Adoption: The Long View Podcast

In this episode, Lori Holden talks with single adoptive mom Leah Campbell about the unexpected way she became a mom to her beloved daughter, "Cheeks," now 7. Author of the just-released children's book The Story of My Open Adoption, Leah is a writer and mo...

In this episode, we hear from birth mom Ashley Mitchell of Big Tough Girl and Lifetime Healing Foundation. Now 14 years into her open adoption experience, she talks of grief and healing, and of the importance of adoption education for both adoptive and for...

In this episode, Lori talks with Carolyn Savage, who has, perhaps, the twistiest-turniest journey to family you've ever heard of. Starting with an inconceivable snafu with a fertility clinic, within one year Carolyn (1) gave birth to a son she placed in th...

In this episode, adoptee and activist Rich Uhrlaub addresses the ways that adoptees in many states don't have the same legal rights as the non-adopted. He tells us why original birth certificates were sealed in the closed adoption era, and what the ripple...

Angela Tucker is on a mission to center adoptee voices -- which have been historically marginalized -- because she considers adoptees the experts in the adoption experience. That’s a great point, and adoptive parents are wise to listen for understanding. I...

If you’ve ever feared not being considered the “real” parent, if you are unsure how you can co-exist in your child’s heart along with their birth mother or father, if you are curious about how an adoptee tries to “earn” their love from their adoptive paren...

To get ready for this episode -- which turned out to be on Emotional Intelligence in adoption relationships -- imagine that you are 18 years old and parenting a 4 month old boy, a path you don’t feel prepared for at all. You have an older half-brother; he...

Rebecca Vahle has witnessed the very beginning moments of hundreds of adoptions, starting with her three children, now young adults. Those three vastly differing experiences prompted her to create a program that standardizes care for potential adoption pla...

Some people like stories. Others like numbers. In her book, Open Adoption & Diverse Families, Dr Abbie Goldberg has satisfied both camps, as well as those who equally love stories and data. Today’s guest has brought me a huge gift in the form of her resea...

Can you imagine fumbling around in the dark for one of the most important missions of your life, without having any training at all? Once the deep flaws in the closed adoption era started to become apparent, some adoption agencies decided to experiment wit...

Today’s guest -- who consulted about adoption themes for the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere -- wrote an article many years ago that goes viral just about every year. The article is called 10 Things Adoptees Want You to Know, and within it, Lesli Johns...

This episode, like the podcast as a whole, is not for short-sighted people. This episode, like the podcast in its entirety, will appeal to people who want to be able to see more than one step ahead. Maybe 3 or 4 or 10 steps ahead. If this is you, you’re in...

How different is adoption now compared with the closed adoption era? And what does that mean for adoptive parents? Gabrielle Glaser is the author, most recently, of American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, which tells the shock...

If you've ever wondered how you could have an open adoption when you can't have contact with birth parents, you'll want to make sure to catch this episode with adoptive parent counselors Katie Biron and Kara Andersen. We cover the differences between openn...

The journey of adopting a baby can be so uncertain and feel so all-consuming that sometimes, it's hard to see past it. My guest today, Tim Elder, helps people become parents through adoption with his Infant Adoption Guide blog and podcast. We're talking wi...

Candace Cahill placed her son as an infant in 1990. Their semi-open adoption closed when he was 8, but contact was reestablished at 18. After navigating the complexities of reunion for five years and only a single face-to-face meeting, Michael died in his...

If your main sources of information about adoption are from the loudest voices, you may be missing out on key facets that would help you better navigate your own adoption situation and better serve your child. You can't see your own blind spots (by definit...

No baby should be born with a job, to quote Dr Phil. It's just too much to expect a baby to fix anything -- a relationship, a heart, a life. But many people come to infant adoption after experiencing infertility and enduring some sort of loss. They might t...

Not every adoptive family will need an adoption-competent therapist on hand, but many will at some point. This is not to pathologize adoption; lots of non-adoptive families also end up also seeking therapy for various struggles. But adoptive families are s...

Have you ever eaten a meal at Wendy's? Have you ever perused the list of top Adoption Friendly Workplaces? Have you ever felt an ache in your heart about children who are in foster care, growing up without a permanent family taking care of them, loving the...

In Season 2, we've heard from 10 amazing and fascinating people who have explored the complexities of adoption with us -- adoptees, an investigative journalist, birth moms, a therapist, a foster mom, adoptive moms and dads, the CEO of a large child welfare...

To kick off Season 3, we address how you can prepare for 9 of the most common awkward, delicate, tricky situations that come up for adoptive parents. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation with your child (you're not my real mom!), and sometimes it's w...

We talk often on this show about attunement in adoptive parenting, which is the process of intuiting in the moment what your child needs from you. The first step is to understand as best you can the perspective of an adoptee. You won't get this from listen...

It's normal -- celebrated even -- to wonder about and ask ourselves "Who am I?" After all, genealogy is cited as one of the top hobbies people have. There are TV shows with names like Finding Your Roots, Long Lost Family, and Who Do You Think You Are? help...

Like the ancient tale of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant, adoption is fertile ground for people "knowing" about it while experiencing only a fraction of it. From our limited experience we start to think we have a handle on it and we know the truth about...

How we see ourselves as adoptive parents is intricately tied with how we see our children via adoption, and ultimately how they see themselves. Seemingly heroic narratives like “saving a child” and seemingly innocuous ones like “we were meant to be togethe...

It's estimated that there are between 40 and 100 families waiting for every available infant placement. The odds are not in everyone's favor, and at least some of the people hoping to adopt a newborn will just not be able to. That's a hard truth. What happ...

Tony Hynes is an interracial adoptee whose adoption case reached the US Supreme Court in the 1990s. While his case was knocked down to a lower court, Tony Hynes' adoption ended up in a rare arrangement – joint custody between his Black birth grandmother an...

Parenting is a Big Deal. But adoptive parenting? Well, that brings a whole other layer to plain old parenting. Add in a transracial element? Wrap another layer around an already wrapped Big Deal. Separation from original parents, no matter how necessary or...

It's National Adoption Awareness Month, and we can think of no better way to honor it than to listen to an adoptee, especially one who is also raising an adoptee. Our guest this month was adopted and grew up in the closed adoption era and is now an advoca...

As we wrap up 2022, we also wrap up Season 3. This year, we have heard from seven adoptees, one birth parent, four adoptive parents, two people who got OFF the adoption roller coaster, and two people in differing roles within their interracial families. We...

There are very few people who have the multi-perspectives and lived experience in adoption that Rebecca Ricardo has. Rebecca joined her family through adoption – this means she is an adoptee. As a young teen she placed her son for adoption, embarking on th...

Adoptive parenting has this in common with regular old parenting: just when you start to feel like you've mastered a stage, like babyhood, toddlerhood, tweenhood, or beyond, your child keeps growing and enters a new stage. And you're back at square one, le...

Why are truth and trust so important in adoptive families? In all families, really? Isn't it OK sometimes to keep some things under wraps, for someone's own good? There's a philosophical paradox called sorites based on the idea that no grain of sand is a...

One thing we know is that adoption comes out of a broken attachment, that the baby or child we parent has already lost something primal, that biological connection to the first mother, as well as the genetic connection to her and to the baby's first fa...

If you've been listening here long, you know that to believe that adoptive parenting is no different from regular old parenting will likely end up with you feeling blindsided some day, without tools and without strategies. This is because all adoptions...

Parenting a child of a race different from yours adds a whole new element to adoptive parenting. While this episode does focus on raising an interracial adoptee (also called a transracial adoptee), becoming more comfortable with talking about race is a w...

Greg Gentry, Fireside Adoptees So many parents end up wishing they'd had a time machine to go back and know earlier what we didn't know then about parenting, which is the whole premise of this podcast – to take the long view. With adoptive parenting, that...

One of the distinctions we continually make here on Adoption: The Long View is the difference between "open adoption" and "openness in adoption." The former typically means having some sort of information about or contact with birth family, but the latte...

This is a really special episode for me because not only am I the host, as I always am, I am also a guest. I'm so excited to announce on Adoption: The Long View, that within a month, a book I, along with my two guests, have spent the last 3 years envisioni...

It's December of 2023, which means that my new book, Adoption Unfiltered, written with Sara Easterly, an adoptee, and Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, a birth parent, is finally available! The first part of this episode is our traditional season-closing digest...

Welcome to Season 5 of Adoption: The Long View! This month's guest is someone I made a bad first impression on (in my own head, anyway) because of an assumption I made about her that turned out to be wrong. Adoptee and content creator Jennifer Dyan Ghoston...

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...

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...

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...

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 Reed...

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 they...

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, baff...

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 sam...

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 extra...

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...

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...