spend our days supporting children and parents as they navigate big feelings and complex...