Product Description

Like Passages, this  groundbreaking book uses the poignant, powerful voices of  adoptees and adoptive parents to explore the  experience of adoption and its lifelong effects. A major  work, filled with astute analysis and moving  truths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115050 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-01
• Released on: 1993-03-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Ingeniously integrating psychological and educational theories, the authors construct a model of the normal yet unique stages of adoptee development.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A rather thin volume that nevertheless will reassure adoptees that it is usual for questions about adoption and birth parents to persist throughout life. Using Erik Erikson's stages of life as a framework, Brodzinsky (Psychology/Rutgers) and Schechter (Psychiatry/Univ. of Pennsylvania), here writing with Henig (Your Premature Baby, 1983, etc.), call upon years of experience as researchers and counselors in the field of adoption to describe the continual adjustments that adoptees make as they grow from infancy to old age. Most moving is the litany of losses that move adoptees to grieve, often unknowingly. Even infants only a few months old show signs of mourning their first caretakers. Later, the authors say, adoptees may confront the loss not only of a birth family but of a personal and genetic history. The latter is particularly painful when it is time for young adults to begin their own families. Such life crises often kick off a search for birth parents. But the book's authority is undermined by what the authors frankly admit is the rapidly changing environment of adoption, where secrecy and shame are now rarely invoked and searches are often unnecessary. Open adoption-- in which the birth mother is known to and is often closely attached to the adoptive family--and increasingly available birth records eliminate the information gap that most often causes stress in adopted families (although open adoption may create its own set of stresses, the authors point out). Replete with anecdotal material, this offers few new insights but does lay out issues of development that only adoptees face over the course of life. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Publisher
Like Passages, this groundbreaking book uses the poignant, powerful voices of adoptees and adoptive parents to explore the experience of adoption and its lifelong effects. A major work, filled with astute analysis and moving truths.

Customer Reviews

Reads like a bad term paper.
This is the worst book on adoption I have read (and I have read quite a few) The authors (none of whom are directly part of the adoption triad)try to analyze development across the lifespan of the adoptee according to an Eriksonian model (in fact I think 1/4 of all the words in the book may be Erik Erikson or Eriksonian) At times they are downright offensive to both adoptees and birthparents, and they never seem to have any illumination into what it is actually like to be an adoptee - maybe that is because they have talked to a lot of them, and analyzed a lot of them, but they just don't really understand it on a deeper level. I would hope that anyone truly interested in this subject would read Betty Jean Lifton's Journey of the Adopted Self instead.

Excellent resource for all impacted by adoption
This book is great, as it gives some more 'handles' to the feelings and experiences of adoptees. It can be a bit 'academic' but that's all part of the learning process associated with the complex practice of adoption. Well worth reading. I'd add it to your counselling service library in duplicate.

Somewhat painful to read
Although this book has some very good information, I might suggest reading
it after you have adopted your child/children. It's a bit like hearing all of the very difficult parts of raising children at the same time. It was pretty overwhelming campared to many of the other books out there.