Anatomy of a Trauma Trigger: Responding to My Child’s PTSD | Herding Chickens and Other Adventures in Foster and Adoptive Care

“I slept until 11:00AM!  Instant panic on my part.  Was Carl OK?!…Thank goodness my husband was awake to care for Carl in the morning and meet his needs.  It doesn’t matter that Carl is 11 and not 5 anymore.  This can set off the trigger alarm.

You see, my kids come from a home with a junkie mom.  She was an addict.  She had mental health conditions.  She would go to bed and not get up for weeks.  Sometimes she would lock the kids out of her bedroom and let them take care of themselves.  Mary was 4 and Carl was 5 when they were removed from her care during a drug raid.”

Dear Sugar: 5 Questions to Ask When Making Parenting Decisions After an Adoption: white sugar, brown sugar

“Becoming a parent for the first time is overwhelming, but becoming a parent via adoption puts on a whole extra level of pressure, expectations, and dilemmas.  I talk about Super Parent Syndrome in my first book: the idea that since you’re a mom-by-adoption, you need to live up to it (says society, says relatives and friends, says birth family, says yourself and your partner).  But the truth is, you really are JUST a parent: you’ll have your strengths and faults, and living to impress others will leave you deflated and discouraged.  
I want to encourage you, when facing a parenting decision, not to make your choice out of guilt, suspicion, guessing, projecting, or to impress others. Instead, ask yourself these five questions, and you’ll most likely arrive at what is right.”

 
Let’s Be Brave, White Parents of Future Black Men: Coffee Colored Sofa

“My husband, Matt, is an excellent story teller. He comes alive in every detail of each moment in such a way that his stories can often be longer than the event they’re describing. He’s engaging and people hang on his every word.
However, there is one story I despise hearing from him- the story of how he and his friend Ryan were roughed up by police officers outside of Chicago.”

 
White privilege, and what we’re supposed to do about it: Rage Against The Minivan

“White privilege is a difficult concept.  It can cause a lot of confusion and defensiveness.  In the diversity class I teach to graduate students, this topic is more heated than any other topic we touch on.  Similarly, this week I’ve seen people pushing back against the idea of white privilege as if it’s an indictment that they are a racist (it’s not.)  I even watched a blogger (who is white) criticize my friend Kelly (who is black) for her suggestion that people confront their white privilege.  The blogger suggested that Kelly called white people “white supremacists”…as if “white privilege” and “white supremacists” were interchangeable terms (they’re not.)  Confusion abounds when we talk about white privilege, and I think it’s confusion that often leads to offense at the term.”