Finally, a comprehensive parenting book for adoptive families! Over 100 contributors have created a guide so useful and comprehensive, that whether you're a newly arrived home or experienced family, there's much here to read and learn. Our adopted children come to us from loss of a birth-family, perhaps a culture, and sometimes language. There are helpful things that we can do to address these issues, and Adoption Parenting helps you to create an awareness to do just that. The authors look at stumbling blocks to good parenting, and standard parenting practices that aren't the best solution for adopted children. Core issues affecting all members of the adoption triad are explored, including such common challenges such as sleeping through the night, discipline and attachment. Other specific challenges families have faced are covered: FASD, trauma and PTSD, sensory integration, speech and language delays, learning issues, food issues, racial differences, and at ways to effectively parent a post-institutionalized child. There is also a section on Post Adoption Depression, the importance of support networks (both for your children and for yourself) and when and how to find therapists if that is warranted. The book is filled with resources and links to help find more information on a specific topic as your parenting or your child needs. Don't read it all at once, dip in as needed. Contributors include well-known adoption professionals, and the parents who have had to learn to parent the children who have come to them. Many of these parents have become experts as well! The advice and the wisdom they have to share is honest and heartening. Adoptees who are now adults have shared experiences on their growing up that are interwoven in the book and there are contributions from birth mothers as well. Each person comes to parenting from a different place and the needs their children have are unique. Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections encourages the reader to choose which tools are helpful for their particular situation and which are not. This isn't a book about what you have to do to parent, but about perspective, awareness, and understanding that overlays how you parent. Designed to help each of us become the best parents for our children and to offer support and connections for families on the journey of adoption parenting, you'll want to keep this source-book handy at all times!