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Home > Adoption > For Prospective Adoptive Parents > Understanding Potential Challenges > Mental Health Challenges
Mental Health Challenges
Resources and information on a variety of mental health challenges faced by adopted children and their families, including attachment difficulties.
Postadoption Services
It is common for adoptive families to need support and services after adoption. Postadoption services can help families with a wide range of issues. They are available for everything from learning how to explain adoption to a preschooler, to helping a child who experienced early childhood abuse, to helping with an adopted teen?s search for identity. Experience with adoptive families has shown that all family members can benefit from some type of postadoption support. Families of children who have experienced trauma, neglect, or institutionalization may require more intensive services.
Pediatricians With a Special Interest in Adoption and Foster Care Medicine: Adoption Directory (PDF - 54 KB)
American Academy of Pediatrics
State-by-State directory to help parents locate pediatricians who provide primary care to foster children and adoptive families, preadoption and postadoption medical assessment, and more.
Post-Adoption Services: Meeting the Mental Health Needs of Children Adopted From Foster Care (PDF – 158 KB)
North American Council on Adoptable Children (2007)
Provides information on the mental health needs of children adopted from foster care, including a description of the services needed and available financial assistance. State examples of effective postadoption service programs are also included.
Selecting and Working With an Adoption Therapist
Adoption has a lifelong impact on those it touches, and members of adoptive families may want professional help as concerns arise. Timely intervention by a professional skilled in adoption issues often can prevent concerns from becoming more serious problems. Professionals with adoption knowledge and experience are best suited to help families identify connections between problems and adoption and to plan effective treatment strategies. Sometimes a difficulty that a child is experiencing can be directly linked to adoption, but sometimes the connection is not readily apparent. In other situations, issues that seem on the surface to be related to adoption turn ...
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