Adoption: The search for a new parenthood

Gary Diamond, an American-trained developmental pediatrician, has along with professional colleagues over the past 15 years, counseled and traveled to orphanages around the world in the service of adoptive parents, interested in evaluating the child pre-adoption in his/her native setting, often being in foster care or orphanages in a variety of countries in Eastern Europe and Central America. The book is a collection of 25 true accounts of adoption, post adoption and adolescent and adult experiences with adoption, and presents a unique chronicle of the life cycle of the adoptive family and the adopted individual, with the added dimension of actual accounts of orphanage life. The book, and the stories within, are a chronicle of an individual's search for identity, which is a universal theme. The book originates in Israel, where adoptive families actually send physicians, trained in child development, to countries to examine children offered for adoption, enabling adoption professionals to acquire long-standing and intimate insights, into the process of adoption, from its very early stages, when institutionalized children are first exposed to visiting professionals and prospective adoptive parents. There exists no other account in the professional or popular literature of the life cycle of the adopted child/ individual, beginning from such an extremely early juncture in time. Eva Arbel, MSW, has long experience with adoptive families, she herself being adopted at the age of two months, adds a unique dimension to the book, detailing the psychological processes adoption involves in the individual's and family's struggle to define self identity and to reconcile the tug of war between the adoptive and biological realities the adopted child and adult is constantly caught between. The book should be of special interest to professionals in the field of child development, developmental medicine and pediatrics, social work, child psychology and family counseling, as well as to the general public especially interested in human interest accounts of families and development, the search for identity and raising children struggling with issues of adjustment, attachment and belonging.