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Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview dozens of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, therapists, and other allies—all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious space of adoption may seem like a lofty goal, it reveals the authors’ optimistic aim: working together with truth and transparency to move toward healing.

Healing isn’t possible, though, without first uncovering the hurts—starting with adoption’s central players: adoptees, who are so often in pain, suffering from what the latest brain science validates as the long-term emotional effects of separation trauma. By encouraging others to vulnerably share their stories, the authors discover that adoptees aren’t the only ones in the adoption constellation who are hurting. Birth parents regularly shut down after being shut out by adoptive parents. Adoptive parents often struggle with unique parenting challenges and hidden insecurity, feeling the need to hide the fact that they are not the Super Parents they led the agency to believe they would be. Across the industry as a whole, misinformed and even unethical practices abound.

Adoption Unfiltered models the importance of adults in adoption working together in the spirit of curiosity and empathy—to better support adoptees and their first and adoptive families. Read about the Adoption Unfiltered 2024 Book Tour in Washington, DC.

A bit of magic, a sprinkling of adventure, and a whole lot of heart collide in All the Impossible Things, Lindsay Lackey’s extraordinary middle-grade novel about a young girl navigating the foster care system in search of where she belongs.

Meet Ruby “Red” Byrd―a young, unique girl facing the turbulence of life while grappling with a powerful, mysterious connection to the wind.

As Red navigates the unpredictable storms of the foster care system, her powers resonate with her inner turmoil―intensifying with her fear, anger, and confusion. We follow her journey as she’s tossed into the loving arms of the Grooves, an unconventional couple who run a quaint petting zoo, amid a symphony of quirky creatures and unexplained gifts of their own.

This newfound idyllic sanctuary is soon threatened by a familiar tempest―her chaotic mother. Longing for familial love and caught in a maelstrom of emotions, Red’s story is a challenge to master her incredible abilities, surpass the impossible, and find the family she craves. Read our adoption lens book review.

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee.

But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong. Read All You Can Ever Know Book Excerpt.

Praised by clinicians and adoptive parents across the country, this first-of-its-kind book unmasks the disguises that teens hide behind as they transition from childhood to adulthood. Learn why and how the adolescent struggle to form one’s identity is even more complex for teens who were adopted.

Discover the six most common adoption “stuck spots,” and gain a broader understanding about the benefits of post-adoption family support services. Packed with case studies and powerful insights from adopted teens, you’ll benefit from years of ground-breaking therapeutic work conducted by Center for Adoption Support and Education.

Written by Debbie Riley, LCMFT, C.A.S.E. CEO & John Meeks, M.D.

C.A.S.E. CEO Debbie Riley co-authored the signature book, Beneath the Mask: Understanding Adopted Teens, for clinicians and parents of teens. The C.A.S.E. Team has created a companion workbook specifically for teens, featuring heartfelt stories written by teen and young adult adoptees who graciously shared their feelings about their own adoption journeys. Filled with activities and journaling pages, this workbook offers teen adoptees and their parents a valuable resource.

Mark Hagland is an adult transracial, international adoptee, born in South Korea in 1960 and adopted as an infant to the United States, where he was raised by American parents of Norwegian and German descent. He has spent more than two decades volunteering in and participating in spaces around transracial adoption, both in-person and online, in order to support and educate around all the important topics in the transracial adoption area.

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen.

Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.

Parenting and neuroscience expert Robyn Gobbel is here to reveal how all behavior, no matter how baffling, can be explained and remedied. You just need to look past the behavior and understand what’s going on inside.

Robyn decodes the latest brain science into easy-to-understand principles and metaphors to help you become an expert in your child’s behavior. She reveals simple ways to help you regulate and connect with your child, with brain-, body- and sensory-based strategies to overcome day-to-day challenges. She also provides you with the knowledge to understand and regulate your own brain so that you don’t flip your lid when your child flips theirs.

Let this be your lifeline for parenting or caring for any child with baffling behaviors and hidden challenges, including kids who have experienced adversity, or with additional needs. Read Raising Kids with Big Baffling Behaviors: Brain, Body, Sensory Strategies That Really Work Parenting Book Review.

Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions.

Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee’s journey, narrating his own and other adoptees’ stories in all their complexity. He unpacks the history of how adoption has worked and names how the church influenced adoption practices with unintended negative impacts on adoptees’ faith. Small’s own tumultuous search for and reunion with his mother in Korea inspired him to help other adoptees navigate what it means to carry multiple stories. His adoptee-centered advocacy helps adoptees regain their agency and identity on a journey of integration and healing, with meaningful relationships in all their family systems.

This 52-week writing journal created by adoptee Lisa Coppola, a licensed mental health counselor, enables adoptees to better understand how their early experiences have consciously or subconsciously affected their instincts, behaviors, and emotions. With prompts based on core themes that arise in post-adoption therapy, space for writing, resources including a glossary, and guidelines plus a script to help volunteer moderators run peer groups, Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees can enable the writer to recognize, validate, and learn how to comfort feelings, an essential step on the path to leading a healthy and fulfilling life.

Adult adoptees can use the journal as a guide individually or under the care of a therapist. Therapists can use the journal as a tool in their practice with adopted clients. Peer-led support group moderators can use the prompts as weekly assignments, enabling attendees to share their thoughts and build connections in a group setting.

Have you ever wondered “Why did I do that?” or “Why can’t I just control my behavior?” Others may judge our reactions and think, “What’s wrong with that person?” When questioning our emotions, it’s easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It’s time we started asking a different question.

Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the audiobook, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future – opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way. Read What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing Book Review.

If you’re the white parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment, and nurturing family life they need to thrive.

The only problem? It’s not true. What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption breaks down the dynamics that frequently fly under the radar of the whitewashed, happily-ever-after adoption stories we hear so often. Read What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption Book Review.

From original research, personal stories, and interviews with parents and adoptees, you’ll learn:

• What parents wish they’d known before they adopted–and what kids wish their adoptive parents had done differently
• What white privilege, white saviorism, and toxic positivity are…and how they show up, even when you don’t mean it
• How your child might feel and experience the world differently than you
  All about microaggressions, labeling, and implicit bias
• How to help your child connect with their cultural heritage through language, food, music, and clothing
• The 5 stages of grief for adoptive parents
• How to start tough conversations, work with defensiveness, and process guilt

Written by Melissa Guida-Richards, a transracial, transnational, and late-discovery adoptee

Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily.

In “You Should Be Grateful,” Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.

You’d be amazed at the questions children who have been adopted are asked about being adopted. For some children, it begins as early as age 3: “Why don’t you look like your mom?” For others, it begins at school: “What happened to your real mother?” or “Why did she give you away?” Friends, classmates – even well-meaning grown-ups – make comments or ask questions that can be uncomfortable for adopted children.

Praised by parents around the world, this simple, effective workbook helps adopted children learn that their story is unique, personal and theirs to share (or not). The W.I.S.E. Up! Owl delivers easy-to-follow choices to help adopted children decide when and how to share information and respond to others’ questions/comments.

All children in foster care need simple, effective easy-to-remember methods for identifying and managing their own feelings while responding to the questions, comments and curiosities of others. W.I.S.E. Up! is perfect for children in foster care, foster and kinship care givers, social workers, school counselors, teachers and other mentoring adults. Based on the nationally acclaimed empowerment program that has helped more than 50,000 children who have joined their family through adoption or foster care. This W.I.S.E. Up! workbook has been tailored to meet the specific needs of children in foster care.