More Love, Less Panic: 7 Lessons I Learned About Life, Love, and Parenting After We Adopted Our Son from Ethiopia

by Claude Knobler (Goodreads Author)

In this heartwarming and hilarious memoir, Claude Knobler describes how he learned the hard way that the apple actually can fall far from the tree—and that’s Okay.

Already the biological parents of a seven-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter, Claude Knobler and his wife decided to adopt Nati, a five-year-old Ethiopian boy who seemed different from Knobler in every conceivable way. After more than five years spent trying to turn his wild, silly, adopted African son into a quiet, neurotic, Jewish guy like himself, Knobler realized the importance of having the courage to love, accept, and let go of his children.

In this wonderfully written memoir, Knobler explains how his experiences raising Nati led him to learn a lesson that applied equally well to parenting his biological children: It’s essential to spend the time we are given with our children to love them and enjoy them, rather than push and mold them into who we think they should be.

K.j. Dell’antonia rated it 

For a raw, honest, as it happens account of an older child cross cultural adoption, I’ve yet to read better than this. Some of the similarities to our experience made me rethink some of the generalizations that are often made about waiting kids and their needs and experience and emotions–I think a brash cover is more common than people think. Great read for adoptive families.

Published at Goodreads.com: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821135-more-love-less-panic

More Love, Less Panic: 7 Lessons I Learned about Life, Love, and Parenting After We Adopted Our Son from Ethiopia

Claude Knobler, Author

Memoir meets self-help in Knobler’s enjoyable account of life as an adoptive father. Knobler and his wife had two “perfectly good” biological children, ages four and six, when, moved by an article about AIDS orphans in Africa, they decided to adopt. After the couple spent months navigating through government red tape, they took in five-year-old Nati, whose mother was HIV positive. Nati instantly upended stay-at-home dad Knobler’s feeling of being in control of his household. Through this experience, he learned to think more about what was right for his own kids, and less about what American middle-class consumer culture says is best. Knobler’s tone is straightforwardly disarming, as when he reveals that his mother, having spent his “entire life frantically trying to find a nice Jewish girl for me to marry so that I could give her nice Jewish grandchildren,” was now ill at ease about having an Ethiopian grandchild. This wise account has the potential to reach a large parental audience—not just dads, and not just adoptive parents. Agent: Lindsay Edgecomb, Levine Greenberg Rostan Agency. (Jan.) 

Published at Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-399-16795-9