I’m jazzed to share part IV of our adoption series with foster and adoptive mama, Renee Henderson. Honestly, I was nervous to cover foster care because I had some preconceived fears about emotional development in the foster care system. Renee shared with us that she has been a foster parent to 15 kids in 4.5 years, and contrary to many foster stories, she adopted three children from foster care. We dove into this quite a bit because it’s important to enter foster care with expectations for how the system operates.

The overarching goal for foster care is reunification with the biological family.

However, a lot of foster parents enter the system hoping to adopt, resulting...

In this week’s episode, we dove into part III of our adoption series with adoptee, Kayla.  Kayla shared that she was adopted at the age of 2.5. She has an older brother who is the biological child of her parents. She is black and was adopted by a white family. She grew up in a mostly white community.

Kayla shared that in many ways she felt as if she didn’t fit into her community. Throughout her adolescence, she felt very different from everyone around her. She felt like she didn’t fully fit in with black culture and didn’t fully fit into white culture. Her parents made an effort to bring aspects of black culture into her life, with books, dolls, and by taking...

In this week’s episode of Voices of Your Village I dove into part two of our adoption series. I had the opportunity to chat with birth mom, Annaleece, about her experience being pregnant with her birth daughter, making the decision to place Charlie for adoption, and the relationship that she has with her now. 

Annaleece shared the circumstances that led to her becoming pregnant at the age of 17. Having experienced sexual abuse, Annaleece was working through that trauma. She moved out of her parents’ house and soon after she found out she was pregnant. Initially, adoption wasn’t on her radar. Her relationship with the birth father wasn’t ideal, but she...

In this week’s episode, I dove into the first part of our adoption series with adoptive parent Shelby Dickinson.  Shelby lives in California with her husband and two children. Her 3-year-old son Owen is adopted. She shared with me the process of Owen’s open adoption and the dynamic that she has worked to establish with his birth mom and family. 

Shelby and her husband had a unique experience with Owen’s adoption. From the time they first started pursuing adoption, to the time that they had Owen in their arms was only 7.5 weeks. Adoption is typically a multi-year process. They did use a facilitator rather than an agency, which does tend to speed...

In this episode of Voices of Your Village, I was jazzed to connect with my long-time colleague Teresa Stewart to chat all about nap transitions. Teresa has master's degrees in both child development and maternal and child health. She has always been passionate about supporting children and families. Although she worked in policy and advocacy early on in her career, her own experience of motherhood led her to more direct education and support work. She spent many years teaching classes and overseeing programs for a company called Isis Parenting. Suddenly the company closed, overnight. This eventually led to starting her current business running online groups, sleep consulting,...