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A Lifebook is the story of how your child came to be yours and the story of his life before he came to you. Adoption is only one aspect of your child, and at some point, his life merges into your life. However, he had a life before he came to your family, and his Lifebook tells this part of his story.
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Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome to Weekend Wisdom by Creating a Family. Creating a Family has a long -form podcast that drops every Wednesday and we interview an expert for an hour.
This part of the Creating a Family host of podcasts is a short form, meaning it lasts about five minutes. And rather than interview an expert, we answer your questions.
So please submit your question. Send it to info @creatingathamily .org. If you think about it on the subject line, put in "We can wisdom" and it will find its way to me,
but we really do want to get your questions so we know that we can answer them. We have questions that we can actually answer. So I'm going to jump into this week's "We can wisdom" and that is all about adoption lifebooks,
how to make it, how to So, we talk a lot about life books here and I think it helps to actually be with the definition of what we mean by that. A life book is a story about how your child came to be yours and the story of his life before he came to you.
So, adoption is only one aspect of your child and at some point, his life is going to merge into your life and a separate book is not going to be needed since he's going to be looking at the pics on your phone or electronic photo frame,
or on your wall, or going old school if you have it in a photo album, or a scrapbook. At some point his life is merging and he's going to be using the family. However, he had a life before he came to your family and his life book tells that part of his story.
And that's true regardless of whether he came to your family at birth, or at two, or at ten, or at 16. Lifebooks also create the opportunity to talk about adoption and their life before they came to you.
They are a wonderful conversation starter. And let's face it, life gets busy when you have kids and it's hard to find time or to make the time to talk about what's important.
So it helps to have a book to open and read and use that air quotes around the word read to your child. Lifebooks can also be an opportunity for your child to express their feelings about adoption,
be they happiness or grief or loss or anger. Also to express those feelings about things that happened in their early life or to ask questions about why they are not living with their birth family.
So it's a conversation started going both ways. It allows for opportunity for your child to come back to you to ask questions. Lifebooks can also reduce what we call magical thinking.
Kids tend to make up what they don't know. And when a child makes up a story, it's usually not the truth. And also, it can be much worse or at least an exaggerated version of the truth.
So we want our kids to have as much information as they can, and a lifebook is a great resource for doing just that. And lifebooks are a great way of introducing the harder parts of your child's story.
A lifebook, if used correctly, can lay the groundwork of the early life story that can be added to as the child ages. A lifebook does not need to be a physical book.
However, I think that it really helps to have something to hold. That may change, honestly, in the future with technology, but for now, I do recommend that it actually be in some form,
a physical form. Another thing to note about lifebooks is that it is your child's book, and the child should have full access to this book whenever they want to look at it,
with or without you. In our family, it was kept in the child's room at their level. If it contains sensitive or hard information, I personally wouldn't let them share it outside the home until they are fully old enough to make the decision and understand the ramifications of sharing that information.
There are many templates out there for creating lifebooks. You can just google them and keep this in mind. It does not have to be fancy. It can just be an old -fashioned photo album with clear plastic inserts and,
you know, things like that. You can include pictures, the outfit his birth mother selected for him to go home from the hospital with, or copies of email is shared between you and his birth parent if you have their permission to include that.
If possible, when the child is placed with you, get as much information, including pictures and stories as possible about their life before they came to you. Ask who their former foster parents were if they were in foster care.
Call or email with these parents to get pictures and stories. And if they're reluctant to give you that information, ask the caseworker for pictures and stories. And seek out birth parents or extended family,
if possible, and safe to ask for picks and information. And if you're concerned that birth parents might not be safe, then reach out to grandmas and aunties and others who might have information that can be shared.
And there are lots of books to help you figure out how to create a lifebook. You can find them on our website by going to creatingafamily .org, then clicking on adoption,
and then look down through adoption suggested books. And under suggested books, we have an entire section on lifebooks, so you can find lots of information that way.
Before you go, I want to tell you about a interactive training that creating a family has developed. It could also be used as a support group curriculum for foster adoptive and kin families.
It makes it very easy to do a high quality training. Each of the curriculum comes with a video, a facilitator guide, a handout, and an additional resource sheet.
We have 25 topics in the library so any of those 25 topics you can choose, and you can get more information at parentsupportgroups .org,
all one word. Or you can go to creatingafamily .org, hover over the word training, and click on parent support group. Either way, we'll get you there.
And thanks for listening to this week's Week in Wisdom. If you liked it, please tell a friend to subscribe, and you do that by going to to thecreatingathamily .org podcast. And I will see you next week.
