Welcome to Season 5 of Adoption: The Long View! This month's guest is someone I made a bad first impression on (in my own head, anyway) because of an assumption I made about her that turned out to be wrong. Adoptee and content creator Jennifer Dyan Ghost...

Early in my adoptive parenting days, when my kids were first becoming able to talk about their adoptedness and continuing through their adolescence, I was on alert for signs that adoption had hurt them. I’d been listening to adult adoptees and I knew that...

My new book Adoption Unfiltered, has three chapters in it devoted to religion and adoption, with my co-authors and I each researching and covering a chapter. Sara Easterly, an adoptee and a Christian, wrote about religion’s pain points for adoptees. Kelsey...

There are very few people who have the multi-perspectives and lived experience in adoption that Rebecca Ricardo has. Rebecca joined her family through adoption – this means she is an adoptee. As a young teen she placed her son for adoption, embarking o...

Adoptive parenting has this in common with regular old parenting: just when you start to feel like you’ve mastered a stage, like babyhood, toddlerhood, tweenhood, or beyond, your child keeps growing and enters a new stage. And you’re back at square one...

Why are truth and trust so important in adoptive families? In all families, really? Isn’t it OK sometimes to keep some things under wraps, for someone’s own good? There's a philosophical paradox called sorites based on the idea that no grain of sand i...

One thing we know is that adoption comes out of a broken attachment, that the baby or child we parent has already lost something primal, that biological connection to the first mother, as well as the genetic connection to her and to the baby’s first fa...

If you’ve been listening here long, you know that to believe that adoptive parenting is no different from regular old parenting will likely end up with you feeling blindsided some day, without tools and without strategies. This is because all adoptions...

Parenting a child of a race different from yours adds a whole new element to adoptive parenting. While this episode does focus on raising an interracial adoptee (also called a transracial adoptee), becoming more comfortable with talking about race is a w...

So many parents end up wishing they'd had a time machine to go back and know earlier what we didn’t know then about parenting, which is the whole premise of this podcast – to take the long view. With adoptive parenting, that wish can be even stronger, be...

One of the distinctions we continually make here on Adoption: The Long View is the difference between "open adoption" and "openness in adoption." The former typically means having some sort of information about or contact with birth family, but the latte...

This is a really special episode for me because not only am I the host, as I always am, I am also a guest. I’m so excited to announce on Adoption: The Long View, that within a month, a book I, along with my two guests, have spent the last 3 years envisio...

It’s December of 2023, which means that my new book, Adoption Unfiltered, written with Sara Easterly, an adoptee, and Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, a birth parent, is finally available! The first part of this episode is our traditional season-closing digest...

To kick off Season 3, we address how you can prepare for 9 of the most common awkward, delicate, tricky situations that come up for adoptive parents. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation with your child (you're not my real mom!), and sometimes it's w...

We talk often on this show about attunement in adoptive parenting, which is the process of intuiting in the moment what your child needs from you. The first step is to understand as best you can the perspective of an adoptee. You won’t get this from listen...

It’s normal -- celebrated even -- to wonder about and ask ourselves "Who am I?" After all, genealogy is cited as one of the top hobbies people have. There are TV shows with names like Finding Your Roots, Long Lost Family, and Who Do You Think You Are? help...

Like the ancient tale of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant, adoption is fertile ground for people "knowing" about it while experiencing only a fraction of it. From our limited experience we start to think we have a handle on it and we know the truth about...

How we see ourselves as adoptive parents is intricately tied with how we see our children via adoption, and ultimately how they see themselves. Seemingly heroic narratives like “saving a child” and seemingly innocuous ones like “we were meant to be togethe...

It's estimated that there are between 40 and 100 families waiting for every available infant placement. The odds are not in everyone’s favor, and at least some of the people hoping to adopt a newborn will just not be able to. That’s a hard truth. What happ...

Tony Hynes is an interracial adoptee whose adoption case reached the US Supreme Court in the 1990s. While his case was knocked down to a lower court, Tony Hynes’ adoption ended up in a rare arrangement – joint custody between his Black birth grandmother an...