Yesterday, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption announced the fifth annual 100 Best Adoption-Friendly Workplaces list recognizing organizations nationwide for their adoption benefits. The Wendy's Company is No. 1 on this year's list, with a combination of up to $24,300 in adoption assistance ...

By Leonette Boiarski, ACSW, LSW Even with the large number of adoption information requests made by individuals interested in foreign adoption made during this past year, most queries came from families searching for viable options in an environment where inter-country adoption of healthy infants ...

By Carolyn Berger, LCSW, with Lisa Schuman, LCSW The blended family, one that’s created through birth and adoption, has been a part of the adoption landscape for a long time.  There are different types of blended families—those where an adopted child is the first child and those ...

This has been an unsettling week in the world of assisted reproduction, and most especially, surrogacy.  As two professionals who have worked in this field for many, many years and who have created our respective families through assisted reproduction, including surrogacy, we have been in a ...

By Carolyn N. Berger, LCSW The first thing you notice when looking through the literature on birthfathers is how little there actually is.  When we think about the “adoption triangle,” those people who play pivotal roles in an adoption, we are generally talking about the child, ...

By Ellen Glazer, LICSW, AFA Mental Health Advisory Council  Words are powerful. Anyone who has ever had a friend or family member adopt a child knows how important it is to use what is commonly known as  “Positive Adoption Language.”  Adoptive parents bristle if you say ...

by Carolyn Berger, L.C.S.W.  Father’s Day is fast approaching and with it comes quick trips to the stationery store to find the perfect card for Dad.   This year I’ve been reading and thinking about the role of birth fathers a lot and have been heartened to find an ...

by Lisa Marsh Part of a sereies on Single Fathers Raising, Caring For and Talking To Pre-teen Daughters About Their Bodies Way before breasts begin to appear, like little soft hills on the flat landscape of a girl's flat chest, she will have an awareness that she is different from her ...

by Carolyn Berger, LCSW I’m a single mom and until recently I thought I had done a pretty good job of educating my two teenage sons, ages 18 and 21, about sex and sexual health. We never sat down for “big talks” about these subjects.  Rather, I tried to weave them into our ...

  The media has been in overdrive reporting on the life transitions of Oprah Winfrey and Maria Shriver. Oprah chose to end her 25 year reign as the queen of television.  Maria Shriver did not choose to be in the middle of a scandal caused by her husband that has blown her world ...