As adoptive parents, we spend a lot of time contemplating the impact adoption may have on our children. We worry about everything from attachment to post-traumatic stress to developing good birth parent relationships to positive representations of birth country cultures, and on and on and on.

With so much filling our anxiety plate, we might be forgiven for occasionally forgetting that our kids have not only adoption-related issues to face, but also those plain old regular ones that all children have to deal with over the course of their lives.

There is so much adoption-related information around that adoptive parents may overlook some of the great general parenting advice that's available.

Take, for example, Parenting 24/7, a site set up through the University of Illinois as a comprehensive resource for parents of kids from newborn to teens.

With sections on "Competence and Confidence", "Eating and Mealtimes", "Getting along with others", "Guidance and Discipline", and many, many more in the toddler section alone, it's a good place to start when questions arise and advice is sought.

I should have taken a gander when I was explaining the birds and the bees to Sam the other day. Reading the take there has bolstered my confidence by letting me know I'm at least in sync with the pros on the subject:

General answers are usually enough for the young child. Deciding the best time to fully explain reproduction depends on your child’s age, maturity level, curiosity, and exposure to this information by his peer group. Each parent must decide when this time will be.

And it's most certainly not only adopted kids that have trouble with life's transitions, as this article points out. I have no doubt that adoptive parents may worry more about the impact of change and transition on our children, anxious that anything might trigger deep-seated insecurities attached to the original separation from birth parents, but our kids are not alone in not wanting to give up their pacifiers or move into their own beds.

We also sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of adoptive families as the leading edge of multiculturalism with it up to us to break new ground, but in the US there an estimated five-million multicultural or interracial children, and the vast majority are in biological families.

This report from the University of Ohio states that, "multicultural young people who have learned to cope in a racist society often have high self-esteem and a strong sense of personal identity," and that the way they learned to cope, " ... can often be attributed to the parents' view of the world and the way they handle their cultural differences."

For more on general parenting that adoptive families may find helpful, see the next post.