Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith - Softcover

Ankerfelt, Sally; Swift, Gayle H

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1733659722 ISBN 13: 9781733659727

Publisher: Gayle Swift, 2019

Synopsis

Love is essential yet not enough...Reinvigorate, reshape and improve the way Christians understand and approach adoption!

Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith blends personal experience, expert insights, adoptee interviews, trauma research, and scriptural interpretation so The Church and the Christian community can re-envision adoption for the sake of adoptees and their families. Quotations from adoptees and birth mothers keeps adoptees at its center.  Their heartfelt words enliven the book and build a deep empathy for those touched by adoption.

Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith builds compassion for adoptees and first families as a gateway to truth seeing and truth telling. In that truthful and compassionate space lies the healing and belonging for which adoptees profoundly yearn.

It examines beliefs, practices, and Scripture to attune to the needs of vulnerable children and their families and align with Christian values. It examines the historical adoption practices, reviews current practices and proposes revisions. More importantly, it lifts up the words and lived experience of adult adoptees--the true experts on adoption--and braids them with the insights of adoptive families to craft a new adoption paradigm. 

Readers will learn:

 

•    How to become better Christian parents and more supportive faith communities
•    How to answer tough questions and to anticipate who will pose them and why
•    How to clarify Christian adoption beliefs and practices
•    What makes adoptees the true adoption experts
•    How to process the pain of birth parent loss
•    How to validate adoptee grief and loss
•    How to support family preservation
•    How the radical love of Christ must reshape the way we approach adoption
•    How first-hand adoptee/adoptive family accounts can teach us about faith and adoption
•    How to serve vulnerable children and their families with faith, love, and understanding

About this title

About the Author

Gayle H. Swift, an adoptive mother of two now-adult children, co-founder of GIFT (Growing Intentional Families Together,) a certified coach and a former foster parent is dedicated to supporting adoptees and the families who love them. A fifty-four-year survivor of ovarian cancer, she treasures the blessing of family relationships. Gayle has paraglided in Peru, hiked the citadel of Machu Picchu, trekked glaciers in Antarctica, and snorkeled the glacial melt between the tectonic plates in Iceland. But parenting proved to be the greatest adventure of her life.

She collaborated on the multi-award-winning "ABC, Adoption & Me with her daughter Casey (an adoptee.) It was re-illustrated and revised in 2019 to reflect the latest in professional understanding of the adoptive family's journey. Check out the new version! The original version of ABC, Adoption & Me was named a Favorite Read of 2013 by Adoptive Families Magazine and several other awards. Gayle has won seven Royal Palm Literary Awards. She blogs on adoption at the GIFTfamilyservices website and reviews children's books at  her personal website GaylehSwift .

Gayle and Casey also wrote We're Adopted, So What?: Teens Tell It Like It Is to reach tween and teen adoptees. It launched in 2019. Five fictional teen girls share their thoughts and feelings being adopted, how adoption shapes their world and relationships, creates challenges, and how they strive to blend together their biological and their adoptive worlds.

Gayle and her colleague Sally Ankerfelt, M. Div, co-wrote Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith which was also published in 2019 and received a gold Royal Palm Literary Award!

Gayle has presented at the NACAC (North American Council on Adoptable Children) Conference. She believes in the power of books to inform, heal, and create healing community. She also contributed to It's Not about You: Understanding Adoptee Search and Reunion and Open Adoption. 

From the Back Cover

What can first-hand adoptee/adoptive family accounts teach us about faith and adoption?

• How can we serve vulnerable children and their families with faith, love and understanding?
• How must the radical love of Christ reshape the way we approach adoption?
• This ground-breaking book helps you explore:
• How to become better Christian parents and more supportive faith communities
• How to answer tough questions and to anticipate who will pose them and why
• How to clarify Christian adoption beliefs and practices
• What makes adoptees the true adoption experts
• How to process the pain of birth parent loss
• How to validate adoptee grief and loss
• How to support family preservation

From the Inside Flap

Adoption-attunement Elements:

• Consider grief and loss issues
• Use sound adoption language
• Understand the attachment process
• Respect birth parents and first families
• Model, teaches, and holds healthy boundaries
• Educate family, friends, teachers, and faith communities on adoption
• Remember a child's story belongs to him
• Recognize adoption as a family experience
• Encourage playfulness and good humor as a family value
• Integrate a child's birth heritage
• Honor a child's need to know and connect with birth family
• Nurturesand value a child's innate talents, encourages her to be herself
• Parents work through their own grief and loss issues
• Follow ethical practices
• Operate with a child-centric focus

Edition details

• Publisher: Gayle Swift
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1733659722
• ISBN 13: 9781733659727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260