The Encyclopedia of Adoption by Christine Adamec and Laurie Miller, MD contains brief entries on a large number of terms and subjects relevant to adoption. Adamec is a medical writer and Miller is a director of an international adoption medicine clinic.
The book covers terms and issues found in domestic infant adoptions (both agency and independent), child welfare system adoptions, international adoptions, and kinship adoptions.
The book’s focus is breadth, not depth. My first reaction was that, after nearly a decade of reading adoption magazines, I was not learning anything from the book. I thought it might be appropriate only for those just beginning to consider adoption.
However, I’ve found that the entries are numerous enough that I can always find something new and interesting. It’s a good book to keep in the car or, dare I say, the bathroom.
It is useful to have succinct entries for terms that adoptive parents often hear but may not completely understand, such as “Interstate Compact”, “subsidies”, and “re-adoption”. In addition to terms, there are brief entries for issues such as “eating problems in adopted children”, “sleep issues in adopted children”, “hepatitis”, “explaining adoption”, “teachers and adoption”, and media coverage of adoption.
I also enjoyed the book’s figures, including numbers of adoptions, characteristics of those who adopt from foster care, and brief, readable summaries of research studies on adopted individuals and adoptive families.
The appendices include a bibliography as well as contact information for state and provincial social service offices in the U.S. and Canada and for various adoption-related organizations. Other useful appendices include: state-by-state summaries of policies on placing children with relatives for adoption, of each state’s criteria for terminating parental rights, and state laws on access to identifying birth family information.
The most recent edition of this book was published in 2007, so it contains nearly up-to-date information on many issues. However, adoptive parents should always ask their attorney and/or social worker about current policies, as these may change frequently.