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Lifebooks
An Adoption Backstory
By Kelly Burgess
Probst, who gives workshops on creating lifebooks, notes that it's important for children to have a truthful account of their beginnings, as best as parents are able to provide. She has seen cases where, because the child's life before adoption was not discussed, they don't even realize they were born in the same manner as other children, or they may think they were born on the airplane that brought them to this country.
While lifebooks help children understand their antecedents, they provide a valuable service for parents as well by helping them decide how to approach conversations about their child's adoption. "The larger picture of lifebooks is that they help the child understand their lives before they were adopted, but there's also a great deal of value for parents in the process of creating the lifebook," says Probst. "When parents let the information simmer, and think about how they want to put it in the lifebook, what they're doing is thinking about how to talk to the child. Then, when the child is in the back seat of the car and asks a question, the parent can pop into the framework of what they've already prepared. It gives parents confidence."
This is why Probst is not a fan of the "just do it" philosophy that many experts take toward lifebooks or of the pre-made, fill-in-the-blanks type of lifebook. She prefers a more carefully crafted, truthful version with a big emphasis on positive reframing. In other words, although there are often difficult parts of a child's early life, such as with Joy Charette, what's important is to emphasize the child's resilience, rather than just offering a string of facts. It's the foundation of how they'll view their beginnings and is an important part of their vision of themselves.