Customer Reviews

Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

The author starts off by comparing the feelings an infant has on adoption day to the way an older child would feel if his parents were killed in a car wreck. She goes on to state that adoption causes a wound in the womb that ruins the child emotionally for life. Throughout the book the author refers to her own experience as an adoptee and her life long dependence on therapists to overcome the life altering loss she suffered at 4 days of age. She goes so far as to state a 3 year old told her he was afraid on his adoption day (at age 9 DAYS) because the adoptive parents were strangers. Most of the research is based on adult adoptees found in various therapy groups. Not a single positive adoption story is portrayed..possibly because the healthy and happy adoptees are not seeking therapy.

If you are considering adoption please DO NOT waste your energy on this book. It is not helpful or constructive, but serves only to offer negativity and defeat before you even begin.

As a 35-yr.-old adoptee who was adopted as a toddler, I could relate to practically everything in this book. I found myself saying yes, yes, yes---somebody understands, finally.

But adoption is not a one-size-fits-all subject, and this book implies that everyone who is adopted experiences the same feelings of rejection and loss. And that is simply not true.

If you're adopting a newborn, this book is probably not for you, but I believe that it is a must-read for all other adoptive parents. And if you are an adolescent or adult adoptee who is struggling to come to terms with your adoption, as this author obviously did, this book might help you to understand why you feel the way you do.

This was a book I looked forward to with high expectation...what a huge let down. Sherri's approach in her book makes a blanket assumption that all adoptees are broken & will never find true joy or completeness-simply because they are adopted. This book was promoted as a Christian book & contained no scriptures to back up the basis for her thinking. Between the pop psychology world view (for example- rebirthing was spoken about)& the obviously wounded overflow of her heart, I found it most difficult to glean from this book any really valuable advice. Skip this book!!

I only voted a 1 because they don't have a "zero" option!

Sherrie Eldridge seems to have compiled this book to vent her own feelings of adoption. As an adopted child myself I am very thankful my adoptive parents didn't read this book! This has nothing to do with "me" and I'm not a group, I'm an individual! For Sherrie Eldridge to imply that I would, as an adopted child, become an animal abusing, eating disordered, mal-adapted adult is insane. I find it especially amusing since I am a Vet and have chosen this occupation due to my love of animals, who were, at times, the only living creatures I could trust enough to build an attachment to, until my adoption.

I am a well adjusted adult and have never had the issues brough up in this book. Beware adoptive paretns...reading this book may put ideas into your head that don't belong there. Treat adotpive children as individuals, not as 'typical case studies'.

This is one of the worst books ever written on adoption. As a soon-to-be adoptive parent and wife and daughter-in-law to 2 adoptees, I was extremely disturbed by the message this book sent. The seemingly unqualified author has simply decided to write a diatribe on her own experience and found the worst case scenarios to pinpoint. As indicated by other reviewers, it presents an opportunity for her to blame everything and anything that happened in her life on adoption, such as being upset because her adoptive parents didn't clearly point out that her love for ketchup was clearly from her birthparents. The author has chosen to provide advice encouraging adoptive parents to place their own adult fears and concerns into what the children clearly must be thinking. Hogwash! I am thankful that she took the time in the forward to thank her therapists, but they clearly are not doing her a lick of good. No parent should insist on what their child must grieve about and adoptive parents need to understand that non-adopted children often go through the same stages as adopted children. Do not read this book!

My sons were adopted and did not seems to have many issues, but after reading this book I figured the must!

Against my husband's wishes (who is an adoptee) I started talking more about adoption and birth histories etc. Well, sure enough now they are having 'issues'.

My guess is this could be called 'How to give your child a primal wound'. Constantly talk about being adopted. Author goes so far as to suggest bringing up b-mom at b-days, holidays, basically whenever you can. Also, If your child's b-family did not go to college, do not 'expect' them to go. It is an adult adoptee's excuse book and pity parade.

What I took from the book be honest and open about adoption, give your child freedom to talk about when the want to, being empathetic, understand they may feel love and rejection from b-family. Yet, author does not give any age appropriate guidelines for any of the adoptive issues to be discussed.

Like my husband says, "The past is the past. You are here today and we love you very much and we will be here forever and always love you."

I am neither adoptee,adoptive parent or birth parent.I am outside of the triangle. However I have a huge awareness of adoption issues as a result of personal experience. A relation of mine asked would I find her son, (who was adoped to the USA at the age of 4 from Ireland, before she died.) I spent the next four months searching for this relation of mine, only to find he had died in very sad circumstances, three years earlier.I spent the next three years helping adoptees, birtmothers find each other.
I discovered very quickly that it was an "emotional minefield". The ammount of hurt I encountered caused a lot of stress in my own life. I started reading anything I could find on the whole area of adoption(thanks to Amazone.com). I read all Liftons books, Verniers Primal Wound, Brodinskys and a host more. Between them and my experience in the field, I got an insite into the whole area of adoption.
Two years ago, I purchased Twenty Things adopted kids....... Knew.
I felt it summed up very well from a practical point of view, my experience to date.
I would appeal especially to adoptive parents to read this book. You might not like what you read, but further on down the road if you take on board the feeling and emotions expressed by adoptees, you are the "real parents" of these little understood children.

... when I read books like this one. Please read all the negative reviews on this book before you consider reading the book itself. Truth and Grace are much better answers than all the "primal wound" things this author addresses. I'm not saying we go into total denial of the unique needs that an adopted child MAY experience. What I am saying is that we need to get God's perspective on the adpoted child rather than continually focussing on all the negative stuff.

"A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families..."
(Ps 68:5-6 NIV)

Frankly, after reading this book I nearly pulled the plug on our adoption process. It certainly gave me food for thought, but her notions of the Primal Wound left me reeling, and she put such a negative spin on adoption that I wondered why on earth anyone would want to do it. Fortunately our adoption agency offers some terrific pre-adoption workshops and I have regained a much more optomistic outlook about the whole process. I wish the author had acknowledged in a meaningful way that adoption is treated much differently today than it was when she was a child. We'd all be foolish not to think that our children will not have some emotional and/or developmental issues related to their adoption, but I felt this book took an extreme and damaging approach.

As an adoptive parent of three children adopted from state foster care, I found this book to be honest and helpful.

We adoptive parents don't always want to hear that our children will experience pain and loss. We wish we could make it all better. But Eldridge helps us understand that to help our children move beyond their losses, we must acknowledge them. The first step in doing this is realizing our children have different issues than biological children. They have lost their first parents, and often lost foster parents and other loved ones as well. This inescapable fact may affect them for a lifetime.

Eldridge writes eloquently about the feelings of abandonment, loss and grief that adopted children often feel. She demystifies the common beliefs that adopted children will simply "forget" their losses, or that good parenting means adoptees won't want to search for birth parents (or, conversely, that only unhappy adoptees want to search).

With so many books on adoption today written by adoptive parents, it is nice to see a book written by an adoptee. The perspective of Eldridge is welcome and necessary in adoption literature. She deserves kudos for the courage to write so openly about her private feelings and fears.