So You've Adopted a Sibling by Holly Marlow

Delly does try, but even with the social worker’s help, it becomes clear that she isn’t able to keep her child consistently safe. The story includes a social worker who tries many times to help the birth parent to learn how to parent. This can be interpreted as a metaphor for an addiction that existed pre-birth and that Delly sadly does not overcome, or it might more simply represent memory and concentration problems due to the birth parent’s own traumatic experiences, health issues or a learning disability. I didn’t want to make it specifically about him anyway, as the details of his story are private, and his to share if he so wishes, so I included metaphors that can be interpreted in a few different ways, depending on the child’s life story.ĭelly Duck frequently gets distracted chasing butterflies, forgetting to look after her egg, then her duckling when the egg hatches. When I wrote my first book, ‘ Delly Duck: Why a Little Chick Couldn’t Stay with his Birth Mother,’ we hadn’t yet been matched, so I didn’t know the specific story of my son. I usually use stories to help my children to understand and process emotive topics, but while we were going through the adoption process, I couldn’t find any stories that explained why some children can’t stay with their birth families, so I decided to write my own! My children ask a lot of questions, which have inspired me to write books about adoption and foster care. I have a 6 year old biological daughter, Zoe, and a 3 year old adopted son, “J,” who joined our family when he was 13 months old. Holly strives for a gentle/therapeutic parenting style and this has led her to create stories to help children to understand some of the emotional and practical complexities of adoption.

Holly Marlow is a British author and parent to biological and adopted children.

So You've Adopted a Sibling by Holly Marlow