National Adoption Awareness Month – Pop Quiz 2020

The post below is a slightly edited post from 2019 there is no pop quiz and with the covid-19 pandemic happening I’m hoping that people have become both more aware and motivated to know their family health histories; to document them, to know them, especially for their children they adopted who won’t have grown up in their biological family. Please comment and talk about ensuring this Thanksgiving you will do it, or update it. It’s important.

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We all know that having an updated and robust Family Health History is invaluable, that the older we get, the more important it becomes. Long-time readers of this blog know that I was that adoptee who was too busy living my best life to focus on adoption and being an adoptee, until I wasn’t. Until the lack of any family health history changed my life, completely, a life I never could get back.

That’s why I still harp on Adoptive Parents to make sure they ask for updates every year at Thanksgiving, despite knowing most don’t bother, no matter how much I plead, it’s meh, child is healthy, or we can just pick up the phone, at least they can until that day when there isn’t anyone on the other end.

And, I’m not going to let Birth Parents off the hook, either. Talk to older family members, ask questions, write the answers down, forward the information on so your child benefits. Neither the birthmother nor the birthfather have an excuse to not do this for the child.

And to ALL Adoption Service Providers – you need to do a better job. You need to start requiring a detailed family health history, not just what the mother writes on whatever form you give her while she’s in your office. She (and the father) need to take the forms home and ask their elders to fill them out as it’s often the pattern of the same disease showing up generation after generation that matters. So ASP’s do you job or you’re a hypocrite on how much you care about the child.

Here’s a family health history form to fill out. Do it now, either print copies for people to fill out, email it to fill it out online and save it. Commit to updating it every Thanksgiving.