Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience After Neglect and Trauma

Adopted children who have suffered trauma and neglect have structural brain change, as well as specific developmental and emotional needs. They need particular care to build attachment and overcome trauma.

This book provides professionals with the knowledge and advice they need to help adoptive families build positive relationships and help children heal. It explains how neglect, trauma and prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol affect brain and emotional development, and explains how to recognise these effects and attachment issues in children. It also provides ways to help children settle into new families and home and school approaches that encourage children to flourish. The book also includes practical resources such as checklists, questionnaires, assessments and tools for professionals including social workers, child welfare workers and mental health workers.

This book will be an invaluable resource for professionals working with adoptive families and will support them in nurturing positive family relationships and resilient, happy children. It is ideal as a child welfare text or reference book and will also be of interest to parents.

Deborah Gray is the founder of Nurturing Attachments. She is a clinical social worker specializing in the areas of attachment, grief, and trauma. She has spent over 15,000 hours in the last 15 years counseling children who were adopted. Her private practice philosophy is one of empowering parents with information and techniques so that their skills and styles are used in meeting the needs of their children. Her passion is to help children and their families to develop close, satisfying relationships.

Deborah is a popular presenter due to her practical approaches of promoting attachment, shaping behavior, and working through trauma. She teaches in the Cascadia Resources/Northwest Adoption Resource and Portland State Post-Graduate Programs in Adoption Counseling and the University of Washington's Post-Graduate Trauma Certificate program.

In her personal life, Deborah Gray feels linked to adoption through the family in which she grew up. She has also been a therapeutic foster parent. She received her graduate degrees from Syracuse University in 1981. She is a licensed social worker in the State of Washington.

Deborah Gray is the author of numerous articles and the book Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents, published by Perspectives Press, Inc. in 2002.