Award-winning book that recently earned acclaim from the prestigious
Next Generation Indie Book Awards!"
How can young adoptees navigate the constantly changing seas that adoptees face? This book overflows with practical suggestions. It provides a way to spark important conversations with adoptees, extended families or friends. It validates and renders compassionate witness to the adoptee experience.
Being a teenager is tough. When you factor in the complexities and challenges of being adopted, it is exponentially harder. The graphic-style book,
We're Adopted. So What?features five teen girls who share a huge thing in common: each of them was adopted. This shared experience draws them together yet the distinctions between their experiences are as unique as their personalities. Feisty, fun and outspoken, the girls tackle some tough topics.
They share their thoughts and feelings being adopted, how adoption shapes their world and relationships, creates challenges, burdens them with curiosity, frustration, anger, and grief, and shows how they strive to blend together their biological and their adoptive worlds.
Open adoption has become the norm for most contemporary domestic adoptions yet questions and complications remain for adoptees and their families:
- How can all these people cooperate to create healthy, supportive relationships that best support adoptees?
- How does a young adoptee balance their dual loyalties, connections, and heritages?
- How do they weave the spectrum of their feelings, challenges, and experiences into a cohesive identity?
We now recognize that connection to and respect for an adopted child's biological roots is integral to an adoptee's ability to successfully unify their dual heritage. Still, the concept of openness remains shrouded in apprehension, confusion, and curiosity. How is it possible for a child to have two sets of parents involved in their lives? Against this backdrop of openness, how do teens in international or "traditional closed" adoptions, feel about and deal with their lack of connection with birth families?
A
ward-winning author, Gayle H. Swift drew on her experience as an adoptive parent, adoption coach and foster parent. She is a co-founder of GIFT Family Services and is dedicated to supporting adoptees and all of those who love and support them. She writes extensively on adoption issues and is an activist for adoptee rights. On her website Gaylehswift, she curates a book review blog,
Writing to Connect which reviews children's books through an adoption-attuned lens.
Gayle collaborated with her daughter to write We're Adopted. So What? It is part of their on-going effort to meet the needs of adoptees and the families who love them by developing materials that reflect Adoption-attunement, validate the adoptee experience, and affirm the complexity that adoption brings. Targeted to tween and teen adoptees it features five fictional teen girls who 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 has also contributed a chapter to the anthology, It's Not about You: Understanding Adoptee Search, Reunion & Open Adoption. She collaborated with her colleague Sally Annkerfelt, M. Div., to write Reimaginging Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith.
Gayle and her colleague Sally Ankerfelt, M. Div, co-wrote Reimagining Adoption: What Adoptees Seek from Families and Faith which was 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, inspire, encourage, and create healing community. She also contributed to It's Not about You: Understanding Adoptee Search and Reunion and Open Adoption.
