How to Make and Use an Adoption Lifebook - Weekend Wisdom

A Lifebook is the story of how your child came to be yours and the story of his life before he came to you. Adoption is only one aspect of your child, and at some point, his life merges into your life. However, he had a life before he came to your family, and his Lifebook tells this part of his story.

Resources:

• Adoption Lifebooks (Suggested Books)
• Welcoming an Older Child to Your Home (Resource Page)
• Transitioning a Child to Your Home (Resource Page)

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Hello, and thank you for joining us for today's Weekend Wisdom. This short podcast from Creating a
Family is where we answer specific questions that you might have about raising your adoptive,
foster, or kinship family. We love it when our listeners share their questions and dilemmas.
We comb through our archives and we listen to expert interviews and kind of collate it all to
create a practical answer for you that we think will strengthen your family. This conversation is
from our archives and it's a great example of that practical advice. You will hear our founding
executive director, Dawn Davenport, talking about what a life book is, why it's a great tool when
you're raising an adoptive foster or kinship child, and how to properly use it to support your
child's developing identity. So sit back. Take a listen, enjoy hearing from Dawn again,
and then share it with a friend when you're done. And don't forget, you can send your questions to
info at creatingafamily.org to be included in our Weekend Wisdom queue.
Put Weekend Wisdom in the subject line and we'll add you to the list and bring you an answer for
your family's dilemma. Thanks so much and enjoy the episode.
So we talk a lot about life books here, and I think it helps to actually be with the definition of
what we mean by that. A life book is a story about how your child came to be yours and the story of
his life before he came to you. So adoption is only one aspect of your child and at some point his
life is going to merge into your life and a separate book is not going to be needed since he's
going to be looking at the pics on your phone or electronic photo frame or on your wall or going
old school if you have it in a photo album or a scrapbook. At some point his life is merging and
he's just going to be using the family. However, He had a life before he came to your family,
and his life book tells that part of his story. And that's true regardless of whether he came to
your family at birth or at 2 or at 10 or at 16.
Life books also create the opportunity to talk about adoption and their life before they came to
you. They are a wonderful conversation starter. And let's face it,
life gets busy when you have kids, and it's hard to find time or to make the time to talk about
what's important. So it helps to have a book to open and read, and use that air quotes around the
word, read to your child. Lifebooks can also be an opportunity for your child to express their
feelings about adoption, be they happiness or grief or loss or anger.
Also to express those feelings about things that happened in their early life or to ask questions
about why they are not living with their birth family. So it's a conversation starter going both
ways. It allows for opportunity for your child to come back to you to ask questions. Life books can
also reduce what we call magical thinking. Kids tend to make up what they don't know.
And when a child makes up a story, it's usually not the truth. And also, it can be much worse or at
least an exaggerated version of the truth. So we want our kids to have as much information as they
can. And a life book is a great resource for doing just that. And life books are a great way of
introducing the harder parts of your child's stories. A life book, if used correctly, can lay the
groundwork of the early life story that can be added to as the child ages.
A life book does not need to be a physical book. However, I think that it really helps to have
something to hold. That may change, honestly, in the future with technology. But for now,
I do recommend that it actually be in some form of physical form. Another thing to note about
Lifebooks is that it is your child's book, and the child should have full access to this book
whenever they want to look at it, with or without you. In our family, it was kept in the child's
room at their level. If it contained sensitive or hard information, I personally wouldn't let them
share it outside the home until they are fully old enough to make the decision and understand the
ramifications of sharing that information. There are many templates out there for creating life
books. You can just Google them. And keep this in mind, it does not have to be fancy.
It can just be an old-fashioned photo album with clear plastic inserts for papers and things like
that. You can include pictures, the outfit his birth mother selected for him to go home from the
hospital with, or copies of email shared between you and his birth parent if you have their
permission to include that. If possible, when the child is placed with you, get as much
information, including pictures and stories as possible about their life before they came to you.
Ask who their former foster parents were if they were in foster care. Call or email with these
parents to get pictures and stories. And if they're reluctant to give you that information, ask the
caseworker for pictures and stories. And seek out birth parents or extended family,
if possible and safe, to ask for pics and information. And if you're concerned that birth parents
might not be safe, then reach out to grandmas and aunties and others who might have information
that can be shared. And there are lots of books to help you figure out how to create a life book.
You can find them on our website. by going to creatingafamily.org, then clicking on Adoption,
and then look down through Adoption Suggested Books. And under Suggested Books,
we have an entire section on Lifebooks, so you can find lots of information that way.
Before you go, I want to tell you about an interactive training. that Creating a Family has
developed. It could also be used as a support group curriculum for foster, adoptive, and kin
families. It makes it very easy to do a high-quality training. Each of the curriculum comes with a
video, a facilitator guide, a handout, and an additional resource sheet. We have 25 topics in the
library, so any of those 25 topics you can choose, and you can get more information at
parentsupportgroup.com.
creatingafamily.org, hover over the word training and click on parent support group. Either way,
we'll get you there. And thanks for listening to this week's Week in Wisdom. If you liked it,
please tell a friend to subscribe and you do that by going to the creatingafamily.org podcast.