Tag: Adoption Page 1 of 23

Worth Your Time (March 2024)

On March 27, 2024

In Book Recommendations, Worth Your Time

Hey readers,

Here’s my recent round-up of books and articles to read. If you do, let me know what you think!

Keep Complaining to God. Just Don’t Ignore Him by Drew Dyck

“What explains why some leave while others stay? Sometimes the only difference I could see is what they did with their trials. The first group ran away from God while the second ran toward him. Instead of letting doubt and disappointment fester in darkness, they dragged it into the light. They joined the great biblical tradition of prophets who expressed their grievances to God, often in harsh and accusatory language.”

Make Your Life Count: 12 Rules for Teens by John Piper

7 Parenting Errors That Can Influence Adult Children to Leave the Faith by Q. O. Helet

“I can easily identify many things we did—or did not do—that may have contributed to our sons’ departure from the faith. I hope to see others avoid such an outcome. In that light, here are seven parenting errors that can influence adult children to turn their back on Christ.”

The State of the Culture, 2024: Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it’s not pretty) by Ted Gioia

Whoa, this is fascinating and scary and super important: “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.”

Who Would I Be If I Was Happy? By Trevin Wax

“We live in a time of self-creation. The traditional markers of identity that once came from outside ourselves—from our family or friends or community or past—are viewed as subpar, even repressive. We’re supposed to chart our own course, to look deep inside to discover our desires and define ourselves as we determine.

This way of life sounds exhilarating at first, but the result is fragility. What happens when we adopt the therapeutic assumptions of our age, when we look into our hearts and find only failures and frailty? Many of us begin to define ourselves by our maladies, to base our identities in suffering.”

Books:

What White Adoptive Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption by Melissa Guida-Richards

This was such a helpful, insightful book–it really is a must-read for anyone who has adopted transracially (or is thinking about it).

Being Elisabeth Elliot: Elisabeth’s Later Years by Ellen Vaughn

I wrote about Part 1 of this biography a couple of years ago here at A Life Overseas. Part 2 did not disappoint. What a fascinating look into what was going on in Elisabeth’s life during the time she wrote the books that influenced me so much.

My garden has started blooming. Happy Spring to you all!

Have I Failed My Children?

By Amy Medina

On March 1, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting

“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”

I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.

My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.

***

Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.

“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.

When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.

It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.

On Transracial Adoption

By Amy Medina

On January 16, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Re-Entry to America

There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.

Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.

Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.

For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.

I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.

I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.

Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.

Mothering African Hair

By Amy Medina

On September 8, 2021

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Third Culture Kids

Of all the things a new mother stresses about, her kids’ hair is usually not one of them. But for me, it was.

I felt an invisible weight upon me that if I was to be a good mom to my girls, I must get their hair right. This was not a completely imagined pressure. I learned early on that in both African and African-American cultures, well-maintained hair is important. I already knew my competence as a white mother to two black daughters would be questioned in many ways. So I was determined to prove myself capable of at least caring for their hair.

I read Black hair blogs. I watched YouTube videos. I even bought and read a book on the subject. I tried a ridiculous number of hair products. Yet still, I was anxious. It was harder than I thought, and despite my best efforts, I could not turn myself into a Black hair artist.

Dear Moms of Littles, Adoption Has Taught Me Your Labor Is Not In Vain

By Amy Medina

On May 11, 2019

In Adoption

The other night, there was a lot of screaming in my dining room. A lot of screaming. Like, I’m sure that our neighbors thought someone was being maimed or murdered.

But no. Someone was being asked to share a handful of half-dry markers with a sibling. This was apparently cause for a fight-to-the-death battle that involved wailing and flailing on the floor.

Also, no, this was not a developmentally-appropriate toddler temper tantrum. We are way past the toddler stage in this house.

I put on my calm, firm voice and did my best to stay calm and firm for twenty minutes while rage rampaged through my house. When it was over, the child flipped back to their perky, chipper self, while I felt like I had been run over by a truck.

Several years ago I read an article that told me that a child learns emotion regulation from his or her mother before the age of three. The mother’s sense of calm actually, physically, passes onto her babies, and teaches her children how to calm themselves down.

That was a game changer for me. Oh. My child didn’t have a mother as a toddler. This is why my child cannot regulate emotions. And I’ve discovered that at the heart of the anger is a deep insecurity. We have the same conversations, over and over again. You are valued and loved. You can trust Mom and Dad to give you what you need. People are not out to get you. It’s not you against the world. We are on your side.

Even though the number of years that child has been in my care has far surpassed the number of years that child spent in an orphanage, it doesn’t matter. Those first three years are so critical that it’s taking years and years to try to reverse that early learning.

And honestly, what I’m dealing with is mild. As an adoptive mom of four, I am fully immersed in adoption books, forums, and friendships. The stories I hear or read about make me realize that I’ve got it easy. Sorry, Beatles, but All you need is love isn’t always true. An adoptive family can be full of love, but it takes a long time to fix what was broken. Especially if it was broken during those first few years.

So if you are in those “fixing what was broken” years with your adopted child, then you have my sympathy. Mothers With Screaming Children…Unite!

But my point of writing today is to encourage those moms who are raising little people right now–the Under Three crowd.

Some of my kids came to me as infants. Now that I’m past that stage, it’s easy to be nostalgic. Those belly laughs and funny first words, the pieces of songs that come out all wrong, the excitement over shiny shoes, the dancing and prancing….because who wants to walk???

But then I remember the sleeplessness. The messes, over and over again. And it wasn’t so much the exhaustion that got to me, but the monotony. The tasks are repetitive and feel endless. Changing. Feeding. Throwing blocks in the air. Reading inanely ridiculous books. Talking about yourself in the third person. Listening to Dora one more time. And praying they go to sleep. Dear God, please just make them go to sleep.

The hardest part about all of this was that it often felt so pointless. So small. So insignificant.

But that’s where adoption has taught me that it’s not. During those early years of sleepless nights and endless messes, you are giving your child a whole lot more than love. Without realizing it, you are teaching her to trust adults to get her needs met. You are giving him a sense of personhood and value. You are teaching her how to regulate her emotions. You are giving him safe boundaries and showing her how to reign in her desires.

Of course, this is not to say that every child who was adopted at an older age is going to struggle with these things. It also doesn’t mean that every biological, home-raised child is not going to struggle. Personality and life circumstances are huge factors. But in general, adoption has shown me that those early years really matter. Centrally matter.

So be encouraged, Mom of Littles. These years will pass, and you will never regret the investment you made in your children in those mind-numbingly long years. Keep at it.

One of my all-time favorite pictures (2007)