Sharon Roszia, Kinship Center of California, Coauthor of The Open Adoption Experience
A gem ... well written, badly needed. A self-empowering, highly useful book that is very sensitive to needs.

Book Description
All families, no matter how they are brought together, struggle against enormous odds to thrive. However, for adoptive families, where the history is not a shared one, the rites and traditions commonly relied upon to negotiate transitions and to withstand internal or external stressors do not exist. This is where Creating Ceremonies: Innovative Ways to Meet Adoption Challenges comes in.

The authors, a single mother with two adopted children and a social worker specializing in adoption, have joined forces to create a rich and vital resource to help adoptive families better cope with the day-to-day changes and challenges of life together. Carefully written to reach out to the range of families - two-parent, single-parent, foster-parent, as well as families with gay or lesbian parents and those of multiracial, multiethnic, or multicultural origin - the ceremonies presented here cover the spectrum of life-cycle phases, from preadoptive to moving in, from adjustment to reinforcement and beyond.

Among the ceremonies: "Forever Family," "Getting Ready for a New Person in the Family," "End of the School Year," "There Is a Place for Both of Us," "Rejection and Abandonment," "Monsters and Nightmares," "The Day We Met," "You Are Safe Here." Used verbatim or customized to address a similar situation or a specific interactive style, the scripts will help family members move toward fresh, energized perspectives. They can be used again and again to provide short-term resolutions to particular problems and to reflect a long-term commitment to the family's well-being.

An appropriate way to say "welcome home" -- or to say "goodbye." A means to express painful feelings. A bridge between differing perspectives. A helping hand to a youngster in trouble. A commitment to hope. Another milestone. For the professionals who work with adoptive families - for the families themselves - Creating Ceremonies extends and enriches the vocabulary of caring.

One of the Best Gifts We Ever Gave Ourselves, November 1, 2001

I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend and it started to help us immediately. We had to move a year ago and our kids (5 & 8) were a mess. This time we did ceremonies for moving, saying goodbye to the old house and hello to the new, and saying hello to our new neighborhood and neighbors. This move was a breeze for our kids. They loved what we did and so did we. My wife and I would never have thought about doing these ceremonies on our own. We would have braced ourselves for another horrible experience with our son and daughter. This book would be a great gift to any parents whether they have adopted kids or not. We consider it one of the best gifts we ever gave our family.