Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is a pioneering and nationally recognized family and adoption therapist who, with The Family of Adoption, is the first to demonstrate that there are predictable and understandable developmental stages and challenges for all adopted people. She lays them out by age level, showing, for instance, how and why daydreaming is a normal strategy for adoptees, how particular academic subjects may create pain for adopted children, and why so many adopted adolescents experiment with the "wrong crowd".Pavao shows us why adoptive parents, as well as teachers and therapists and all who work with children, must come to understand these developmental stages as normal -- though challenging -- for adopted children. She writes with equal insight of the "birth rites" of both biological and adoptive parents; of how adoption does not cure infertility, but childlessness; and of healing rites for birth parents who must give up the parenting of their child.
The Family of Adoption is a timely and powerful argument for the right kind of "openness", and truly the most insightful and healing book on the adoption shelf.
