These parenting books are packed full of resources to help equip parents with the skills they need to parent children who are coping with the aftermath of early childhood abuse, neglect, and disruption. Parenting in general is never easy. Parenting children with a rough upbringing can be especially difficult. These books will help make the parenting process possible.
Parenting Books for Adoptive Parents
(Or people hoping to become adoptive parents!)
Rachel Skousen
April 08, 2014
1. Adopting the Hurt Child: Hope for Families with Special Needs Kids
by Gregory Keck and Regina Kupecky.
This is a great resource for pre-adoptive parents. It helps explain how abuse and neglect impact a child's development and ability to form healthy human connections-- and also walks parents through solutions to problems that may arise through the course of an adopted child's childhood.
2. Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections
by Jean MacLeon.
"More than 100 contributors create a practical, hands-on approach to parenting your adopted child."
3. Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents
by Deborah Gray.
Another excellent resource for both prospective adoptive and post-adoptive parents, Attaching in Adoption is written by a clinical social worker who is specialized in the areas of attachment, grief, and trauma. This book explains attachment and attachment disorders, and offers practical tools to parents for helping children reach their fullest potential.
4. Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love-Based Approach to Helping Attachment-Challenged Children with Severe Behaviors
by Heather T. Forbes and B. Bryan Post.
This book offers a new approach to parenting the traumatized child, based on helping both the parent and child identified fear-based reactions that are creating and reinforcing negative behaviors and emotions.
5. Building the Bonds of Attachment
By Daniel A. Hughes.
This book follows a case-composite child named Katie who was severely neglected during her early years. The reader is given an opportunity to learn about attachment, attachment disorders, and developing attachment security through observing this child as she moves from her birth family, through several foster placements, and finally into a successful adoptive home.
6. Dandelion on My Pillow, Butcher Knife Beneath
By Nancy Thomas.
From the author of "When Love is Not Enough," this book describes Thomas' personal experiences of parenting children with severe attachment, emotional, and behavioral issues. She goes into detail about her day-to-day parenting techniques and also describes the specifics of the attachment therapy sessions she attended with her kids.
7. The Nature of Nurture: Biology, Environment, and the Drug-Exposed Child
by Ira Chasnoff.
"The Nature of Nurture" explains how prenatal substance exposure can impact a child's health and development later on. It offers practical techniques to help children overcome the effects of early drug exposure.
9. Parenting the Hurt Child: Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow
by Gregory Keck and Regina Kupecky.
The sequel of "Adopting the Hurt Child," this book offers solutions to parents who have adopted children who have been traumatized. From the back cover of the book: "If you’ve chosen to bring one of these children into your family, you likely have hopes, dreams, and images of success—dreams and images that might now look dark and hopeless."
10. Parenting With Love and Logic
by Foster Cline and Jim Fay.
A parenting classic, "Parenting with Love and Logic" offers practical solutions to parents hoping to raise self-reliant children.
11. The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
by Ross Greene.
Ah, the "explosive child." When things don't go her way, she screams, hits, kicks, spits, swears, throws things, destroys property, and more. Rewards, punishments, and explanations don't seem to help. Greene, a clinician who has worked with thousands of explosive children, offers a special approach to help this type of child, an approach based on problem-solving and skills-training.
12. When Love is Not Enough: A Guide to Parenting a Child with RAD
By Mary Thomas.
A detailed, practical guide for helping children heal from their past traumas and become happy, healthy, respectful, responsible members of your family.
Rachel Skousen
Rachel has a long-held passion for adoption that was sealed through her work as the content manager at Adoption.com. She currently works as a content specialist at Adopting.org, finding and sharing amazing adoption content from across the web. She is a mom of three and loves reading and napping in her spare time.
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