What Every Adoptive Parent Needs to Know: Healing Your Child's Wounded Heart

What Every Adoptive Parent Needs to Know: Healing Your Childs Wounded Heart is an essential resource for adoptive parents. . . . As a young couple, Dan and Cassie Richards thought they had finally fulfilled their dream of having a family after adopting a beautiful little boy and girl. But they had unsuspectingly invited a Trojan horse into their hearts and home. While the children seemed happy on the outside, deep inside they were suffering from the hidden trauma that so many adopted children carry with them. This remarkable true-life story of raising two adopted children is a tale of hope and resilience, of two parents unprepared for their children s psychological wounds that only time would reveal. Most importantly, it shows that profound healing is possible when adoptive families realize that traditional parenting is not enough. Because of the rejection, neglect, and abandonment they experience in the first few months of life, adopted children are imprinted with the subconscious belief that at their core they are unlovable and worthless, even if their new parents are nurturing and loving. They often decide that to depend on anyone who has the power to abandon them including their new parents is lethal. As a result, as they grow older they may develop attachment and identity issues, and their behaviors can become provocative and frightening to their parents. What Every Adoptive Parent Needs to Know offers adoptive parents and parents-to-be a solution. It shows that the journey to healing begins with moving beyond the misconception that the life of adopted children starts when they arrive in their new home. And it gives readers both the courage and information they need to create the breakthrough these children deserve. By following the threads of the Richards moving story, clarified by insightful analysis and practical advice from family therapist Kate Cremer-Vogel, this compelling book reveals how the effects of childhood wounds can be transformed with therapeutic parenting techniques. Both parents and professionals will learn how to recognize the most common signs of abandonment, attachment, and identity issues in children from behaviors such as lying, stealing, anger, and hatred expressed toward caregivers, to the inability to share joyfully in holidays, birthdays, and celebrations. Parents will learn how to reorient themselves to look at these behaviors not as reasons for punishment but as the child s cries for help. As Cassie and Dan discovered, it is never too late to heal the wounded heart of a child with this powerful approach to parenting.