Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft

This book is alarming. The author presents information about toddlers that is quite simply wrong. She also promotes an abusive fringe therapy (Holding Therapy) that is even illegal in a number of states.
A good, modern source of information about how children develop and form attachments with their caregivers is Dr. Jean Mercer's "Understanding Attachment."

This is an excellent book for parents who are considering adoption or who are waiting for their referral. This book does a great job of preparing parents for some of the possible issues they may face, without scaring you out of the idea of adoption!! I felt much better prepared for my daughter after reading this book.

We've had our son in a pre-adoptive placement for 8 months. We read this book before (and checked it often) after he came home to us. I beleive the auther gave very realistic expectations for the grief/bonding process experienced by children who are adopted as toddlers.

To respond to some of the previous reviews, some of the author's comments could be seen as negative, but I truly believe she is giving a realistic picture of what life post-adoption could be like. She and her family adopted a toddler and she definitely is encouraging of others to do so, but she wants to help prepare parents for the transition.

Our son spend months afraid to leave us, hiding under tables if we said we needed to leave to go somewhere, clinging to me when taken to the nursery at church. Then he spent much time saying "you're my mama!" and "I love you, mom!" Once he was feeling more secure with us, he wanted to share that with us verbally. This book helped us look for and recognize positive bonding signs.

In addition, my husband and I went through a roller-coaster of emotions post-placement and this book helped us to realize that our feeling were normal and healthy. Our other children were also helped by this book in that we were more attuned to their needs/confusions as well.

Also, for those who said you can't send letter/items, etc to children in international adoptions, perhaps you can not. However, her ideas for sharing pictures, drawings, letters, etc, are very applicable to foster/adoption placements. We loved making our scrapbook for our son and his foster family enjoyed reading and looking at it with him.

Overall, I found this book to be very informative and helpful.

We read this book before we adopted a 26 month old who had been institutionalized for 2 years in a Soviet orphanage. Packed the book when we went on the trip and were very glad that we did. A lot of the issues were very relevant and rereading sections helped immensely.

For those who think this is too negative to read before you adopt a toddler, I can only say that you should reassess your decision to adopt an older child.

I do think that all kids deserve a home.

I also believe that all kids deserve parents who are well-prepared.

Clearly not all the issues are relevant to every adoption, but as we have found over the past 4 years in corresponding with many, many families who adopted toddlers and older kids you cannot be prepared enough.

Recently a family murdered an adopted toddler from Russia (and this was not the first) - I honestly believe that reading this book can help families understand what they are undertaking.

I adopted a toddler, boy was I just thrown into motherhood, and my husband fatherhood. I bought this book to try to make sence of it all, some helpful parts but I found it hard to find quickly the areas I really was interested in, I guess I was looking for more of a reference book so this book was limited in helping me that way.