Lifebook for Children Adopted from Foster Care

My Awesome Life, customized for children adopted from foster care, includes an additional section, My Adoption.

Adjust to Life with a New Family

• Pages like “My Adoption Plan” provide a safe way to share alternative perspectives on why the child is being adopted.
• Children can learn about their adoptive families through pages like “My Adoptive Family Tree.”
• Pages like “Being Adopted” offer a way to express feelings about adoption.

Remember and Celebrate Strengths of the Birth Family

• Pages like “My Mother”, “My Father”, and “My Brothers and Sisters” offer a way for the child to record details about his or her birth family.
• Pages like “Health History” offer a central place for children to record information that will be important later in life.

Build Self-Esteem

• Children discover their strengths through pages like “I am Special.”
• Pages like “My Firsts” celebrate the child’s achievements.

Lifebooks Shorten the Adjustment Period to the New Home

Meg describes how the Lifebook helped her adopted 10-year-old son transition to his new home:

“As adoptive parents, we missed out on so much of his life and this was a great way for us to get to know him and for him to get to know us. Our little boy was better able to talk to us about what happened in his life with the Lifebook as his guide. Even though some things were hard for him to talk about and hard for us to listen to, this was something he needed to do to be able to move forward in his life. If it wasn’t for the Lifebook helping him with this transition to our home, it might have taken him much longer to open up to us and be able to move forward in his life.”

Lifebooks Build Self-Worth

Rebecca describes the impact that Lifebook work had on her adopted daughter:

“Before [working on a Lifebook], she would always talk about how nobody loved her and she didn’t belong anywhere. Through the Lifebook process, it began to shift. She would read letters [from previous foster parents] and it made her feel like people had cared about her and loved her her whole life. I didn’t hear anymore ‘I don’t belong here’, and ‘I don’t feel loved’ and ‘nobody wants me.’”