Race Education

“Daddy Why Am I Brown?”: A healthy conversation about skin color and family

This is a children’s book meant to start a conversation about how kids can learn to talk about skin color in a way that’s kind, thoughtful, and healthy. It’s also meant to help children understand the difference between race, ethnicity, and culture.

Race Education

Beynd the Golden Rule

This illustrated book serves as a parent’s guide to preventing and responding to prejudice. This book explores how to discuss racism and tolerance depending on the age of the child.

LGBTQ+

AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

This is an interdisciplinary essay collection which examines the shaping of local queer cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitonis and understandings of sexuality and gender that rely on Western assumptions.

Literature

God Painted Me

This book imagines the way we came to be and how we are loved through adoption. Mason tells his mommy how God painted him and all that is in the world. With divine creativity and color, we are all God’s masterpiece.

Literature

Free to Be… A Family: A Book About All Kinds of Belonging

This is a collection of stories, poems, and songs about different types of families and family relationships. The theme of this anthology is that the concept of “family” includes adoptive and foster families, step-families, relatives, friends, community, culture, and global humanity.

Literature

I Wished for You: An Adoption Story for Kids

This story follows a conversation between a little bear named Barley and his Mama as they curl up in their favorite cuddle spot and talk about how God chose them to be a family. Barley asks Mama the kinds of questions many adopted children have, and Mama lovingly answers them all. This book affirms how love is what truly makes a family.

Literature

A Forest of Doors: An Orphan’s Quest

A young child, orphaned by addiction and isolated from her siblings, dreams of reuniting her family after decades of separation. She begins a quest and gains more than she ever dreamed possible along the way. A Forest of Doors is a powerful true story of loss, love, spirituality, coping, and redemption.

Literature

Delly Duck: Why A Little Chick Couldn’t Stay With His Birth Mother

When Delly Duck lays an egg, she is excited for it to hatch. But she doesn’t really know how to keep an egg safe, or how to look after her chick when he hatches. See how a concerned goose tries to help Delly to learn how to care for her chick, in this touching adoption story.

Literature

Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey

Meet Charlie, an adoptee who opens his heart and shares what’s on his mind through various phases as he grows up in his adoptive home. As the narrator, Charlie invites readers to see the adoption journey from the perspective of a child adoptee. This illustrated book provides insight into emotions and thoughts an adoptee or foster child might encounter while also equipping parents and caregivers with timely responses and resources. While every adoption story is unique, Charlie’s voice brings to light common themes the authors encounter as post-adoption therapists at Boston Post Adoption Resources (BPAR). | The book begins with Charlie settling into his adoptive home and progresses as he grapples with challenges such as building trust, feeling a sense of worth, relating to his beginnings, and establishing his identity. The illustrated portion connects to recommendations for parents: things to think about, tips for conversations, family activities, and additional resources.

Literature

The Pinballs

Carlie knows she’s got no say in what happens to her. She is in a foster home with two other kids, Harvey and Thomas J, and is just a “pinball being bounced from bumper to bumper. As soon as [she] get settled, somebody puts another coin in the machine and off [she goes] again. But against her will and her better judgment, Carlie and the boys become friends. And all three of them start to see that they can take control of their own lives”.

Literature

Before We Were Yours

It is 1939 in Memphis. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River “shantyboat”. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Before they know it, they are thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage. The Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. | In present-day South Carolina, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. It helps that she was born into wealth and privilege. When Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. | Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

Literature

Adoption Stories: Excerpts from Adoption Books for Adults

This book shows that adoptees are an assorted population with varying backgrounds. It argues that adoptees should be given the right to ask questions about our background and even gain access to our adoption documents when we inquire. They have the right to ask questions—even if it makes adoption agencies uncomfortable. This book, containing excerpts from Janine’s “Adoption Books for Adults” collection, is “completely biased on the rights of adopted people and void of influence from adoption authorities”.

Literature

Foster Child

When her great-grandmother is placed in a nursing home, a twelve-year-old is sent to a foster home where the fanatically religious father presses his attentions on her.

Literature

Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War

This is a true story about life in a Saigon orphanage, a dramatic rescue flight from Vietnam to Canada, adoption by a Canadian family, and growing up in Canada. It tells the story of the last Canadian airlift operation that left Saigon and arrived in Toronto on April 13, 1975. Son Thi Anh Tuyet was one of 57 babies and children on that flight. Based on personal interviews and enhanced with archive photos, Tuyet’s story of the Saigon orphanage and her flight to Canada is an emotional and suspenseful journey that is brought to life in this book.

Literature

Adopted Jane

Jane Douglas has lived at the James Ballard Memorial Home for orphans for most of her childhood. Reliable and sensible, she has watched other children find families of their own, but never once has any family wanted to adopt Jane. Then one magical summer, Jane gets not one — but two– invitations for a month each to live with a real family in a real house.

Literature

My Forever Family: from fostering to adoption

This book follows Oliver as he goes through the ups and downs of the fostering to adoption process. It is a simple and easy to understand text for 4-10 year olds or children with limited understanding.

Literature

I Love You Like Crazy Cakes

This tells the story of a woman who travels to China to adopt a baby girl. It is based on the author’s own experiences and is a celebration of the love and joy a baby brings into the home.

Literature

The Family Book

In this picture book, Parr celebrates many different types of families through color. He assures readers that no matter what kind of family you have, every family is special in its own unique way. His central message is about the importance of embracing our differences.

Literature

The White Swan Express: A Story About Adoption

This is a picture book that talks about the process of adoption from China. It shows the steps from the adoption-agency paperwork to interviews to approval and finally being able to travel to China.

Literature

The Red Thread: An Adoption Fairy Tale

This book is based on the ancient Chinese belief that an invisible, unbreakable red thread connects all those who are destined to be together. In this story, a king and queen rule a beautiful and peaceful land. They should be full of joy and contentment, but they both feel a strange pain that worsens every day. Then a peddler’s magic spectacles reveal a red thread pulling at each of their hearts. The king and queen know they must follow the thread–wherever it may lead.

Literature

What Is a Family?

In this Waldorf-style illustrated book, with depictions of families of all shapes, sizes and colors, we get kids talking about their own families while opening their eyes to the fact that even though families don’t always look the same, they all share one special thing—love.

Literature

Matilda

At age five-and-a-half, Matilda is “knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she’s a super-nerd and the teacher’s pet”. But everything is not perfect in Matilda’s world. | For starters she has “two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there’s the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss (‘The’) Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge”.

Literature

The Red Blanket

Eliza Thomas went to China in 1994 to adopt her daughter PanPan, who was then 5 months old. This is their story. It is a touching and beautiful adoption story that reveals the challenges as well as the joys of forming a new family. It is a story about a little girl who needed a mommy and a forgotten blanket that needed a little girl and a woman who needed them both. This is a journey about the forming of a family.

Literature

A Mother for Choco

Choco wishes he had a mother, but who could she be? He sets off to find her, asking all kinds of animals, but he doesn’t meet anyone who looks just like him. He doesn’t even think of asking Mrs. Bear if she’s his mother. Then Mrs. Bear starts to do just the things a mommy might do. And when she brings him home, he meets her other children, a piglet; a hippo; and an alligator, and learns that families can come in all shapes and sizes and still fit together.

Literature

Ten Days and Nine Nights: An Adoption Story

Follow a little girl as she and her family prepare for the new baby that will soon be joining them. And simultaneously, watch the girl’s mother fly off to Korea, meet the new baby, and bring her home. Here is an utterly simple, sweet, and child-centric look at the adoption process through the eyes of a soon-to-be older sibling. From cutting a red paper heart and taping it above the new baby’s crib to telling her best friend about the adoption, the young narrator counts down every day and night with growing anticipation, marking them with a big X on her calendar. This is also perfect for older children who are about to become big sisters and brothers.

Literature

Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born

This book is “a special celebration of the love and joy an adopted child creates for a family. In asking her parents to tell her again about the night of her birth, a young girl relives a cherished tale she knows by heart. Focusing on the significance of family and love, this a unique and beautiful story about adoption and the importance of a loving family”. This book also “speaks to the universal childhood desire to know more about the excitement, awe, love, and sleeplessness that a new baby brings to a family”.

Literature

A Family Is a Family Is a Family

This is a book that talks about the many different types of families. Ones of every shape, size and relation.

Literature

The Boxcar Children

This is a book series following the four Alden siblings who make home in a boxcar.

Literature

I’ve Loved You Since Forever

This is a celebratory and poetic testament to the timeless love felt between parent and child. This beautiful picture book is inspired by Today show co-anchor Hoda Kotb’s heartwarming adoption of her baby girl, Haley Joy.

Literature

The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past

This book presents a cultural history of the events that led to the controversial one-child policy in China and the generation-long abandonment of Chinese daughters to American families.

Literature

Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents

This is a comprehensive guide for prospective and current adoptive parents on ways to understand and care for the adopted child and promote healthy attachment. It provides “practical parenting strategies designed to enhance children’s happiness and emotional health” and explains “what attachment is, how grief and trauma can affect children’s emotional development, and how to improve attachment, respect, cooperation and trust”. The listed parenting techniques are “matched to children’s emotional needs and stages, and checklists are included to help parents assess how their child is doing at each developmental stage”. This book covers a wide range of issues including international adoption, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, and learning disabilities. It is also geared as an important resource for adopted professionals.

Literature

The Primal Wound

This book is a “seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life”. This book also discusses pre-and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss and gives adoptees, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior. Additionally, it lists “the coping mechanisms which adoptees use to be able to attach and live in a family to whom they are not related and with whom they have no genetic cues”. The hope is that this book will “contribute to the healing of all members of the adoption triad and will bring understanding and encouragement to anyone who has ever felt abandoned”.

Literature

In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories

This is a collection of interviews conducted with Black and biracial young adults adopted by white parents. It entails personal stories of two dozen individuals “who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds”. Some things this book explores is “How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles?” The book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption as of 2000.

Literature

Lucky Girl: A Memoir

In this true story, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, “comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. | In 1974, a baby girl from Taiwan arrived in America, the newly adopted child of a loving couple in Michigan”. Hopgood had an “all-American upbringing, never really identifying with her Asian roots or harboring a desire to uncover her ancestry”. | When Hopgood was in her twenties, her birth family showed up. They end up being “a boisterous, loving, bossy, complicated middle-class family who hound her daily life by phone, fax, and letter, in a language she doesn’t understand until she returns to Taiwan to meet them. As her sisters and parents pull her into their lives, claiming her as one of their own, the devastating secrets that still haunt this family begin to emerge. Spanning cultures and continents, Lucky Girl brings home a tale of joy and regret, hilarity, deep sadness, and great discovery as the author untangles the unlikely strands that formed her destiny”.

Literature

A Single Square Picture: A Korean Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

Kim Ji-yun, who grew up in Seoul, Korea soon became Catherine Jeanne Robinson, who had an American family and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty years later, she returned to Seoul in search of her birth mother and found herself “an American outsider in her native land”. Katy was left “conflicted, shattered, exhilarated, and moved in ways she never imagined”. This book is “a personal odyssey that ascends to the universal”, and is “a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever questioned their place in the world — and had the courage to find the answers”.

Literature

Anne of Green Gables

This heartwarming story that takes place in “an old-fashioned farm outside a town called Avonlea. Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old orphan, has arrived in this verdant corner of Prince Edward Island only to discover that the Cuthberts—elderly Matthew and his stern sister, Marilla—want to adopt a boy, not a feisty redheaded girl”. Before they send her back, Anne wins them over completely. This is “a much-loved classic that explores all the vulnerability, expectations, and dreams of a child growing up, Anne of Green Gables is also a wonderful portrait of a time, a place, a family… and, most of all, love”.

Literature

Heidi

Little orphan Heidi goes to live high in the Alps with her gruff grandfather and brings happiness to all who know her on the mountain. When Heidi goes to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household, she dreams of returning to the mountains and meadows, her friend Peter, and her beloved grandfather.

Literature

Jane Eyre

Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit and falls in love with him. However, there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?

Literature

Stellaluna

This is a “tender story of a lost young bat who finally finds her way safely home to her mother and friends”.

Literature

Great Expectations

Orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman. One day, “under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of ‘great expectations.’ This is a gripping tale of crime and guilt and revenge and reward.

Literature

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist is an orphan who ran away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble. Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull’s Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.

Literature

All You Can Ever Know

Cheung is a Korean transracial adoptee from Oregon and was born severely premature. She grew up knowing her adoption story as a “comforting, prepackaged myth”. As she grew up, she began to face prejudice, find her Asian American identity and became more curious about her origins. In this memoir, Cheung tells of the “search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child”. It is a “profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong”.

Literature

Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption

Sjöblom was adopted from Korea at two years old into a Swedish home. Throughout her childhood, she struggled to fit in and was constantly told to suppress her feelings of wanting to know more about her origins. Thus, she learned to bury the feelings of abandonment, like many other adoptees. In this illustrated memoir, “Sjöblom’s unaddressed feelings about her adoption come to a head when she is pregnant with her first child [and] she discovers a document containing the names of her biological parents”. She realizes “her own history may not match up with the story she’s been told her whole life: that she was an orphan without a background”. She ends up digging more into her background by traveling to Korea and the orphanage and finds out that the truth is “more complicated than the story she was told and struggled to believe”.

Literature

Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Sociology)

This is an annotated bibliography that covers literature published from 1990 to 1991 suitable for children and young adults “dealing in some fashion with adoption”. There are 503 titles in this volume and are divided into fiction and nonfiction by reading level. “Most of the books included feature adoption as a main theme, others use adoption as a secondary theme, while others have characters who just happen to be adopted”. The bibliography encompasses topics such as “the age of arrival, sibling adoption, single-parent adoption, foster parent adoption, step-parent and relative adoption, transracial and intercountry adoption, Amerasian children, racial identity, minority families, special needs, large families, birthparents, search and reunion, surrogacy and open adoption, and some of the less pleasant aspects of adoption”. It is compiled by a reference librarian who is also an adoptive parent. There is also a featured selective resource list and directory of adoption-related organizations.

Medical Needs

The Special Needs Parent Handbook – 2nd Edition

The book provides practical and useful advice for parents of children with special needs or other disabilities. It includes sections on: Hiring babysitters and free respite help, Finding the best and kindest doctors, Keeping the family together, taking care of your health and more.

Racial Identity

Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

The book’s description is written by an adoptee herself. She discusses 20 things that adopted children may fear and want to discuss with their parents.