Adoption Through the Rearview Mirror by Karen Springs is both a sobering introduction to life with deeply troubled children and a passionate appeal to provide permanent family solutions for orphans and vulnerable children.
Through the voices of parents, adoptees and (often suffering) biological siblings, this raw and real book inspires hope and excitement about what God can do in the tears, heartbreak and apparent failure.
Springs steadily draws the reader into the complexity of adoption, as she shares her own learning story about the harsh realities of early childhood trauma, fetal alcohol syndrome, and attachment disorders, alongside stories celebrating painful and life-changing adoptions.
Describing her own journey, she writes “I was increasingly realising that I needed a more thoughtful and educated approach to advocacy” [for adoption].
As Springs puts it at one point, “While blogs and Facebook are perfect platforms for celebrating adoption, many adoptive families quickly realize that social media is not the best outlet for sharing their daily trials. As a result, relatives and friends who watched a very public journey to ‘bring a child home’ no longer knew how these families were really doing and what challenges they faced.”
The book’s personal stories of struggles, love, sacrifice, and pain, are designed to help families better prepare for adoption and ask themselves whether adoption is the best solution for them (or the child).
She takes the reader on a literal road trip, visiting adoptive families across the US whom she knew, collecting their stories and asking, “how can we present the messaging around adoption in a more transparent and helpful way?’” As one adoptive parent put it to Springs: “What I needed were truth-tellers. People who would say ‘yes, it sucks at times.’”
Springs points out that ‘the church and other Christian entities have marketed adoption without full disclosure surrounding the spectrum of “challenges”. She illustrates by saying that “No one was added to the PTSD Trauma Adoption Group until after they came home with their child.”
So, this informative book addresses damaging messaging, whilst still advocating for family-based solutions for orphans and vulnerable children.
Springs is non-judgmental and full of grace about the complexity of life. She draws on her extensive experience of adoptive families to offer rooted advice to prospective adoptive parents and to both adoptees and parents who have already adopted.
As Springs points out, “I recognise that our daily walk with Jesus will not always be sustained if it’s built only on warm, fuzzy feelings. Instead, we find the strength to keep walking forward based on what we know to be true, even when our feelings don’t match.”
I recommend this book to anybody concerned about adoption, or considering adoption, and also suggest reading a few articles that Christian Daily International published, which provide valuable insights on orphan care across the globe:
- Forum to address key issues, provide hope amid global crises affecting orphans and vulnerable children
- Global forum on orphan crisis kicks off in Thailand, points to hope not in strength or power but in work of God’s Spirit
- Addressing the root of the orphan crisis: the three-fold crisis of the soul
- Forum panel talks about necessary paradigm shift from orphanages to family-based care
Adoption Through the Rearview Mirror: Learning from Stories of Heartbreak and Hope. Karen Springs, Forward Reflections, Paperback, ISBN: 978-0999901403.
