What is the New Mexico Fiesta Project?

Family activities New Mexico FIESTA plans and coordinates social opportunities for adoptive parents and their children. Activities include holiday gatherings, sporting and cultural events and more…

Information is provided through a comprehensive lending library of books and videos for adoptive parents, children and professionals. A listing of available materials can be found at www.nmfiesta.blogspot.com in addition to a statewide resource manual of adoption competent service providers. The website has additional information for LGBT and Spanish speaking families.

Educational workshops are scheduled in each region of the state on a quarterly basis. These workshops build on the information provided in preadoption education. Sessions include attachment, discipline, basic parenting, positive adoption language, open adoption, cultural identity development and therapeutic crisis intervention strategies.

Support groups are held each month in every region of the state. Groups are facilitated by experienced, enthusiastic adoptive parents called Family Contacts (FCs). Groups are also provided for extended family members and children. Family Contacts can be reached on tollfree warmlines to provide encouragement and resources.

Training events are held throughout the year for families, educators and social service professionals on topics including: transracial adoption, talking with kids about adoption, neurobiological aspects of attachment, grief and loss.

Adoptive families from all over New Mexico are eligible to participate in the FIESTA project. All of New Mexico's Adoptive Families including Single parents, LGBT families and Spanish speaking families are welcome.

Choosing an Adoption Competent Therapist

The need for adoption-competent mental health services is critical to the ongoing wellbeing of adoptive families. Feedback from adoptive families reflects a struggle to meet the mental health needs of their children due to a failure of some mental health providers to understand the unique issues of adoption that are related to mental health. Health and behavioral health care providers need to have expertise related to adoption in the same way that a provider might specialize in substance abuse treatment or in a specific diagnosis such as autism.

The following list of characteristics related to adoption-competence can serve as a gauge in choosing a therapist:
• Knowing that adoption is a lifelong process that includes universal experiences as well as unique individual feelings and perceptions.
• Recognizing the therapeutic importance of parenting relationships and family connections for the child.
• Addressing developmental challenges that are common to adoption.
• Helping families promote secure attachments and healthy relationships, no matter what developmental challenges arise.
• Viewing adoption from a culturally competent family perspective and understanding the power and complexities of adoptive and birth family dynamics.
• Treating adoptive families as team players, reaching towards the mutual goal of healing for the child.
• Avoiding blaming adoptive parents for their children’s behaviors; reframing everyone’s goal as being part of the solution.
• Helping adoptive parents honor their child’s past and achieve a comfort level that allows their child to address separation, loss and feelings about birth family.
• Supporting adoptive parents in assuming parental entitlement, fully empowering them as decision-makers and “experts” in the parenting journey.
• Recognizing and respecting the unique characteristics and skills that make adoptive families successful and that assist families in developing and practicing those skills.
• Striving to provide in-home and outreach services to families to meet them “where they are.”
• Recognizing that temporary out-of-home treatment is not an adoption failure but may ultimately keep the child and family connected and reunified.

This list is used by permission of Spaulding for Children and the National Consortium for Post Legal Adoption Services, based on the research of Howard, J and Livingston-Smith, S. (1997) Strengthening Adoptive Families: A Synthesis of Post-Legal Adoption Opportunities Grants,

Traits of a Successful Adoptive Parent

To be a successful adoptive parent it takes flexibility, patience, tolerance, and having a sense of humor.


The Successful Adoptive Parent ...
• Is fully prepared for adoption and assists the child with adjustment.
• Maintains a connection with the child’s birth family to ensure the children maintain their sense of identity and experience a reduced sense of loss.
• Uses friends, family members and faith-based communities as a support system.
• Finds humor in daily life (even in crisis) and practices self-care.

Reprinted from Kansas Children's Service League