Product Description

Your Hurt Child Can Heal and Grow.

When a child is adopted, he can arrive with hurts from the past—pain that stunts his emotional growth, and your family’s life, too. At some point your parenting dreams can shatter, and raising a hurt child becomes more like a burden than a blessing.

But don’t give up. With time, patience, informed parenting, and appropriate therapy, your adopted child can heal, grow, and develop beyond what seems possible now. From insights gathered through years of working with adopted kids who have experienced early trauma, Gregory C. Keck and Regina M. Kupecky explain how to manage a hurting child with loving wisdom and resolve, and how to preserve your stability while untangling their thorny hearts.

"We hope that what we share will give you strength, courage, and commitment," write the authors. "We hope you will tap into your own resources and creativity to become the parent you’ve always wanted to be."

If you’ve adopted a child, whatever the circumstances, you’ll find hope and healing on these pages––for you, your family, and especially your adopted child.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14321 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 295 pages

From Booklist
In this sequel to their Adopting the Hurt Child (1998), Keck and Kupecky explore how parents can help adopted or foster children who have suffered neglect or abuse. They begin by outlining changes in adoption and fostering procedures in recent years and use case studies to document the friction and disruption introduced into a household when a hurt, adopted child is brought into the family. The authors examine attachment disorders and control issues as well as parenting techniques that work (praise, consistency, flexibility, anger management) and those that don't work (punishment, withholding parental love, grounding, time-outs, deprivation). They highlight the symptoms of abuse and options for therapy. Foster or adoptive parents need to claim the role of parent in the child's life, the authors advise, suggesting ways to deal with teachers and other authority figures in the child's life. The book includes a variety of resources on, among other topics, finance, therapy for siblings and parents, cultural differences, and marriage counseling. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
GREGORY C. KECK, PH.D., coauthor of Adopting the Hurt Child, is the founder of the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio, specializing in working with adoptive families whose children experienced early trauma. He offers training regarding attachment disorders, both nationally and internationally. Most important, he’s learned a lot from his two sons.

REGINA M. KUPECKY, L.S.W. has worked with adoption issues for more than twenty-five years. She currently treats children with attachment disorders at the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio, and conducts training nationally and internationally on adoption-related topics. She is also the coauthor of Adopting the Hurt Child.

Customer Reviews

This is a must read for all pre-adoptive families
After reading close to 20 great books, this one is the one that gave me the most day to day good advice, information and real life case stories. This should be a prerequisite for anyone adopting. It is truly a wealth of information that is written in an easy to read format.
Great book!

Prejudiced book
Throughout this book there is an assumption that the "hurt" child is one whose biological parent(s) have abused and/or neglected their child. In far too many cases the child becomes "hurt" because overzealous child protection authorities have removed the child from it's biological parent(s)or primary care giver since birth. A classic case like this was Logan Marr (see PBS Frontline "Logan Marr" on the Internet) who became psychologically "hurt" because of her removal from her biological mother and who would not settle down and was killed by her foster carer because she would not accept the foster carer as a new parent.
For the past two years I have had to deal with my own child's real psychological "hurt" from having been unnecessarily removed into foster care and then after two years returned to me as damaged goods. Keck and Kupecky have an arrogant disregard for a child's biological and social need for its own parent(s). This book is merely a "feel good" spin justification for the far too many and unnecessary adoptions and placement of children in out of home care, something which has damaged thousands of innocent and previously unharmed children.

A must read for parents of children with RAD
If you have a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) this is a book you must read. It is very informative, enlightening and helpful. It is an excellent reference to go back and read over and over. You can't change the fact a child has RAD. However, you can learn why he does what he does and how to best deal with the many behavioral issues specific to RAD. I found this book to be a eye opener, a relief (explains what you have been living through for who knows how long) and very helpful. A highly recommended read for any parent of a child with RAD, anyone considering international adoption and also for foster parents.