Mary Hopkins-Best

Good book on challenges of adopting a toddler. This will make you stop & think. Toddlers are active in their world with no language to contribute - these little ones tend to have a harder time than younger or older. Anyone adopting a toddler really needs to read this.

it's not that there isn't anything of value in this book, because there definitely is. but the author's tone is really hard to get past. she is firstly, writing a book that has this pseudo-academic style to it, complete with lengthy details about what she was going to discuss throughout the book and summaries of each chapter, which makes it incredibly tedious to get through. coupled with this academic language is a really annoying overuse of the exclamation point, which i guess isn't really show more a fair complaint to make, except to say that it bothered me and didn't fit in with the content. her tone is also extremely judgmental and directive - so she says things like, 'if you are or believe in x, y, and z, then you would be a good candidate for toddler adoption. but if you are like a, b, and c, you should consider a different route to parenting or shouldn't parent at all!' it's not even that i necessarily disagree with everything she was getting at, it's just the way she said it was really confrontational, and there was nothing constructive about it. if i wasn't required to read this, i might have actually put it down 1/4 of the way through it. show less

As we can't in anyway know what our child will be like until after we pick them up, reading this book before you adopt is absolutely essential if you are even so much as "considering" adopting a child aged between 1 and 3!
And, I think both potential adoptive mums and dads should read this, especially if only one parent is going to stay home and the other will mainly be at work (and therefore not know through first hand experience exactly what the home-parent is coping with).