Life Book
Fri, 02/06/2009 - 23:09
Life Books are a way for a Child of Trauma to make sense of his or her past. It is a way to declare, "I MATTER." Life Books allow a child to express themselves through art, words, photos, and drawings. A Life Book can attempt to give a child some sense of why his/her bio parents had to leave.
A Life Book can provide tools for conversation that can make conversations about why the child was relinquished easier.
A Life Book should:
- Tell a child's story from birth.
- Provide details of a child's birth parents
- Provide a way to explain to a child, in appropriate ways, why she/he was adopted
Life Books are often not easy. Nor should they be. They are a therapy and children will often re-live the feelings of loss and abandonment.
Have you started a Life Book with your child? Share your experiences, your thoughts, and advice.
Comments
I finally made adoption lifebooks (although we just called them scrapbooks) for both my children. I still need to do a bit work on them to get them completed up to now and of course it will always be a work in progress but they are mostly done. My kids absolutely love them. They loved the idea of making a title page and since it can be easily removed and done over, it didn't matter how it looked as long as they were satisfied with it lol. Also I proved my theory that given 24 hours notice I could make one as it took just about that to do both of them. It was a bit of an investment to make all the copies of the pics I needed but it wasn't near as bad as I thought it would be lol. My daughter even took hers to school to show her teacher.
I'm so pleased that your kids enjoyed the process!
Does the importance of adoption lifebooks hold just as true for older child adoption? My children were 10 and 7 when they were adopted from foster care and no I never did a foster care lifebook. They have an album from their bmom and I have pictures of them from the time they came to me but I've never tried combining them. I have been meaning to have copies made of the pictures from their bmom, especially since I found one in my daughter's room of when she was a baby that had been almost ruined.
I've found nearly destroyed photos in our kid's room too. Seems that they were taken out of the album, and in some cases, faces were cut out of the pictures themselves. We no longer allow albums in the bedroom.
A lifebook is more than just an album, I think. It expresses a history for a child and acknowledges that the child has a past before the adoptive or foster parent came along. It is a way of approaching both the good and the bad experiences in the child's life. It can serve as a tool to heal the heart. So, I think that older children can definitely benefit from the experience.
http://adoption.suite101.com/article.cfm/creating_an_adoption_lifebook
This has instructions if you're interested.
My kiddo can be really engaged in helping working on the lifebook. It seems to be abstract enough that there is, initially, a separation of the events and the emotions surrounding those events, that makes approaching topics (like bio parents) easier.