Here are 20 adoption books for parents that will help you as you embark or continue on your adoption journey. My suggestion is to not overwhelm yourself but to find one or two to get started and after that, you can decide where you’d like to go from there.
Adoption books can be an awesome way to further deepen your understanding of adoption.
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Preparing for Adoption: A Guide to Introductions and the First Few Weeks (provisional) by Julia Davis
Pre-Adoption
This book is intended for adopters, foster carers, and professionals supporting adopters. It offers ideas and strategies to help parents prepare a happy and settled home for children before their arrival and ways to parent them in the early days of becoming a family that addresses their attachment needs.
Chasing Kites: One Mother’s Unexpected Journey Through Infertility, Adoption, and Foster Care by Rachel McCracken
Pre & Post Adoption
This book takes real-life experiences of struggle, heartache, and loss and blends it into a narrative of faith, hope, and the joy that can come through it all.
Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents by Deborah D. Gray
Pre & Post Adoption
A comprehensive guide for prospective and future adoptive parents on how to understand and care for their adopted child and promote healthy attachment.
Ready or Not: 30 Days of Discovery For Foster & Adoptive Parents by Pam Parish
Pre & Post Adoption
A biblically-centered 30-day study that helps you consider the impact of foster care and adoption on lives and families. It helps evaluate motives and expectations for the foster care and adoption experience, and explore foster care and adoption through the lens of scripture.
The Adoptive Parent Toolbox by Mike Berry
Pre & Post Adoption
Whether you are thinking about adoption, just starting the process, or thinking about starting all over again, each chapter of this book delivers real-life perspectives from the author’s 14-year journey. It offers advice and wisdom of hundreds of other families who have adopted both internationally and domestically.
The Whole Life Adoption Book: Realistic Advice for Building a Healthy Adoptive Family by Thomas Atwood
Pre & Post Adoption
This book serves as a resource for many aspects of adoption addressing the needs and concerns facing adoptive parents while offering encouragement for the journey ahead.
The Lucky Few: Finding God’s Best in the Most Unlikely Places by Heather Avis
Pre & Post Adoption
As the mother of three adopted children – two with Down syndrome – Heather Avis shows us how we are the lucky few who actually recognize that God’s plans are best, even when they seem so radically different from the plans we have for ourselves.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Joy of Adoption: 101 Stories about Forever Families and Meant-to-Be Kids by Amy Newmark
Pre & Post Adoption
A collection of 101 stories about forever families, meant-to-be kids, and the joy of adoption.
The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole by Lori Holden
Pre & Post Adoption
This book covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully.
Parenting Children of Trauma: The Foster-Adoption Guide to Understanding Attachment Disorder by Marcy Pusey
Pre & Post Adoption
This book is for parents who feel overwhelmed, desperate, and depleted because they stepped into adoption with dreams of loving a child to wholeness, only to find that children who hurt sometimes hurt people.
20 Things Adoptive Parents Need to Succeed..Discover the Unique Need of Your Adopted Child and Become the Best Parent You Can by Sherrie Eldridge
Pre & Post Adoption
Real-life accounts from 100 adoptive parents who “get it” as you learn how to speak your child’s “heart language” fluently.
Tandem: A Devotional for Adopting with God in the Lead by Alison A England
Pre & Post Adoption
This adoption book follows a chronological flow that provides adoptive parents tools and resources in bite-size pieces to tackle each task with faith-based confidence.
The Connected Parent: Real-Life Strategies for Building Trust and Attachment by Lisa Qualls
Pre & Post Adoption
This book teaches how to simplify your approach to your adopted child using scripts, nurture your child, combat chronic fear, teach respect, and develop other valuable tools to facilitate a healing connection with your child.
Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Updated and Expanded Edition) by Russell Moore
Pre & Post Adoption
In this adoption book, the author shows that adoption is not just for couples who have struggled to have children but seeing adoption as part of the “Great Commission mandate and as a sign of the gospel itself.”
Honestly Adoption: Answers to 101 Questions About Adoption and Foster Care by Mike Berry
Pre & Post Adoption
Practical, down-to-earth advice to make good decisions in your own adoption and foster parenting journey and give you the help and hope you need.
Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew by Sherrie Eldridge
Pre & Post Adoption
This book, written by an adoptee, gives voice to children’s unspoken concerns and shows adoptive parents how to free their kids from feelings of fear, abandonment, and shame.
The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family by Karyn B. Purvis
Pre & Post Adoption
This book will help build bonds of affection and trust with your adopted child, effectively deal with any learning or behavioral disorders, and discipline your child with love without making him or her feel threatened.
In On It: What Adoptive Parents Would Like You To Know About Adoption. A Guide for Relatives and Friends by Elisabeth O’Toole
Pre & Post Adoption
This book goes beyond an adoption book for parents and is sometimes called the adoption book “for everyone else”. It offers helpful advice and instructive anecdotes from adoptive parents, adult adoptees, adoption professionals, and the friends and relatives of already established adoptive families to help enlighten others about adoption.
I wished I had done a better job of documenting early moments. So, here are a couple of adoption journals so you can do a better job than I did. These moments are worth cherishing ❤
My Family, My Journey: A Baby Book for Adoptive Families (Adoption Books for Children, Adoption Gifts for Adoptive Parents, Adoption Baby Book) by Zoe Francesca
This album contains sections to record milestones and cherished family moments that mark a new baby’s life, pages to chart the adopted child’s unique journey. It includes a pocket to store important documents and over 60 stickers you can use to customize the family tree pages.
I Wished for You: A Keepsake Adoption Journal by Carrie Kipp Howard
A keepsake journal to capture all of the emotions, history, hopes, dreams, and surprises that each adoption journey entails. It offers guided prompts that encourage parents to enjoy and reflect on their own experiences.
Bonus: This one is not Adoption specific but I had to include it. Most of us could use some radical change in our families from time to time!
Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family by Paul David Tripp
This book offers a view of God’s plan for us as parents as it outlines fourteen foundational principles centered on the gospel. It shows that we need more than the latest parenting strategy or a list of techniques.
I hope you found this list of 20 adoption books for parents helpful. There is so much that we as adoptive parents, or adoptive parents to be, can learn to help our children better understand and embrace their adoption story.
For a list of 50 adoption books for kids, check this out.
