We asked Jo Francis, CoramBAAF’s Publishing Manager, to personally recommend the top five publications that practitioners and professionals find useful when working with adoptive children, young people and families around identity. This is what she chose.
Matching a child in an early permanence placement: the importance of identity
| John Simmonds
The matching of a child’s ethnicity, culture, religion and language with those of their prospective adopters has been a longstanding and challenging set of policy and practice questions. This discussion paper addresses this challenge by focusing on 16 key messages, inviting the reader to reflect on the importance of the development of a child’s identity over time and then into adulthood.
Adversity, adoption and afterwards
| Julia Feast, Margaret Grant, Alan Rushton, John Simmonds and Carolyn Sampeys
This unique study explores the long-term outcomes for a group of girls, now women in middle age, adopted from orphanages in Hong Kong, by families in the UK. The study offers a rare opportunity to explore the impact of adverse early experience, modified by adoption in creating opportunities and risks, over 50 years.
In search of belonging
| Edited by Perlita Harris
A thought-provoking anthology with more than 50 intensely moving testimonies. These writers convey the complexity for black and minority ethnic children of being raised by a white adoptive family.
Chosen
| Edited by Perlita Harris
This anthology gathers writing by over 50 adopted adults. The themes of identity, loss and grief, family and “post-reunion” relationships permeate these accounts, as does the power of healing, encouragement and hope.
Finding our familia
| Stevan Whitehead
Published as part of the Our Story series, this is the story of the adoption of two children from Guatemala. But it is more than that. It is a moving and inspirational account of how a couple, in their search to build their family, find not only two children but what will become their extended family – their familia.