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The Adoptive Parents' Handbook: A Guide to Healing Trauma and Thriving with Your Foster or Adopted Child
The essential guide to parenting adopted and foster kids--learn to create felt safety, heal attachment trauma, and navigate challenging behaviors and triggersChildren who have been adopted and/or shuttled through the foster-care system experience trauma at a much higher rate than other kids, which can make it difficult for them to trust, relax, regulate their emotions, and connect with their new families. As a parent, learning how to heal attachment trauma, attune to your child's needs, identify triggers, and create felt safety is essential to providing the loving, supportive, and stable home they need to thrive.Written for parents of adopted and foster kids of all ages, this book offers resources for handling common concerns like sleep issues, food sensitivities, anger, fear, and reactivity. It also provides guidance on navigating transracial adoptions, working through parents' own hang-ups, and recognizing signs of developmental and psychological conditions. The book highlights practical strategies and provides real-life examples to address questions do I help my adopted child adjust?Is this kind of behavior "normal"?How do I help my child live, heal, and thrive with PTSD?
317 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 2020
18 people are currently reading
120 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 13, 2025
This book is incredibly helpful for prospective or current adoptive parents/families. I am not a parent; however, I help my parents with my adoptive younger brother and thought this book would be useful. While not every section was applicable to our situation, there’s a little something for everyone here. There’s sections about preparing to meet your child, fostering, interracial adoption, and more. All of this was thoughtfully written.
The author, Barbara Cummins Tantrum, is a licensed therapist who believes in trauma-informed family. Her sister is adopted and Tantrum adopted several of her children. In her practice, she sees many adoptive children as well. She’s experienced in this topic and I found her to be a reliable source as far as I could tell.
The writing is easy to understand and to consume. Sometimes I struggle with nonfiction books (even if I enjoy them or have an interest in the topic). I didn’t feel that way with this book. If you are interested in adoption, consider picking this book up!
The author, Barbara Cummins Tantrum, is a licensed therapist who believes in trauma-informed family. Her sister is adopted and Tantrum adopted several of her children. In her practice, she sees many adoptive children as well. She’s experienced in this topic and I found her to be a reliable source as far as I could tell.
The writing is easy to understand and to consume. Sometimes I struggle with nonfiction books (even if I enjoy them or have an interest in the topic). I didn’t feel that way with this book. If you are interested in adoption, consider picking this book up!
June 10, 2024
*Update
I read this book the month that we first inquired about adoption. I’ve read it once again, the week before meeting our daughter. This is a holy grail level book for adoptive and prospective adoptive parents.
This book should be required reading for anyone considering adoption (specifically from foster care). Barbara Cummins Tantrum has four adoptive children (including a sibling group) and has also fostered. She has a sister whom her family adopted and a half-sister who was placed for adoption. She’s also an adoption and trauma therapist. I love that she has extensive experience both personally and professionally. As a transition house counsellor, her views fall very much in line with mine.
I read this book the month that we first inquired about adoption. I’ve read it once again, the week before meeting our daughter. This is a holy grail level book for adoptive and prospective adoptive parents.
This book should be required reading for anyone considering adoption (specifically from foster care). Barbara Cummins Tantrum has four adoptive children (including a sibling group) and has also fostered. She has a sister whom her family adopted and a half-sister who was placed for adoption. She’s also an adoption and trauma therapist. I love that she has extensive experience both personally and professionally. As a transition house counsellor, her views fall very much in line with mine.
July 11, 2021
I would give it 8 stars if I could.
I’m not an adoptive parent. I want to be, at some point down the line. So I havent tried to implement the stuff in this book. But just by reading it i feel way more ready for the challenge. It has also started some great conversations between me and my partner about fostering and adopting.
When we do actually start moving towards fostering/adopting, I’m gonna get a few copies of this book and put one in each room.
I’m not an adoptive parent. I want to be, at some point down the line. So I havent tried to implement the stuff in this book. But just by reading it i feel way more ready for the challenge. It has also started some great conversations between me and my partner about fostering and adopting.
When we do actually start moving towards fostering/adopting, I’m gonna get a few copies of this book and put one in each room.
July 5, 2022
For me, this was one of the best adoption/foster-related books I have read so far. It was clear, straight-forward, informative and concrete. It was also free of sentimentality and religious pushes. This can be a good book for foster/adoptive families or those who want to learn about the harder sides (and get to know how to handle even the toughest situations).
I am bringing some quotes from the book (I hope they make sense now that I have copied them out of context).
I am bringing some quotes from the book (I hope they make sense now that I have copied them out of context).
...and didn’t offer any shallow platitudes of “it will get better” or “don’t worry.” Anybody who has been in the trenches of trauma knows those sayings for how worthless they are. The only thing that speaks the language of trauma is connection
But then one of my professors said something that shook me to my core and completely changed the course of my professional life. She said that the best therapists worked in the areas of their trauma—and if your trauma was in your childhood, you should work with children.
But I would invite you to think about your origin story, and what brought you here. We need to know where we come from before we can adequately know where we are going.
Trauma is any event or situation that causes a person to feel terror and horror to the point of feeling like your life and safety are in serious jeopardy. Trauma is inflicted when a person either experiences or witnesses such an event; in fact there is little difference between experiencing or witnessing to the amount of trauma. This type of incidence of trauma may temporarily or permanently alter a person’s ability to cope, their self-concept, and their ability to identify what is a threat. Types of trauma include abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional), hospital trauma (life-threatening injury or illness), violence within the family or in the community, war, natural disasters, parental loss (by death, neglect, divorce, mental illness, or substance abuse), rape, assault, being suddenly removed from your home, changing foster homes, and so on.
So what does it mean to have an altered hippocampus and amygdala? For a nontraumatized person, their body will most likely only react to things that are actually dangerous, with only the occasional false start. For a person with trauma, this means that they live in a state of constant hypervigilance and overarousal, which means that small things trigger big reactions, and they are always on the lookout for those small things. A sudden loud noise like an unexpected door slamming might make everyone in a room jump a bit, but someone with an overactive amygdala might actually be triggered by something like that into fight, flight, or freeze. Living in that state of hyperarousal is exhausting.
Kids don’t seek control to drive their caregivers crazy; they do it to try and make what seems like a crazy and unstable world safer for them.
Kids with trauma are unable to look ahead and think, “If I do this, then this will happen,” very well. This is why traditional disciplinary tactics don’t work very well on them, because it’s so hard for them to think ahead.
Infants decide in their first year of life whether or not the world is safe, and then that belief and felt safety becomes the basis on which they pattern future relationships.
...recognize that their grief is not your fault. Guilt and a lack of confidence in the face of your child’s grief can actually be a barrier to attachment and relationship building.
Part of becoming a foster or an adoptive parent is bearing witness to a child’s profound grief and loss, and to do that in a way that they feel seen, heard, soothed, and their story honored.
here is my working definition of PTSD: When you have an outsized fear reaction to something not inherently dangerous (trigger) based on something that has happened in your past (trauma), this is a PTSD reaction.
The part of your brain responsible for logical thought is the prefrontal cortex, which is a very complex part of the brain, and it also is slower at processing.
The part of the brain responsible for the fight, flight, or freeze part of your brain is the cerebellum, which is also responsible for automatic parts of your body like your heartbeat and breathing.
A child is at their most vulnerable when they are being corrected for doing something wrong.
many kids coming from dysfunctional backgrounds are very triggered by holidays, even if they were removed from their homes at relatively young ages.
But if I could tell parents one thing that is absolutely critical for their mental health, it would be to not take the things your child does and says personally. The fact that your child feels safe enough to act up with you means something; they would not be yelling at someone they thought was going to beat them or kick them out of their house.
When a caregiver holds and rocks a baby, the distance between their faces is the perfect distance for the baby to focus and attach.
When a child with a disordered attachment can actually get into a relationship with a loving, calm, and interested adult who can be a healthy attachment figure for that child, then magic can happen.
Children (and adults) only need one real attachment figure where they experience real love and attachment, and it can change their entire lives.
by the time a child was placed with a foster parent for three months, their attachment style starts shifting to reflect their foster mother’s attachment style.
an attachment style is something that is set pretty early, but it is something that can be changed by consistent, loving parenting.
Children want to feel enjoyed; feeling enjoyed is a major part of attachment for them. For a child, unconditional love feels like being enjoyed.
Kids need boundaries to feel safe just as surely as they need to feel loved. But the trick to disciplining traumatized kids is to make the boundaries the bad guys, not you. You want to be the good guy, the one helping them out to figure out how to follow the rule. You want to be the cheerleader hoping they can make it, the helpful one reminding them of the family policy, the one really hoping that the consequence doesn’t have to fall.
Routines and rituals help children create expectations about the predictability of their external environment.
One of the key principles for restoring a sense of safety for a child is implementing predictable daily routines that establish safety, help children organize experience, and to develop mastery.
If they feel unloved and have no boundaries, that is neglect. If they feel unloved and have boundaries, that is authoritarianism. If they feel loved and have no boundaries, that is permissiveness. If they feel loved and have boundaries, then that is authoritative parenting, which is the type that has the best outcome for children.
There are many definitions of grief, but for my purposes here, I’m going to say that grief is the internal processing of the emotions that come from loss and change in someone’s life.
when we focus just on behavior, we are focusing on the symptoms rather than what’s causing the symptoms—sort of like giving a child Tylenol for a fever rather than treating an infection.
The truth is that children aren’t capable of manipulation until adolescence, because to be able to manipulate, you need a more developed prefrontal cortex.
Feelings are not good or bad; they are just there. Never approach your child with the words or attitude that she does not have a right to her feelings or that she isn’t allowed to express them. In fact, a child expressing highly negative feelings with words is a sign of mental health—words are a lot better than behavior. Often children will stop doing destructive physical behaviors if they can start expressing them with words.
It can be very tempting to jump into the advice mode, but you have to resist. Look at every opportunity to do reflective listening as a space for your child to learn more about her emotions to be able to identify, regulate, and express them. It is more important that children learn the skills to deal with their strong emotions than it is to fix whatever particular problem has arisen. Children don’t feel heard (and neither do adults!) if the person is far more focused on the solution than on the problem. Also, you may inadvertently communicate that you think the child is incapable of finding solutions herself by jumping in too quickly.
Anger is what we call a secondary emotion, which means that there is always something else fueling it; it can never be just a feeling on its own.
A child’s anger doesn’t get easier to control until they are able to identify, express, and care for the other emotions under the surface of the volcano. Depending on which feelings it is that are fueling the anger dictates what tack to take.
Race refers to physical characteristics such as skin color and bone structure, and ethnicity refers to cultural and historical ancestry.
Nobody is free of all racial prejudice and privilege; it is much better to be aware of where yours is than to pretend it doesn’t exist.
When kids develop healthy attachments with healthier adults, they can then evaluate other relationships for themselves. But this is certainly not for you to point out—this is something for the child to process, and something they will likely process in young adulthood.
Convey compassion for the birth mom, but don’t sugarcoat reality to the point of obscuring the truth.
Never write anything that isn’t true or use confusing euphemisms. It’s better to use the word addiction than to use the word sick because if you use the word sick for why a parent couldn’t take care of a child, if you catch pneumonia, the child could think a social worker might take them away.
In any relationship, be it marriage, friendship, or partnership, maturity comes when you can recognize the person for who they really are and not who you want them to be. The same is even truer and even trickier when you think about your child.
Children are people with their own personalities, likes, dislikes, experiences, and perspectives. Yes, our role as parents is to shape and to guide; but more importantly our role is to help them to become the best one of them they can become, not something else entirely.
In the end, with your children, you don’t get to choose the lifestyle they lead but rather you choose how much relationship you have with them. And there are of course boundaries that would make it hard for you to be in relationship with your child—perhaps
This sounds counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to deal with food hoarding is to give the child a box to keep some nonperishable snacks in their room that they can eat any time they want. This will often reduce their anxiety and help them not be “collecting” all the time.
If you view behavior as something to correct and suppress, you are going to become very frustrated parenting a child with trauma. But if you can look at the behaviors and try to figure out the emotions behind the behaviors, you have a lot better chance of actually reducing the problematic behaviors.
Do not try to make everything even all of the time. You will drive yourself crazy if every time you buy one kid something every kid has to have something of equal value. Practice celebrating others and what they need.
If we treat lying as a triggered reaction just like other triggered reactions, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to deal with.
Sometimes a diagnosis can actually come as a bit of a relief—parents have known something was wrong for a long time, and now that they have a name for it, it feels like something they can treat and have some hope about. Sometimes it just feels good to have a name for something so that it feels less crazy.
If you do it well, foster parenting involves pain. Kids need you to care about them, and if you don’t, then you’re being a babysitter, not a foster parent. Wherever the child goes next—whether they’re reunified with parents, placed with relatives, placed in a longer-term home, or staying with you—having a loving, intimate, and safe experience with a foster parent is the best thing that can happen for them. For a lot of kids, the time they spend in foster care is the only time in their childhood that they get a good model of a healthy family.
Almost all foster parents say that they are not prepared for how hard it ultimately was on them, but most foster parents I know are glad that they did it.
Trauma is inflicted when a person either experiences or witnesses such an event; in fact, there is little difference to the amount of trauma between experiencing or witnessing.
October 28, 2023
Read this book as adoption is something I am considering.
The author is extremely adoption-positive. She talks a lot about the struggles involved, but it's always encouraging and clear from the tone that she thinks it's doable, worth it, but understands how there can be challenges. I've read books that are focused on issues like this one but the author was discouraging with how much 'bad' they talked about. The author's view makes a big difference.
The focus here is definitely on adopting older kids. This is what I was looking for, but I'm not sure if it would be as helpful for infant adoption. There's a lot about what to expect with older adoptions but not a ton that's infant-specific.
This was a helpful book that focuses more on parenting a child through trauma than categorizing 'adoption issues', things to expect/do/not do, or the process of adoption. The approach is very much from understanding trauma and parenting through it but also tips for a parent to recognize certain issues (PTSD, ADHD, Autism etc.) that might be affecting their kids and how to get help.
A lot of the parenting strategies read like gentle parenting and empathetic listening techniques. I like how rather than simply plugging this technique, she explains thoroughly why it's important for traumatized kids. As someone who is already trying most of these tips on my bio-kids, I especially appreciated how she pointed out strategies that would work on non-traumatized kids but wouldn't on trauma kids & provided alternatives.
The author is extremely adoption-positive. She talks a lot about the struggles involved, but it's always encouraging and clear from the tone that she thinks it's doable, worth it, but understands how there can be challenges. I've read books that are focused on issues like this one but the author was discouraging with how much 'bad' they talked about. The author's view makes a big difference.
The focus here is definitely on adopting older kids. This is what I was looking for, but I'm not sure if it would be as helpful for infant adoption. There's a lot about what to expect with older adoptions but not a ton that's infant-specific.
This was a helpful book that focuses more on parenting a child through trauma than categorizing 'adoption issues', things to expect/do/not do, or the process of adoption. The approach is very much from understanding trauma and parenting through it but also tips for a parent to recognize certain issues (PTSD, ADHD, Autism etc.) that might be affecting their kids and how to get help.
A lot of the parenting strategies read like gentle parenting and empathetic listening techniques. I like how rather than simply plugging this technique, she explains thoroughly why it's important for traumatized kids. As someone who is already trying most of these tips on my bio-kids, I especially appreciated how she pointed out strategies that would work on non-traumatized kids but wouldn't on trauma kids & provided alternatives.
March 23, 2021
Without a doubt the best and most helpful book I've ever read! I first saw this by chance at my local library. It was so good my husband and I bought it before we even made it halfway through, knowing we held something we'd want to reference over and over again. I wish every foster and adoptive parents would read this book. I really cannot Express what a gamechanger it has been for our home.
September 26, 2025
Excellent book for foster and adoptive parents, both current and prospective. Discusses important considerations, challenges, and solutions for helping kids with trauma to heal and thrive in a healthy and supportive home, while also focusing on importance of self-care for both children and parents.
March 14, 2021
I can refer back to this book for many topics and issues that may arise.
April 30, 2022
Really liked this book. Relevant and practical.
October 22, 2022
Excellent! The author has an adopted sister, is a foster and adoptive mom, and a therapist. So she brings a wealth of experience and practices to her writing.
September 24, 2023
For navigation in an unusual world.
December 29, 2023
Finally! A book that brings together modern research and ethics into a practical guide with compassion and humor.
February 8, 2024
Excellently written and concise advice for dealing with trauma in children. One of the most informative books I’ve read on adoption and foster care.
June 26, 2025
such a good book for parenting support, regardless of how you acquire your child lol
January 28, 2021
Really good. Read it twice and will probably read it again. Answered so many difficult questions. Author is highly qualified as an adoption therapist and adoptive mother to four children with backgrounds of trauma as well. Written in 2020, it includes a chapter on special considerations for transracial adoptions. Learned so many things I didn't know.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews