Publications by Brenda McCreight PH.D.

Recovering from Hazardous Parenting

This book is for parents who have raised children and youth with extremely challenging behaviors and who now seek ways to recover from the years of unrelenting stress. This isn’t a book about how you should have raised your child. It isn’t a book that blames your child, or you.

The purpose of this book is to validate what you are experiencing now.

---

Family Matters

Recent events on the world stage have made many parents realize that there are larger problems that threaten to pull families apart. Moms and dads want to keep their children emotionally close to them, and keep their families intact, but they don’t always need or want outside help in order to do this. instead, many families are looking for simple strategies to strengthen their family ties and to learn how to turn to family first when the hard times hit.

Each chapter contains examples of how families have used the relevant strength to improve family relationships; how to evaluate if your family is using the relevant strength; how to look at your current family and your family of origin; suggestions for implementing this strength in the family; and the relevance of the methods to family strength.

---

Bella Ann

Bella Ann, age 10, has grown up in foster care and doesn't expect to ever have a family so she is amazed when a single woman decides to adopt her. Bella Ann waits anxiously for her new mom to find out about the terrible thing that is wrong with her, the thing that makes everyone give her away.

After the first year, Bella Ann is settled in and happy. She begins to explore friendships, and she loves her new grandparents, but Bella Ann also finds herself in trouble at school. Will her new mom find out what is wrong with her? Will her new mom send her back to foster care?

---

Help I’ve Been Adopted

This book is written for all older child adoptees, for their parents, and for the professionals who work with them. The purpose of the book is to address the issues that aren’t given the time or attention that many young adoptees need in order to fit the past into its rightful place and to grasp onto the present. Understanding the past and living in the present is a life long struggle for many adoptees who experience pre-natal exposure to drugs and alcohol and who survive early neglect and abuse - this book gives them a place to start their own journey to emotional health.

Each chapter contains stories about how other children or youth overcame these issues and suggests ways the child and parent can communicate about these concerns.

The book is easy to read, and can be used by the family, by therapists, and by social workers to help the beginning stages of an adoptive placement go more smoothly, or, it can be used years later to help the family talk with each other about adoption issues that they wish they had discussed early on. 

Help I’ve Been Adopted is being published by Tapestry Books, and will be sold through Tapestry Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, major wholesalers and retail bookstores.

---

Recognizing and Managing Children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Effects:

A Guidebook published by the Child Welfare League of America 1997: For any parent or professional living or working with children who are challenged by FAS, this important guide offers practical advice and solid information on dealing FAS’s lifelong effects on behavior and learning. It covers the historical, medical and social aspects of fas, and details common behavioral characteristics associated with the condition. Taking a developmental approach, the guide offers specific behavioral management techniques to be used from infancy through late adolescence. The author’s own case studies are used to clarify psychological concepts and to personalize the syndrome.

This book can be ordered through www.amazon.ca , www.amazon.com , and directly from the publisher at www.cwla.org or from your local bookstore.

---

Parenting Your Older Adopted Child

This book is written for adoptive parents and adoption social workers who are wrestling with the challenges of creating, supporting, and enhancing families whose children were older than two years at the time of the placement. The book provides basic knowledge about the challenges that families may face, and will provide simple skills and techniques that can enhance the durability and quality of the parent/child relationship.

The booklet includes the six key elements of successful older child adoption.

1. Acquiring knowledge about the child’s needs
2. Becoming skilled in meeting those needs
3. Creating support for the child, siblings who live in the home, and parents
4. Developing patience and tolerance
5. Embracing the adoptive relationship as a lifelong commitment
6. Facing the facts by accepting the child for who s/he is now.

It includes topics such as attachment, grief and loss, aggressive and/or sexually intrusive behaviors, family identity formation, international adoption issues, and more

This book can be ordered through www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.com, and directly from the New Harbinger Publications www.newharbinger.com

Published by New Harbinger Publications.

---

Eden’s Secret Journal: The Story of An Older Child Adoption

My name is Eden and I am 13 ½ years old. I am writing this story about me because my therapist said I should. She said if I write down all about my life then maybe I will understand it better. Read an excerpt.

Published by Adoption Press.

The book is available from Adoption Press

*What is an e-Book? An e-Book is an electronic book, one you read digitally on your computer, laptop screen or on devices called ebook readers.