About four months after she came home to us, S- suddenly got very ill. She ended up in the hospital with a chest infection so bad that, at one point, she stopped breathing.

We thought we knew her quite well by then – after all, we’d been with her day and night for a third of a year. But we didn’t, not really.

She was so strong. Strong and tiny, and angry. I looked at her restless, fighting body, saw all the rage and distress and the fear she was going through, and mixed in with my own fear and helplessness was what I can only think of now as a profound sense of respect for her.

When it got really bad I sat next to her and held her hand like they do in the movies. They were putting a drip into her foot and she was exhausted. Exhausted and at the end of her tether. She had her head turned towards me and she was looking at me. Her eyes were extraordinarily big and blue. I wiped away my own tears and saw the question framed in the big, limpid pools of her eyes: can I trust you?

She was only a year and 1 month old at this point and she had been fighting a battle not only in this alien environment for the last couple of days but in the alien environment we’d taken her to for the last 6 months. Now she was asking me the biggest, most serious thing.

Can I trust you?

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I just sat and held her hand and looked into her eyes.

G- and I are both bookworms, and so I thought it might be useful/interesting/not completely dull to list some of our recommended books on parenting.

Then I remembered that one of the things we had to do way back when we went to our adoption panel to be approved for a child was to provide a reading list.

Don’t ask me why [perhaps it was just to show what swots we are]. The panel certainly didn’t – ask us about our reading, I mean. [Perhaps they could tell - that we were swots, I mean.]

So was it a complete waste of time? Well, almost but not quite, because I can now save myself a bit of effort and cut and paste the list.

• Archer C. First steps in parenting the child who hurts. Jessica Kingsley Publishers 1999.
• Campbell N. Blue-eyed son. Pan 2005.
• Cleese J, Skynner R. Families and how to survive them. Vermillion 1993
• Fahlberg V. A child’s journey through placement. BAAF 1994
• Ford G. The contented toddler years. Vermillion 2006
• Faber A, Mazlish E. How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. Piccadilly Press, 2001
• Gerhardt S. Why love matters. Routledge, 2004.
• Hirst M. Loving and living with traumatised children. Reflections by adoptive parents. BAAF 2006
• Layard R. Happiness. Allen Lane 2006.
• The adopter’s handbook. BAAF 2006
• Stoppard M. Complete baby and childcare. Dorland Kindersley 2006
• Verrier N. The primal wound. Gateway 1999.

The one that our social workers were keen on was The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. This helped introduce us to social work thinking on adoption and to theories on the damaging effects of childhood trauma, abandonment and loss. But it is a bit of a slog, and any reader should bear in mind that it’s based almost exclusively on research with adopted adults who were relinquished as babies. Here in the UK at least, that’s an increasingly rare phenomenon, and there was always a question in my mind as to how up-to-date the book is.

So which ones did we really like? Well, Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters, which does a fantastic job of explaining early child development, and the one with a long title about talking by Faber and Mazlish. This one’s brilliant at encouraging a healthy relationship with your kids.

Nicky Campbell, who’s a TV presenter in the UK, was adopted and his book is an interesting insight into how it feels to have both birth and adoptive parents [as well as a large extended family]. He’s particularly eloquent on the subject of identity and how adoption affects the jigsaw of your personality.

Richard Layard’s Happiness is nothing less than a prescription for a healthier society and a better environment for us to bring our kids up in. That to me is worth at least a look – which you can do from here.

The other author I should mention is Gina Ford. We found that S- really benefited from routine and stability, especially in the early days and some of Ford’s ideas were helpful. The single most useful advice we had on daytime sleep came from The Contented Baby, and this was to manage things in terms not so much of how long your children stay down but how long they are awake before their naps. That to me was a revelation.

Oh, just one more – ok, two. Murkoff, Eisenberg and Hathaway’s What to expect books are useful aide memoires, and surprisingly amusing, too. But we wouldn’t be without Penelope Leach. Baby and Child [Penguin 1989] might be a bit old now, but to me Leach is the guru. I hang on her every word.