SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION: A Guide to Finding a Child and Raising a Family

A comprehensive guide to the adoption process--with some wise things to say about parenting adopted children. To help parents determine their readiness to adopt and weigh the available options, psychotherapist Plumez poses some tough questions: ""Are you comfortable with your infertility?"" ""Who do you think are the real parents of an adopted child?"" ""What kind of child can you love?"" (The often-neglected biological options--complete with infertility treatment, artificial insemination, surrogate parenting, egg transplants--are presented clearly and non-judgmentally.) Parents who do decide to adopt are advised of the pros and cons of: agency adoptions (""the least expensive and most reliable method""--but a source of fewer and fewer babies); independent adoptions; and international adoptions (which ""should not be undertaken out of pity or unrealistic, romantic notions""). Even in the US, Plumez notes, there is not so much a shortage of available children as a dearth of perfect newborns. Once a child is adopted, she suggests ways of turning ""upsetting remarks"" to advantage and preparing to tell the child (collect information about the child's genealogy, let the child pursue awareness of adoption at his or her own pace). The search for biological parents, she astutely notes, is rooted in the ""fantasy of the all-good parent lost in the past""; the result, usually disillusioning--""most adoptees who meet their birth parents find that they have little in common with them."" With complete lists of state agencies, regional adoption agencies, resources for foreign adoptions (as well as state-by-state rundowns on average waiting time, availability of records, etc.), a sensitive and solidly informative work.