It’s December of 2024, which means we're bringing you the 5th -- and last -- Best Of advice. The first part of this episode is our traditional season-closing digest of best advice from all Season 5 guests, and the last part is a special musical treat from...

Have you ever noticed that -- much like Riley in Disney•Pixar's Inside Out series -- you have different parts? The Internal Family Systems (IFS) framework asserts that everybody consists of different parts. Our guest this month, Kathy Mackechney, LCSW, IFS...

When our adoptees are young, we cannot anticipate how and when they will process their adoptedness someday as adults. Such processing may not even be on our radar.

For adoptees, figuring out their identity with the added layer of adoption, requires extr...

In a previous episode of Adoption: The Long View (ep505), an adoptee noted that her parents are the center of their adoption story just as she is the center of hers. It’s no big duh that the parents of an adoptee and the adoptee themself experience the s...

One of the myths of adoption is the now debunked “blank slate” theory that if you get your baby early enough, they won’t have experienced any trauma. And therefore, you won’t be raising a child with a trauma history, and you won’t be dealing with big,...

In this much anticipated episode, we resume our conversation with adoptee and adoption educator Torie DiMartile on adoption math that adoptees have to deal with, the worlds they must precariously straddle throughout their lives, the opposing emotions the...

We all know from 1st grade math that a half plus a half equals 1. But for adoptees, the math doesn’t always add up the way we think it will.

At one time I thought that if I could just incorporate my children’s first families into ours, then Tessa and Re...

The moment you become a parent, time seems to stop and you can’t see beyond the sweet baby or toddler you have before you, looking up at you with those big eyes that say you are everything. Those days of full dependence on you feel like they may go on fore...

My new book Adoption Unfiltered, has three chapters in it devoted to religion and adoption, with my co-authors and I each researching and covering a chapter. Sara Easterly, an adoptee and a Christian, wrote about religion’s pain points for adoptees. Kelsey...

Early in my adoptive parenting days, when my kids were first becoming able to talk about their adoptedness and continuing through their adolescence, I was on alert for signs that adoption had hurt them. I’d been listening to adult adoptees and I knew that...