From the Back Cover (1988 edition): As many who have tried and failed know, adopting a child through the traditional system often resembles a game in which the odds are stacked decidedly against the players. Now for aspiring parents comes a unique, candid, and inspiring “how-to” on the many methods of adopting a child.

In Beating the Adoption Game, adoption counselor Cynthia Martin discusses the prospects and pitfalls of agency adoptions; the search for and arrangement of private adoptions, with an examination of the risks involved; open adoptions; disclosure of birth records; and recommendations for improving the adoption system. Martin also includes sample letters and résumés from prospective parents to agencies, adoption authorities, and birthparents; and an extensive bibliography for readers’ reference.

RESOLVE—a national infertility counseling group routinely recommends Beating the Adoption Game because it offers “practical points and advice about the adoption process,” and because “there is no other book like it available.”

---

About the Author: Cynthia D. Martin, Ph.D. is a practicing psychologist specializing in adoption and the family. She is the parent of five children—four of them adopted—and lives in California.

Follow Michael Sansone through his battle with Reactive Attachment Disorder as a child. Learn more about Reactive Attachment Disorder, its debilitating effects and the social stigmatization that follows in its wake. This book is the first of its kind to describe in frightening personal details of abuses, hospitalizations, shattered family members, animal killings, fire starting and chemical dependency associated with Reactive Attachment Disorder. Written from the first perspective this powerful and emotionally charged book will take the reader on a journey of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Read about the telltale signatures of R.A.D. as Michael slowly disintegrates into depression and madness as a child. This book is highly recommended for those that are raising children with R.A.D., Residential treatment centers, clinicians and psychotherapists. It will provide insight through 1st perspective self destruction as Michael grows older and more distant from those close to him. The powerful ending to this book will provide a platform of hope and understanding for those suffering with Reactive Attachment Disorder.

From the Back Cover: Find beauty and hope for the messiness of family life

Are you exhausted by the fairy-tale idea that following Jesus will mean our families won't suffer? That a parenting formula can guarantee our children will tum out okay? That our families will be immune from being broken because we love God?

In The Beauty of Broken, Elisa Morgan, one of today’s most respected female Christian leaders, shares for the first time her very personal story of brokenness—from her family of origin to her family of creation, represented by her husband and two grown children. Over the years, Elisa’s family struggled privately with issues many parents must face, including:

alcoholism and drug addiction • infertility and adoption • teen pregnancy and abortion • divorce, homosexuality, and death

Each story layers onto the next to reveal the brokenness that comes into our lives without invitation. “We’ve bought into the myth of the perfect family,” says Elisa. “Formulaic promises about the family may have originated in well-meaning intentions, but such thinking isn’t realistic. It’s not helpful. It’s not even kind.”

Elisa offers hope in the form of “broken family values” that allow parents to grow and thrive with God. Values such as commitment, humility, relinquishment, and respect Carry us to new places of understanding. Owning our brokenness shapes us into God’s best idea for us and enables us to discover the beauty in ourselves and each member of our families.

---

About the Author: Elisa Morgan, one of Christianity Today’s top fifty women influencing the church and culture and former CEO of MOPS International, is a sought-after speaker, leader, and author.

From the Back Cover: Falling asleep in his mom’s arms... Smiling into her dad’s eyes... Feeling calm and at peace, trusting that their needs will be taken care of...

All these are signs of a healthy attachment between children and their parents. Parents attend to their children’s needs, and children rest easy in the security of their parents’ care. But when a child is permanently separated from his or her parents at a very young age, healthy attachment—that sense of trust in the steady, reliable care of a parental figure—may be disrupted.

Becoming a Family will help adoptive parents recognize and respond to the signs of broken attachment. Written by psychotherapist who has helped hundreds of adoptive families cope with attachment challenges, this practical guide offers clear and effective strategies for parents to help their children overcome their uncertain past and embrace the love of their new parents.

---

About the Author: Lark Eshleman, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Institute for Children and Families. A psychotherapist, Dr. Eshleman has trained orphanage workers in Croatia to work with children before they are adopted. A frequent speaker and writer on emotional trauma and attachment issues, she lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Becoming Dad started out as an anonymous blog written to keep my family updated about the progress my wife and I were making toward adopting a baby. The idea was, if I wrote about the process and kept everyone informed, they would quit calling me every other day and asking how it was going (adopting is nerve wracking enough without that added pressure). I realized through looking back on my blog that I had made a heartfelt chronicle of an amazing time in my life. With the addition of after the fact insight I have added to my original posts. I feel that my story can be of great help and comfort to others who are starting down the road toward adopting a child. This book is equal parts humor and heartbreak, but ultimately triumphant like the adoption process itself.

Becoming Home is for anyone who has wrestled with how to address the orphan crisis. Caring for orphans makes grace touchable. When Christians choose to adopt, foster, mentor, or support care for orphans around the globe, it reveals God’s true character to the world like nothing else we can do. Becoming Home unpacks specific steps everyone can take to care for orphans in distress. Some of these steps are “big” choices like fostering or adopting; some are simpler choices like supporting work abroad or mentoring a foster youth. But all are ways we can practically show love to orphans—not because of a sense of duty, guilt, or even idealism, but because we’ve first been loved by God. Becoming Home is part of the FRAMES series—short yet meaningful reads on the top issues facing us in today’s complex culture. A new kind of book brought to you by Barna Group, to help you read less, and know more. To sign up for updates about FRAMES, see videos, and learn more about these products, visit www.BarnaFrames.com.

In 2003, social worker Lori Richardson purchased a one-way ticket to Guatemala. She planned to fulfill her lifelong dream to provide volunteer service throughout Central America. While in a Guatemalan orphanage, her plans changed when she met Ana, a child with a zestful smile, stifled by chronic illness and a mysterious secret. When the free-spirited traveler tried to adopt the girl she had grown to love as a daughter, she encountered a resistant, dark force that refused the child’s freedom. Tiny Ana made an enormous impact on Lori and she vowed to overcome the obstacles that endangered both their lives. Becoming Mamacita chronicles this miraculous journey and places the reader beside Lori as she corresponds with family and friends concerning her triumphs and struggles in Guatemala. Through mango-scented breezes, soft Mayan textiles, steamy waterfalls and chaotic chicken bus rides around winding cliffs, Ana discovers life is more than oppression; Lori learns it is more than restless freedom. During this three-year odyssey, Lori becomes a Mamacita, a Guatemalan mommy—until an unforeseen event separates mother and child. It is only through the culturally rich experiences and the fierce trials of living in Guatemala that they both find what they are searching for.

From the Publisher: When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But it wasn’t long before they noticed a marked difference between Jonas and his brother, Wyatt. Jonas preferred sports and trucks and many of the things little boys were “supposed” to like; but Wyatt liked princess dolls and dress-up and playing Little Mermaid. By the time the twins were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt’s insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart. In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept and embrace Wyatt’s transition to Nicole, and to undergo an emotionally wrenching transformation of their own that would change all their lives forever.

Becoming Nicole chronicles a journey that could have destroyed a family but instead brought it closer together. It’s the story of a mother whose instincts told her that her child needed love and acceptance, not ostracism and disapproval; of a Republican, Air Force veteran father who overcame his deepest fears to become a vocal advocate for trans rights; of a loving brother who bravely stuck up for his twin sister; and of a town forced to confront its prejudices, a school compelled to rewrite its rules, and a courageous community of transgender activists determined to make their voices heard. Ultimately, Becoming Nicole is the story of an extraordinary girl who fought for the right to be herself.

Granted wide-ranging access to personal diaries, home videos, clinical journals, legal documents, medical records, and the Maineses themselves, Amy Ellis Nutt spent almost four years reporting this immersive account of an American family confronting an issue that is at the center of today’s cultural debate. Becoming Nicole will resonate with anyone who’s ever raised a child, felt at odds with society’s conventions and norms, or had to embrace life when it plays out unexpectedly. It’s a story of standing up for your beliefs and yourself—and it will inspire all of us to do the same.

---

About the Author: Amy Ellis Nutt won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her feature series “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” about the 2009 sinking of a fishing boat of the New Jersey Coast. She is a health and science writer at The Washington Post, the author of Shadows Bright as Glass, and the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Teenage Brain. She was a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard University and Ferris Professor in residence at Princeton, and was for a number of years an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C.

This short, simple and approachable handbook offers advice to families of prospective adopters on how to support the new adopted child and their parents. It concisely covers key issues such as how to gain trust, manage big feelings, giving praise and building a bond. This handbook is ideal for grandparents, sisters, brothers and friends who want to support a new and fragile adoptive family in a productive way and to build a close bond with the newest member of this very special family unit.

A family looks and sees empty places everywhere—at their kitchen table, on the family’s swing set and in their arms. Someone is missing. They find out about a little girl who needs a family. They go to find her and bring her home, and all of their empty places are filled. A wonderful story of adoption! About the Author: Druid H. Joyner thinks there is nothing better than a good story and has been telling and writing stories her whole life. She tells this particular story with great joy since it is a story she has lived! She and her family live in Charleston, SC.

From the Publisher: Adopting a child can be an exciting and anxious time in prospective parents’ lives. There are rooms to decorate and clothes and toys to buy. There are many preparations to make before welcoming the new arrival. In Before You Finalize the Adoption: The Pre-Adoption Workbook, author Joyce Vrooman provides advice and information for parents who are thinking about adopting a child.

Based on personal experience, Vrooman developed this workbook to guide parents through the adoption process to ensure they are knowledgeable and informed. In addition, Vrooman discusses information that parents need to know so the child will receive the proper counseling, therapy, medical treatments, or educational assistance.

Loaded with an array of helpful details, Before You Finalize the Adoption: The Pre-Adoption Workbook contains forms, checklists, worksheets, and questionnaires to help adoptive parents learn everything about their new child prior to the finalization of the adoption. All information pertaining to this child and their adoption is contained in one book.

From the Back Cover: Written by an adoptive mother and an adoptee daughter, Before You Were Mine offers a unique Christian perspective on creating a Lifebook that commemorates your child’s birth story. Complete with worksheets and advice from adoptive families, you’ll find that remembering and celebrating your child’s history can be fun, rewarding, and even redemptive.

You’ll discover how to uncover and organize details of their birth story, make the story both truthful and positive, and use the Lifebook to trace God’s faithfulness.

This powerful concept takes the guesswork out of how and when you’ll talk about your adopted child’s beginnings and offers him or her a lasting memento that helps them overcome uncertainty and fear to rest in Christ’s unconditional love. How will you embrace your child’s birth story as part of God’s plan? Before You Were Mine will help you relax and rejoice in the beautiful story God is writing for your child.

---

About the Author: Susan TeBos (M.A., Western Michigan University) is the mother of three adopted children from Siberia. She has led many workshops for adoptive organizations and for adoptive ministries in churches. She and her husband, Michael, and their children live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Carissa Woodwyk is a Korean adoptee. She has a master’s degree in counseling and psychology and is a lisensed counselor and marriage and family therapist in private practice. She also serves as a pastoral care assocaite at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. She lives with her husband in Hudsonville, Michigan.

Being a Mother: How I Adopted Three Children from Three Different Places in the World tells the story of a woman who found it was difficult have a child. After many fertility treatments, she and her husband decided to go on an exhausting journey, filled with optimism and hope for a life with children. The couple went to different places throughout the world to adopt children, but on their way they encountered various obstacles, threatening to shatter their dreams. This book is a diary that documents—with honesty and sensitivity—the moments when the couple adopted their three children and the events that preceded those moments. The book is a true story. It is surprising, exciting, touching, and filled with unexpected twists. About the Author: Ronit Redlich lives in the Israeli town of Arad. She has worked for many years in education, guiding teachers and moderating parents’ groups.

From the Back Cover: Millions of couples have struggled with infertility. Most of them did not realize that when they finally achieved their goal of having a baby—whether through birth or via adoption—the echoes of their infertility would continue to affect them as parents.

In The Belated Baby, Jill S. Browning and Kelly James-Enger explain how every woman who experiences infertility is forever changed; many of them describe the experience as having “abused their soul.” It also may have hurt their relationship with their partners or altered relationships with their extended families.

Infertile couples often find themselves mentally unprepared for parenthood. They worked so relentlessly to have a baby and, moreover, spent thousands of dollars for fertility treatments or on adoption—what right do they have to complain about the frustration and confusion that all sleep-deprived new parents experience? They also may be conflicted about working outside the home, even if their families need the income. After waiting so long for this baby, “How can I leave him (or her) to go back to work?”

The Belated Baby presents the messages these couples need to hear. Filled with stories from infertile couples in their own words, the book guides readers through the transition from infertile patient to parenthood while revealing infertility can shape them as parents. Most of all, The Belated Baby is a source of hope: there is light at the end of the infertility tunnel, and this book is a reliable guide to finding it.

---

About the Author: Jill S. Browning is a full-time mother of triplets, thanks to fertility treatments. She’s also a freelance writer who specializes in subjects related to parenting. A contributing writer to Chicago Parent magazine, she has written articles for Parenting and the Christian Science Monitor.

Kelly James-Enger is the mother of a two-year-old son through domestic open adoption. She has written eight books, including Small Changes, Big Results: A 12-Week Action Plan to a Better Life, and more than seven hundred articles for national magazines, including Family Circle, Health, Redbook, and Woman’s Day.

Desperate Housewives’ Brenda Strong is Spokesperson for the American Fertility Association.

lvlany times we wake up and go to sleep without realizing the miracles that happen around us every day. When we give each day up to God, we are given the ability to turn ordinary things into extraordinary events. This journal is about the realization of God’s grace during the challenges of everyday life. It will take you from the loss of a good paying job to the adoption of a beautiful baby boy and how God worked miracles to make it happen. You will read a lot about the Army life and the effects of being deployed. Every material thing can be taken away from you but no one can touch your relationship with God. It’s the one thing that you have absolute control over. How you handle it creates your road map to eternity. That road may be long but it could also be cut short. Since you don‘t know when this road ends, it would be wise to live each day for Him. Find out what He wants from you and you’ll find that it’s the perfect life. fulfilled beyond your wildest imagination. Enjoy the stories you read and maybe you will want to share more of the stories you have with others. When we see how God works in each other’s lives, we get motivated to get even closer to Him. And isn’t that a great way to live?

In July of 2009, my wife Robin, our son Benjamin and I went on a journey to China to adopt a little girl. Her Chinese name was Zhu Zheng Hong, which means Pearl Rainbow. We named her Bella Dora, which means Golden Beauty. This is her story.

From the Publisher: Who needs to Belong? Who needs Adoption? Ana’s story is like a parable, while although it is her true story, it relates aspects of adoption that may allow those who have never experienced it to gain new insights as pertaining to God’s love and care for us. This book was created to give help and support to the adoptive parents and children of the world, but also to a larger family, the human Race, for we all can be God’s adopted kids and find our place in belonging. Help us share this message of Belonging and Adoption to all.

Isabel Huggan’s acclaimed belonging is pure pleasure to read—richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three, short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.

From the Publisher: James was desperately in need of a family. His life so far had been traumatic. Neglected and abused by his birth parents, separated from his brother and with a string of foster homes, institutional stays and a failed adoption, James had grown into an anti-social ten-year-old at war with the world. His social workers were beginning to wonder if they would ever be able to find a family for their damaged young charge. The Brown family felt it was time to expand their family. For months they had participating in the preparation required for a permanent adoption placement. The social workers running the Special Needs Adoption Program pulled no punches. It was going to take a lot of skill, patience and flexibility to cope with one of their damaged children. The Brown family believed they were up to the challenge.

From the Back Cover: “I didn’t even know, then, that I was capable of doing what I’ve done... But for Tsbakua I found all the love that was in me. I’ve grown fonder of him than of my own child, than of anyone else in the world, and I’ve fought for him every day of my life...”

In 1983,Thérèse Muamini’s life is changed forever. An African woman working as a cleaner in Paris, she is visited by a friend and her baby son from their home village in Rwanda. The friend is suddenly taken ill and dies of a little known disease the doctors call AIDS. Thérèse adopts the boy, Tshakua, who is diagnosed HIV positive. Undaunted she begins the long and arduous fight to forge a life for them.

What is she to do alone in Paris, with nowhere to live, no money, and a little boy whose condition fills people with fear?

Thérèse shows the blind courage, stubborn resilience, self-sacrifice and extraordinary love that only a mother can know. Driven by these instincts and her unshakeable faith, Thérèse overcomes all obstacles to protect and care for him on her terms, for better or worse.

Told in simple words with an unflinching honesty, this is a mother’s story, and a wonderful affirmation of the strength of human love.

From the Publisher: In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times bestseller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of 13-year-old Zadie.

When the young teenage girl runs away from home and is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be.

Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie she is polite and well-behaved, but understandably suspicious of the family around her. Through Rosie’s support and understanding, gradually Zadie begins to settle into her new surroundings, but loyalty to her relatives, and fear of bringing shame on those around her, prevents her from confessing the horrifying truth about her troubled past.

When the shocking truth finally emerges, Rosie and her family can hardly believe that Zadie had managed to keep the shocking secrets to herself for so long.

---

About the Author: Rosie Lewis is a full-time foster carer. She has been working in this field for over a decade. Before that, she worked in the special unit team for the police force. Based in northern England, Rosie writes under a pseudonym to protect the identities of the children she looks after.

From the Dust Jacket: For ten years he was turbulently married to one American legend, Bette Davis. For the next four he was the lover of another, Rita Hayworth.

Handsome, kind, funny, and casual, actor Gary Merrill has a reputation as a hard-drinking, boisterous Hollywood bad boy.

No doubt he is eccentric: a very masculine man who wears a skirt as he plays golf with some of the world’s most famous actors, politicians, and socialites.

He is also a distinguished actor of stage, screen, TV, and radio—from the movie masterpieces All About Eve and Twelve O’Clock High to his present career, in his seventies, as one of the most sought-after voices for television advertising.

But Gary Merrill also has a side that few of his fans know about: a passionate commitment to social justice that saw him marching with Martin Luther King at Selma, protesting the war in Vietnam, and being a witness for peace in Nicaragua.

And this is the man who, twenty-five years after his marriage to Bette Davis ended, ran ads in The New York Times and other newspapers urging people not to buy the book attacking Bette which was written by her ungrateful daughter B.D.

As Bette Davis writes: “Gary had enormous gifts.” One is a gift for telling stories. He has assembled many of them here with the help of his old friends, writers John and Jean Cole. Besides the revelations about Bette and Rita, there are stories of Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, and a cast of superstars from the thirties through the eighties.

Gary Merrill, most of all, is an original. His vivid personality has sometimes made his life more difficult; his individualism has also been his salvation. He has been true to himself.

Bette and B.D. and others have written their books. Now Gary, with his typical honesty, sets the record straight.

From the Dust Jacket: In this absolutely superb collection of mothers’ personal narratives, some classic writers, as well as exciting new voices, ponder the conflicts and joys of raising sons. Patricia Stevens’s Between Mothers and Sons is the first anthology in which women writers attempt to answer the question that all mothers have contemplated in the course of mothering the opposite sex: “Who is this male child who came out of my body?”

After all, the mother/son relationship is the foundation of all male/female connections. Yet in our culture, it’s a relationship that has been far less closely observed than the relationship between mother and daughter.

From the earliest days of nursing to the good-byes as college and adulthood appear on the threshold, from adoptive families to biracial, from Native American to African-American mothers, these pages cover a broad range of experience. These writers collectively explore the delights and frustrations, the deep and often-conflicted emotions they feel in their roles as mothers to their male children.

“Diamonds are forever, but love can easily get lost. ... I picture the broken pieces of my heart inside me like the shrapnel of a war.” In Jo-Ann Mapson’s heartbreaking “Navigating the Channel Islands,” we read of the intense pain that appears in the wake of her adolescent son’s rebellion. On a more comical note, Deborah Galyan’s “Watching Star Trek with Dylan” is a must for any mother who has wondered about a young son’s love of things mechanical. And Valerie Monroe’s bittersweet “Feet” will touch every mother on the planet: “As I unwrapped the slippers and carefully placed them on this rug, I thought, they’re his feet, after all. And step by step, they will take him away from me.”

Between Mothers and Sons resoundingly, if unflinchingly, celebrates this new journey that we are all making with our boys.

---

About the Author: Patricia Stevens is a graduate of Bowling Green State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her essays appear in both Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul and The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery. She has received the James Michener Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Short Story Award and has been in residence both at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and at the Ragdale Foundation. Ms. Stevens is the mother of two sons.

Patricia J. Williams is a columnist (“Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” The Nation), and a Professor of Law at Columbia University. She is the author of three books, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race, The Rooster’s Egg, and The Alchemy of Race and Rights. She also contributes regularly to Ms. and The Village Voice.

---

Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “On Throwing Like a Girl” by Patricia J. Williams (pp. 211-217), who writes about her experience as a black single mother raising an adopted black boy in New York City.

From the Publisher: Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control covers in detail the effects of trauma on the body-mind and how trauma alters children’s behavioral responses. The first four chapters help parents and professionals clearly understand the neurological research behind the basic model given in this book, deemed, “The Stress Model.” While scientifically based in research, it is written in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-grasp format for anyone working with or parenting children with severe behaviors. The next seven chapters are individually devoted to seven behaviors typically seen with attachment-challenged children. These include lying, stealing, hoarding and gorging, aggression, defiance, lack of eye contact, and yes, even a chapter that talks candidly about how parents appear hostile and angry when they work to simply maintain their families from reaching complete states of chaos. Each of these chapters talks in depth on these specific behaviors and gives vivid and contrasting examples of how this love-based approach works to foster healing and works to develop relationships, as opposed to the fear-based traditional attachment parenting approaches that are being advocated in today’s attachment field. The authors end with a Parenting Bonus Section. True testimonials from parents who have been able to make significant changes in their homes with this model of parenting, giving real-life examples of how they have been able to find the healing, peace, and love that they had been seeking prior to working through the techniques outlined in this book.

---

About the Author: Heather Forbes, LCSW, is co-founder of the Beyond Consequences Institute, LLC. Ms. Forbes has been training in the field of attachment and trauma with nationally recognized, first-generation attachment therapists since 1999. She has been active in the field of adoption with experience ranging from pre-adoption to post-adoption work, including domestic and international adoptions. Ms. Forbes is a published author and presents workshops both nationally and throughout the State of Florida. Much of her experience and insight on understanding trauma, disruptive behaviors, and adoption-related issues has come from her direct mothering experience of her two adopted children. She has a passion for helping families to find the peace in their homes that they deserve.

B. Bryan Post, Ph.D., LCSW is the founder of the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy based in Oklahoma and co-founder of the Beyond Consequences Institute, LLC. Dr. Post is the author of For All Things a Season, Dr. Post’s New Family Revolution System, and co-author of “The Forever Child” series. He is an internationally recognized specialist in the treatment of emotional and behavioral disturbance in children and families. Dr. Post specializes in a holistic family-based treatment approach that addresses the underlying interactive dynamics of the entire family, a neurophysiologic process he refers to as, “The secret life of the family.” As an adopted, and well-known disruptive child himself (“I’ve set fires, killed animals, and stolen compulsively.”), Dr. Post has made it his primary work to speak to parents and professionals from a perspective of true-life experience and in-the-trenches therapeutic work.

From the Publisher: We are living in one of the most stressful times in human history. This abundance of stress is impacting families and in many cases, manifesting itself in children with difficult and severe behaviors. Homes often turn into intense fighting grounds of power struggles and control battles parents find themselves in us against them scenarios with their children. Tension continually builds and before long, parents are feeling completely overwhelmed, powerless, and resentful of their children. As parents implement traditional parenting techniques, parenting in a way that most parenting books recommend, they find their situations becoming worse, not better as promised these resources. It doesn’t have to be this way! Heather T. Forbes, LCSW, offers families a new view to parenting children with difficult and severe behaviors. As a parent herself who experienced dark days (and years) following the adoption of her two children, she offers a ground-breaking approach to parenting that shows parents a proven way to develop strong and loving relationships with their children.

In her new book, Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love Based Approach to Helping Children with Severe Behaviors, Volume 2, Heather offers practical and effective solutions based in scientific research, coupled with professional and personal experience. She is a master at bridging the gap between academic research and real life when the rubber hits the road parenting. This book is written in an easy to understand and easy to grasp format for anyone working with or parenting children with difficult or severe behaviors. The first six chapters discuss the principles of her love-based parenting paradigm. A new understanding of why traditional parenting techniques are ineffective with children with difficult behaviors is given, along with clear and concise explanations of the science behind trauma and negative early life experiences. The next seven chapters address specific behaviors, including poor social skills, homework battles, demanding behaviors, self-injury, defensive attitudes, no conscience, and chores. Each chapter gives specific examples of how to implement her parenting principles, empowering parents to make amazing and permanent changes in their homes. All the examples given throughout these chapters are true stories provided by parents who read and implemented her first book, Volume 1. The book ends with a parenting bonus section where more real-life stories from real-life parents with real-life children are given. These examples range in the spectrum of the ages of the children and a variety of behavioral issues. This book offers hope and healing. It goes beyond just changing a child’s behaviors but goes to the level of healing for all family members. This book has the power to literally change families for life and to help families find the peace in their homes that they dreamed of from the beginning—and the peace they deserve!

---

About the Author: Heather Forbes, LCSW, is co-founder of the Beyond Consequences Institute, LLC. Ms. Forbes has been training in the field of attachment and trauma with nationally recognized, first-generation attachment therapists since 1999. She has been active in the field of adoption with experience ranging from pre-adoption to post-adoption work, including domestic and international adoptions. Ms. Forbes is a published author and presents workshops both nationally and throughout the State of Florida. Much of her experience and insight on understanding trauma, disruptive behaviors, and adoption-related issues has come from her direct mothering experience of her two adopted children. She has a passion for helping families to find the peace in their homes that they deserve.

B. Bryan Post, Ph.D., LCSW is the founder of the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy based in Oklahoma and co-founder of the Beyond Consequences Institute, LLC. Dr. Post is the author of For All Things a Season, Dr. Post’s New Family Revolution System, and co-author of “The Forever Child” series. He is an internationally recognized specialist in the treatment of emotional and behavioral disturbance in children and families. Dr. Post specializes in a holistic family-based treatment approach that addresses the underlying interactive dynamics of the entire family, a neurophysiologic process he refers to as, “The secret life of the family.” As an adopted, and well-known disruptive child himself (“I’ve set fires, killed animals, and stolen compulsively.”), Dr. Post has made it his primary work to speak to parents and professionals from a perspective of true-life experience and in-the-trenches therapeutic work.

From the Dust Jacket: Parents who adopt children internationally have to grab for a firm handhold on a swinging pendulum of child raising advice. Should they act as if they are color-blind or bolster their child’s racial identity? Should they help their child assimilate to the adopted culture or leap full force, as a family, into the child’s birth culture? The best adoption agencies scramble to provide their clients the truth-of-the-moment. Child psychologists and other professionals weigh in as experts on what that truth ought to be. Eager parents seek each other’s support on the Internet. Adult adoptees have much to say, but some of their testimony troubles new parents. Seldom heard are older, seasoned parents, who tend to withdraw from the discussion as their children grow and develop their own interests.

Cheri Register, the mother of two adult daughters adopted as infants from Korea, and the author of the highly regarded book Are Those Kids Yours?, offers that crucial voice of experience in Beyond Good Intentions: A Mother Reflects on Raising Internationally Adopted Children. Her boldly written essays question the conventional wisdom, calling attention to ten choices well-meaning parents make that turn out not to serve adopted children’s needs as well as one might expect. Register calls for a frank and intimate conversation about the distinct challenges of raising children adopted across national, cultural, and, often, racial boundaries. By avoiding pat answers that fall short of families’ real needs, she affirms the hard work and loving devotion that parenthood demands.

Beyond Good Intentions is a coffee table book of a different sort: a diary-sized volume to keep handy and read as you sip your coffee. You will likely catch yourself nodding and frowning just as you would at a candid friend who urges you to reconsider ideas you have taken for granted, to listen without defensiveness to what your children and other adoptees want to tell you, and to think more deeply about what international adoption requires of the “lucky” parents who benefit from it.

---

About the Author: Cheri Register, the mother of two adult daughters adopted from Korea in infancy, is a writer and a teacher of creative writing. She is best known to adoptive families for her book, Are Those Kids Yours?: American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries, which addresses the ethical questions raised by international adoption. Her other books currently in print are the award-winning Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir and The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the Imperfect Life (originally titled Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and Passion). She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

---

By the Same Author: “Are Those Kids Yours?”: American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries (1990, The Free Press), among others.

From the Dust Jacket: Beyond Infertility is written for the approximately 12 percent of all American couples of child-bearing age who experience difficulty conceiving and for the therapists and medical professionals who treat them.

The impact of infertility on couples’ lives can be profound. It can affect their self-esteem, their feelings toward each other, their work, and their relations with family and friends. Susan Cooper and Ellen Glazer, recognized experts in the field of infertility counseling, examine all of these issues and discuss alternatives to pregnancy (adoption, traditional and gestational surrogacy, the decision not to have children), the various and ever-changing options for treatment (including ovum donation, zona drilling, and sperm micromanipulation), and the effects of age and cancer on infertility.

By combining their expertise on the emotional aspects of infertility with essential medical, legal, and ethical information, the authors offer couples a valuable tool for sorting through the complex issues involved in their treatment of choice, enabling them to move beyond their infertility. They also examine the vastly differing effects of infertility on men and on women, and the unique problems of secondary infertility (infertility after the couple has already had a child). Each chapter concludes with compelling personal accounts drawn from the authors’ practice, which provide important complements to the discussions of up-to-the-minute medical advances.

Cooper and Glazer, while examining the new frontier in infertility treatment options, provide a comprehensive, in-depth look at the psychosocial, emotional, ethical, legal, and logistical issues involved with these new and exciting reproductive technologies.

---

About the Author: Susan Cooper is a psychologist in private practice with over fifteen years experience, specializing in infertility, adoption, and third party reproductive options. In addition, she is a psychologist at the IVF America Program—Boston and at Focus Counseling and Consultation, Inc. in Cambridge, where she is also a co-director.

Ellen Glazer is a clinical social worker with over twenty years experience. For the past ten years her private practice has focused on the areas of infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and related issues. She is also the program counselor at the Fertility Center at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. She is author of The Long-Awaited Stork: A Guide to Parenting After Infertility; Cooper and Glazer are coauthors of Without Child, both published by Lexington Books.

About the Author: Picking up where his first book, I Knew Their Hearts, left off, this book is the true account of Jeff Olsen’s struggle to accept his new life as an amputee and single dad a year after losing his wife and youngest son in a horrific car accident. Follow his journey through grief, guilt, and powerful spiritual experiences as he attempts to reconcile the love he feels for a new woman with the challenges of rebuilding a bereaved family. You’ll be forced into foreign territory right along with Jeff as he learns to truly choose joy in even the most painful situations.

---

About the Author: Jeff Olsen is a Number One International Bestselling Author who inspires audiences globally with his intriguing story of perseverance and inner strength. After a horrific automobile accident took the lives of his wife and youngest son, also inflicting multiple life-threatening injuries to Jeff, including the amputation of his left leg, he found the courage to survive over 18 surgeries to eventually heal, both physically and emotionally and thrive in his career and community contributions.

Jeff has appeared on many national and international television and radio programs sharing his insights. He continues his work as a Creative Director and participates on several Advisory Boards for causes he feels serve the higher good of humanity.

Among all of Jeff’s accomplishments, he is most proud of and most fulfilled by simply being a husband, father and friend.

From the Dust Jacket: The images won’t die—South Vietnamese women and children scrambling desperately toward helicopters; North Vietnamese tanks crashing through walls, roaring through the streets of Saigon—the end of an era.

In a war as tragic as any we have known, the victims were numberless. And the most innocent, the most vulnerable, were the children. Beyond the Babylift is the story of one of those children.

He was the son of a black American GI and a South Vietnamese woman. Raised in the black-market streets of Vietnam, he was taken to an orphanage and later sent to the United States. Here he was eventually placed with a white American couple, Pamela and David Purdy, who offered him love and chose him as their fourth child.

Beyond the Babylift is Pamela Purdy’s valiant effort to “put flesh on our struggle to be a family.”

Her extraordinary diary begins: “The babylift from Vietnam had been in full swing for about a month, and every day thousands of children were being flown to all parts of the country. Couples with active, approved applications for U.S. adoptions were telephoned by Friends of Children of Vietnam to see whether they would consider a Vietnamese child. Our call came on Thursday, May 15.”

That is only the beginning of a story you will never forget—a story of America, of a war, and of one remarkable American family. And of people who choose to pick up the pieces and go on, loving one another in the aftermath of a terrible human tragedy.

---

About the Author: Pamela Chatterton Purdy is a visual arts specialist in Brookline, Massachusetts. She and her husband, David, have four children: Kristen, Jessica, Ronald, and Stephen.

From the Dust Jacket: In 1975, an American girl named Genevieve loses her mother when a plane full of orphans crashes in war-ravaged Vietnam. Miles away in the countryside, seven-year-old Lan, a Vietnamese girl, is forced out of her family home by her own brother who has joined the Viet Cong. Worlds apart, these two girls come into womanhood struggling to recover a sense of family—until their journeys suddenly converge. Lan has grown up in the harsh realities of post-war Vietnam, but she yearns for a better life for her children.

Meanwhile, Genevieve marries and, faced with infertility, decides to adopt a child from the country her own mother loved so deeply. But the uncertainty and risk of international adoption threatens to overwhelm both women before their hearts and their families can be healed. Beyond the Blue is the story of enormous losses, unthinkable choices, and the transforming power of God’s love for the children of the world.

---

About the Author: Leslie Gould is the author of Garden of Dreams. She works as an editor and writer in Portland, OR, where she lives with her husband and four children.