Adoptive Families is an award-winning resource for parents-to-be navigating the adoption process and for parents raising children through adoption. Founded as a black-and-white newsletter, OURS, in 1968, by Adoptive Families of America, Adoptive Families took its current name and switched to four-color publication in 1994. In 2014, Adoptive Families transformed into an all-digital magazine and relaunched adoptivefamilies.com as a comprehensive searchable website containing the many resources from more than 40 years of publication.
Adoptive Families provides information and support through expert articles, personal stories, expert audio, in-depth eBooks, made-for-sharing Clip & Save tipsheets, parent-to-parent interaction, and more.
Adoptive Families maintains the vibrant online community, AdoptiveFamiliesCircle, and publishes Building Your Family: The Donor, Surrogacy, and Adoption Guide, a valuable resource and national directory for those considering their path to parenthood.
Our Mission: Adoption Education Shouldn’t End with Placement
For more than four decades Adoptive Families has provided readers with trusted perspectives from respected adoption experts and a sense of community from real-life personal stories written by adoptive parents, adoptees, birth parents, and others touched by adoption. Even as we celebrate the joys of family life, we believe that no one should have to parent in a vacuum. Adoptive Families strives to provide a rich toolbox for raising self-aware children who have access to all the information they need to fully consider their race, their roots, and their adoption story as they grow up and as adults.
Readers turn to Adoptive Families to:
- parent consciously rather than with best intentions
- begin an adoption dialogue from day one and give your children all the details of their adoption stories
- talk openly about racial differences in your family and racism in society
- sensitively build a relationship with an expectant mother and father and navigate an open adoption
- respond to misperceptions about adoption at your child’s school, within your circle of family and friends, or in your larger community
- think about the best way to respond to each of your children’s questions, and create an atmosphere in which they feel safe asking increasingly complex questions.
What We Stand for
- We believe that every child has the right to grow up in a safe, healthy, permanent, and loving family and to know about his or her origins. When this is not possible in a child’s biological family, we believe that adoption is a better option than a childhood spent in institutional or long-term foster care.
- We believe that no individual should be deemed unfit to be a parent based on sexual orientation, religion, race, gender, or marital status.
- We believe that all members of the adoption constellation benefit from transparency in talking about adoption, in their relationships, and in access to birth records and birth family information.
- We believe that no expectant mother should feel coerced or compelled to make an adoption plan due to a lack of information, resources, or support and that, if she ultimately chooses adoption, she should be supported and respected in her decision and her place in that child’s life.
- We believe that all families touched by adoption, whether through domestic newborn, U.S. foster, or international adoption, have more similarities than differences, and that we can all learn from and teach each other through our experiences.
Who We Are
Adoptive Families is published by parenting and health publisher New Hope Media and is based in New York, NY. AF has consistently been staffed by adoptive parents, adult adoptees, adoptive grandparents, and siblings in families formed by adoption.
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief: Susan Caughman
Editor: Eve Gilman
Advertising Sales: Anne Mazza
Digital Marketing Director: Anni Rodgers
Designers: Mark Gentile, Ron Anteroinen
Developer: Christopher Muro
Editorial Advisory Board
Jane Aronson, D.O., Worldwide Orphans Foundation, New York, NY
Denise M. Bierly, Esq., Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, Bierly & Rabuck, State College, PA
Deborah Borchers, M.D., F.A.A.P., Crossroad Health Center, Cincinnati, OH
Jane Brown, M.S.W., Scottsdale, AZ
Susan Soon-keum Cox, Holt International Children’s Services, Eugene, OR
Beth Hall, Pact, An Adoption Alliance, San Francisco, CA
Dana Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., International Adoption Clinic, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Deborah Johnson, M.S.W., Kindred Journeys International, Minneapolis, MN
Regina Kupecky, L.S.W., Adoption & Attachment Therapy Partners, Broadview Heights, OH
Kathy Ledesma, AdoptUSKids, Linthicum, MD
Mark McDermott, J.D., Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, Washington, DC
Joni S. Mantell, M.S.W., Infertility and Adoption Counseling Center, Pennington, NJ
Adam Pertman, National Center on Adoption and Permanency, New York, NY
Vicki Peterson, L.I.C.S.W., Chestnut Hill, MA
Debbie Riley, M.S., Center for Adoption Support and Education, Burtonsville, MD
Sarah Saffian, L.M.S.W., M.F.A., New York, NY
Jayne Schooler, Columbus, OH
Sarah Springer, M.D., F.A.A.P., Kids Plus Pediatrics, Pittsburgh, PA
Judy Stigger, The Cradle, Evanston, IL
Peter J. Wiernicki, Esq., Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, Joseph Reiner & Wiernicki, PC, Rockville, MD