Tag: adopted
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How Adopted Kids Want Their Parents To Handle Their Pre-Adoption Loss
It’s painful to enter into your child’s suffering. It’s so much easier to assume that all is well inside your child, especially if she hasn’t manifested any obvious problems. But all adopted children have been wounded, simply because they experienced a profound loss before they were embraced by their new family. The first thing your…
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What Not To Say to Adopted and Foster Kids
Adoptive parents think they are giving us a great compliment with these words, but more than often, they wound. When well-meaning parents say, “We love you just like you’re our own,” their child may naturally wonder or hopefully ask, “Well, if I’m not your own, then whose am I? Where is my real family? Where…
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What I Wish My Adoptive Mom Would Have Said
Sometimes, parents are ill-equipped to teach their children emotional awareness, thus increasing the child’s Emotional IQ. They may be fearful, believing that emotions like sadness or anger can be harmful. They may be controlling, seeing negative emotions as something they’re responsible to fix, or they may feel it their responsibility to help the child understand…
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The Best News for Adopted and Foster Kids This Easter
The innermost fear of many adopted humans—Is my life a mistake?This is the deepest, darkest shame possible and none of your children would admit it to you. Trust me, MOST adoptees struggle with this question.What is needed for the questioning child?
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How Adoptive and Foster Mamas Can Discover Their Legacy
For, YOU, dear one, are the gift, the heirloom to the next generation. Yes, every single inch of you that lives the daily grind is part and parcel of your legacy. Your strengths and weaknesses, your challenges and failures, your dreams and goals.
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Say WHAT?! An answer when you’re called “Different”
So, friends, WHY do you, why do I, sink into a victim’s mindset? Why do we smile and take it? Why instead, don’t we step back and say in a loud voice, “SAY WHAT?”
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Remember This When You’re Labeled Bastard or Illegitimate
This young woman in this photo illustrates the paralyzing fear of being exposed as an illegitimate or bastard child. Even in church, mean words are uttered and Scripture is twisted at times. Sherrie offers a strategy for adopted and foster kids to overcome deep-seated shame.
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Don’t Fry Your Adopted/Foster Kid Brain-OK?
This teen could be a picture of an adopted or foster kid pushing themselves to the hilt…which only costs themselves. Such striving is contrary to learning to self regulate addictive emotions that tell us to do more. Sherrie Eldridge shares how adopted and foster kids can relax during busy times.
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What Adopted, Foster Kids Must Know About Emotional Abuse
Many times we enter into relationships with unhealed moms and dads with unhealed pasts and chronic issues. We all can recognize physical abuse but emotional abuse is incredibly subtle. And, our propensity for connection blinds us to the hurtful elements of the relationship.
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Would Adoptees and Foster Kids Say Yes to This?
Lately, I find myself asking, “If you knew before you were born, would you have signed up for the life you’re living? Would I have signed up for: Being an unplanned baby, called Baby X Not being able to see my birth mother’s face from birth until reunion at 47 years old Feeling ill at…
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Parents Can Bypass Shame When Explaining Adoption Relinquishment
This photo of a child with a deer illustrates the world of the adopted and fostered child. Parents struggle big time to enter their child’s world when explaining relinquishment. Sherrie teaches how to communicate love vs. shame.
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The Double-Whammy of One Adoptee
Sometimes, life throws a double-whammy at us. Something that brings new limitations and a feeling of being totally out of control. Sherrie shares two parts of her life that run parallel, that she calls her double-whammy. Learn the incredible lesson she learned from a young man in a wheel chair.
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Adoptive, Foster, and Birth Parents Long for This
Imagine standing at Tiffany’s jewelry showcase. Your eyes are drawn to a lustrous, huge. string of pearl, set in a simple, yet elegant setting. All of us would love having those pearls. However, there’s another pearl far more precious to adoptive and foster parents…a pearl you would travel to the ends of the earth to…
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Adoption Triad: Can We Just Get Along?`
Sherrie shares her concern for the next generation of those touched by adoption and offers self-inventory questions to promote unity and healing.
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A Gift Only Adoptees Can Give
It’s a gift adoptive parents can’t give, birth parents can’t give, or adoption professionals can’t give. Only other adoptees can give it to one another. I’ll never forget sitting next to an adoptive mom at an adoption carnival where I was speaking. At the end of the day the time came for the children and…
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Understanding Causes of Unplanned Pregnancies in Adopted and Foster Teens
Why is it so common for adopted and foster teens and 20-Somethings to experience an unplanned pregnancy? You will be surprised as the author reveals her experience and what she has learned to share with adoptive and foster parents. Parents are given tips on how to cope with this challenge.
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Taming Tantrums in Adopted and Foster Toddlers
What is a parent to do when his/her adopted or foster child throws a full blown temper tantrum? Author Sherrie Eldridge shares tried tips she’s learned from adoption professionals in her travels.
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An Unexpected Prescription for Grieving Adoption Loss
It’s so easy to go negative about adoption, thinking that ranting about our pain will get us one step closer to healing. Speaking up and out is good, but there is an additional step that needs to be taken to become the people we were created to be.
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The Burning Fear Adoptees and Foster Kids Find Impossible to Quench
This insidious fear lies in the basement of adopted and fostered kids heart, like mould. How can one deal with such a fear? Who could possibly have an answer that will quench the fear? Read on…
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What Adoptive and Foster Parents Can Do If Short-Changed by Social Workers
It’s hard to believe in this day and age that social workers often hold back vital truth from adoptive and foster parents. Withheld truth that will surely sabotage both parenting and growing up adopted or fostered. What can a parent do when this happens? Sherrie Eldridge lists six steps to help parents get started.
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How Adoptees and Foster Kids Can Prepare for Birth Parent Reunions
An adoptee’s or foster kids’ reunion with birth family members can seem like a milion emotions all at once. It is easy for the reunited adoptee or foster child to feel overwhelmed, like a loser and a victim. Some say you can’t prepare for an adoption reunion, but adoptee veteran Sherrie Eldridge begs to differ.…
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Adopted and Foster Kids: Buckle Your Seatbelts Before Birth Parent Reunions
Looking back on my initial contact via phone with my birth mother, it’s hard to believe that the whole reunion with her ended in slammed doors. Adoptees must be aware that rejection is a real possibility….and remain safe during times when rejection comes. Also, when the sweet words like this come. We must be wise…
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Should Adopted and Foster Kids Keep Trying After Repeated Birth Parent Rejections?
Some therapists call it “repetition compulsion.” That means trying and trying with the same results. We adoptees and foster kids sometimes fall into this when we are rejected by a birth relative. We keep trying to make things better, but the birth relative keeps rejecting or abusing us verbally. What can adoptees and fostered kids…
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Why Adoptive and Foster Parents Must Resist Over-the-Top Giving
“Just get whatever you want.” Many of us believe this communicates love to adopted and foster children. As Sherrie Eldridge wrote this post, she identified a new area of overindulgence in her own life. Find out what overgiving really communicates to your child and the three forms of overgiving.
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Dear younger me…the upset adopted or fostered me…remember the jellybean
A childlike way to uncouple from chaos and crisis? This has helped the younger me calm myself. Perhaps it will help you, or your adopted or foster child.
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What Do Hairstyles Have to Do with Adoption?
As soon as I returned home from my adoption reunion with birth mother Elizabeth, she told me on no uncertain terms that she wanted no more contact. She proceeded to tell me she’d had her hair cut to a one inch length, like mine. Say, what? What was she really saying, and how did adopted…