Understanding Adopted Children and Families

Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is a pioneering and nationally recognized family adoption therapist who, through her first book The Family of Adoption, demonstrates that there are predictable and understandable developmental stages and challenges for all adopted people.

Pavao lays them out age level by age level, showing, for instance, how and why day-dreaming is a normal strategy for adoptees and how particular academic subjects may create pain for adopted children.

Pavao argues that all adoptive parents, as well as teachers and therapists and all who work with children, must come to understand these developmental stages as normal -- though challenging -- for adopted children. She writes with equal insight of the "birth rites" of both biological and adoptive parents; of how adoption does not cure infertility, but childlessness; and of healing rites for birth parents who must give up the parenting of their child.

Pavao is an "important voice in the spirited public debate over what ‘the best interest of the child’ is in the imperfect, bureaucratically untidy world of adoption," says Joseph P. Kahn of The Boston Globe.

Joyce Maguire Pavao is executive director of the Center for Family Connections and founder of PACT (Pre/Post Adoption Counsulting Team) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Center holds training sessions for parents, professionals, and friends of Adoption and Complex Families, as well as intensive clinical training sessions for Clinicians. A summer session will be held July 13-17 in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Workshops on birthparent loss, single parent adoptions, medical issues, search and reunion, and other adoption topics will be held one Friday each month during the year. For information, contact the Center for Family Connections, P.O. Box 383246, Cambridge, MA 02238, +1 (617) 547-0909 or 1-800-KINNECT; Fax: +1 (617) 497-5952; E-mail: kinnect@aol.com.

1. To be released August 1998, by Beacon Press, Boston, MA, http://www.beacon.org. Other useful contacts: Adoptive Parents for Open Records , 9 Marjorie Drive, Hackensack, NJ 07840. American Adoption Congress (ACC), 1000 Conneticut Ave, NW, Suite#9, Washington, DC 20036. Council for Equal Rights in Adoption (CERA), 401 E 74th Street, Suite 17-D, NY, NY 10021