Micky Duxbury: Making Room in Our Hearts

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ABOUT THE BOOK | Family Members Speak | Reviews | Resources

Making Room in Our Hearts:
Keeping Family Ties through Open Adoption
By Micky Duxbury

(Routledge 2007)

Named Best Parenting Guide
by Adoptive Family Magazine

Available at Amazon.com

Adoption has changed dramatically over the past twenty years with most birth and adoptive parents meeting during the adoption process and many continuing with ongoing contact. Increasing openness has benefits, but understandable concerns persist: will the child be confused or have mixed loyalties? Is this shared parenting? MAKING ROOM IN OUR HEARTS answers these questions by presenting the stories of birth and adoptive families who share the joys and challenges of maintaining open relationships.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that can make an honest difference in the understanding of an important subject and in people's lives. I'm delighted to say that `Making Room in Our Hearts' is one of those books. It takes on open adoption, which remains too poorly understood despite its growing prevalence, and explains it in the best possible way: through the stories of those who live it. The result is simultaneously touching and enlightening; it's a wonderful combination that I believe will make an honest difference in the evolution of adoption from the stigmatized, secretive process that it used to be, to one that is honest, healthy and better serves all of its participants, especially the children.

Adam Pertman, Executive Director
Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and Author of Adoption Nation

No other book describes how important openness is from the child and teen’s perspective. As one 19 year-old put it, "I would be a completely different person if I had grown up without knowing who I was and where I came from. Open adoption has allowed me to be the person I was intended to be - with a connection to all of the people who have made me what I am.”

Whether you are an adoptive parent, an expectant parent with an unplanned pregnancy, a birth or adoptive family already in a relationship or wanting to open a closed adoption, the families in this book want to speak with you. For the sake of their children, they have taken risks they never imagined they would take, opened themselves up to people they might not usually befriend, and formed ties that often last a lifetime. Theirs is a commitment that understood that for children to have permanent, secure and loving homes, they did not have to lose their connection to the people who gave them life.