The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption

Helping Your Child Grow up Whole

By: Lori Holden, Crystal Hass

Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, 90 percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how?

Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount. This book offers listeners the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up.

Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori and Crystal review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted child at the center, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset that can be learned and internalized, so parents can choose to act out of love and honesty throughout their child's growing up years, helping that child to grow up whole.

©2013 Rowman & Littlefield (P)2016 Vibrance Press

Rich with good stuff

This book was full of so many good tips and great information. the author used testimonies from many different families to give a wide range of examples. I will probably come back to this and read it again.

Great Book

Listening to this book is helping me understand how a child will feel once he/she gets older and trying to understand where they came from. I also liked the setting boundaries. We are in post placement with our daughter and we've never met our birth mom or dad. I like they way the woman who wrote this book understand how a child will possibly feel once they understand that they didn't come from their parents. I like how she discussed the how her daughter met her biological father and how they met for the 1st time. I wished I had heard this book or read it once we decided to adopt.

Loved Book So Much!!!

Loved this book. This is going to be required reading for all of my adoptive families!!

Brilliant

A must read for anyone considering the journey of adoption! Very informative and fill of great references.

Must read for post or prospective adoptive families!

There aren’t many books out there on open adoptions. We adopted out of foster care and have an open adoption. The insight and tools this book offers are invaluable.

Great read!

So many life lessons in this book. A sweet friend recommended it since we are in the process of adopting ourselves. I will truly take these lessons to heart and will definitely recommend this book to others.

Great book

Thank you for sharing both sides of the adoption journey. It really opened up our eyes to an open adoption.

The reader did a good job

The reader did a good job. Other than that it’s cherry picked stories and calls anyone who doesn’t agree with the writers point of view a coward suffering from fear and insecurities.

Who is talking?

Using a different narrator or voice for each first-person account would have been immensely helpful. The narration itself was excellent, but I feel that the content didn't lend itself to a single narrator or a single narrator doing a single tone/voice was sufficient to communicate the many voices that contributed to the book.