num_pages: 240
description: Adoptive parents often experience the double trial of emotional responses to infertility and to the process of adoption itself called excruciating labor with no end in sight by one adoptive mother. Would-be adoptive parents cycle through grief anger fear anxiety frustration and guilt-and back again. All of these emotions cloud decision-making at exactly the time that adoptive parents are making life-altering irrevocable whether to adopt at all to adopt an older child or an infant or to parent a child with developmental delays as well as other pressing questions.New empirical research by Kathleen Whitten Ph.D. a developmental psychologist and adoptive mother and other experts in the field contradicts many of the outdated myths presented to parents and written about in widely-used adoption guides. Whitten separates fact from fiction and leads parents by the hand through the many emotional impacts the process involves. Written in a reassuring conversational tone the author tells parents when they should listen to their heart-and when practical considerations are too important to ignore. Each chapter features workbook section with constructive exercises and stimulating questions.Adoptive parents do not need yet another book promising a fast track to a child or explaining how to collect documents. Instead they need Labor of the Heart to help them through the difficult emotions and decisions about adoption.
language: English
title: Labor of the Heart: A Parent's Guide to the Decisions and Emotions in Adoption
publisher: M. Evans & Company