I know first-hand how emotionally exhausting it can be to parent a child who has suffered through lack of nurture.  

Having navigated the gamut of emotions while at the same time successfully encouraging our adopted daughter's attachment, positive behaviour change and development I discovered parenting approaches that work.  My husband and I discovered strategies to manage our own challenging emotions while at the same time parenting effectively, therapeutically and with empathy. 

We found parenting a traumatised child much more emotionally and practically challenging than we anticipated and we already had experience of parenting our birth-son!  It is a fact that most adopters have no parenting experience and are being given the most challenging children in our society to parent, they are thrown in at the deep end with very little support.

I realised that although useful and informative in many ways, none of the adoption related books we had read or courses we had been on openly discussed the raw emotional challenges that my husband and I experienced in abundance in the early months.  Through discussions with other adoptive parents I know that what we had experienced was not uncommon - especially in situations where there was a birth child in the family.

Through speaking with adoption professionals who knew our daughter and observed the huge positive changes she was making much more quickly than expected, I was encouraged to write a book to share our approach and strategies in the hope that I can help more people navigate the turbulent waters that often follow the placement of a child for adoption.