Book review: Families Change by Julie Nelson

Our daughter Angel-Leah was four years old when we adopted her from foster care. She had lived with her birthmother until she was removed and place our foster care at two years, seven months old, and she continued to see her extended birth family in supervised visits at the CPS office until she was three and a half. After that came an eight month period of time where she was basically in limbo, her birth parents rights had been terminated and all visits ceased, but we were unable to adopt her for a while because her caseworker had gone on emergency leave.
This time was very hard on Angel-Leah, who was grieving for her lost birth family. Two weeks after her adoption was final, we received a call asking us to take her five month old baby brother, Tommy, who we have now adopted, too.
I had thought very much about whether to have an open adoption for Angel-Leah, and since Tommy’s coming to live with us brought the family back into our lives anyway, I got permission from Tommy’s caseworker, gave the maternal grandmother a call, and after we had emailed a few weeks and gotten to know each other again, we arranged to meet at the park. Our open adoption has gone on with the extended families on both sides for just over a year now, and it has worked out so well for both the children and the birth family. At this time, we don’t see the parents, who have not been able to stabilize their lives, but we do write and send pictures back and forth with the birth mother.

One thing I was not expecting, however, was one day at the park, when Angel-Leah’s five year old cousin began to quiz her about why she didn’t live with her birth mother anymore. Didn’t she love her anymore, the cousin wanted to know? As Angel-Leah heatedly assured her cousin she did still love her birth mother, I tried to help explain, but I realized this was a hard thing for a little child to grasp.

My tendency is to always look towards books to help me, and I very soon found a really nice child’s book to give the cousin. The name of the book is Families Change: a Book for Children Experiencing Termination of Parental Rights by Julie Nelson. I’ve read this book to my own adopted children, and plan to give copies to the cousins for their mother to read to them.

This book gently explains the different ways a family can change, from the simple birth of a new child, to someone leaving for college or getting married, on to change from a birth family to a foster or adoptive family. It acknowledges that this change is scary and difficult. It assures that these new families are real families. It assures the child that these changes are not the child’s fault. It tells the child its okay to love their old family and their new family.

This is a wonderful, well written book for a child going through foster care or adoption, or for a child who has a family member that this is happening too. I would highly recommend it.

fostering book review: Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison

As a foster/adopt mother, this is by far my favorite book on the subject. Kathy Harrison conveys the emotions, the joys and sorrows that come from fostering children, and adopting some of them so very well. She is certainly experienced, having fostered nearly one hundred children. In 1996, she and her husband were named Massachusetts Foster Parents of the year, and in 2002, they received the Goldie Foster Award. She and her husband have three biological children, and three adopted children.

The book begins by telling us a little about their life before, and how they adopted their first two daughters. It then goes into their lives after they became foster parents, and tells the stories of Karen, the daughter they adopted from foster care and several other children who lived in their home at that time. It’s an unabashed view of the fascinating, heartbreaking world of foster care – something most people don’t really understand. With the foster care system under so much fire because of abuse and mistakes, this book shows that there are dedicated foster parents who literally save children’s lives, and who love what they are doing.

This book details the fear of the children who come into a foster home on the worst day of their lives. It shows the heartbreak of children whose parents don’t know how to care for them. It shows the fear of a foster mother who grows to love a foster child with a fierce love, and then has to watch them go back to a less than desirable situation. It shows how a foster mother prepares a child to go to a new adoptive home.

Many situations of the life of a foster family are covered in this book, dealing with social workers in and out of your home, the effect it has on your own biological family, the ‘labor’ you go through when you decide to adopt one of your foster children. It tells how this family manages clothes, toys and rooms. It shows what it is like to deal with the biological family of the child. It’s not a sugar coated version, but shows how hard it can be to care for damaged children.

This is a spell binding book, one I have read more than once. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in actually doing foster care, or who loves someone who does. Click the link under recommended books to look at or purchase this book.