Speranza’s Sweater

Kids deserve a safe place to live and grow and learn. For some kids, this means living with foster or adoptive parents. Speranza’s Sweater chronicles one child’s experience through the foster and adoptive system. Speranza wears her sweater everywhere, hanging onto the last memories of her birth home, until it’s threadbare. Like her unraveled sweater, Speranza must weave together a new story, bringing threads from her past and strands from her present, into a future of love, family, and the true meaning of home.In this heart-warming and reassuring story, children are offered permission to feel and experience their own story authentically. It provides hope and support for the many mixed emotions a child will experience during their foster and adoption journey, through the unraveling and re-weaving of a favorite sweater. Speranza also introduces children to potential life experiences of foster and adopted classmates, friends, or family members. By reading Speranza’s story with your child, and discussing the experience of a child in a similar situation, you can create a safe space to talk about feelings of grief, loss, excitement, confusion, anger, sadness, or any of the many other feelings accompanying removal, foster care, and adoption.Speranza’s Sweater also includes a dictionary of words to empower children and their carers by understanding the language used around them. 3