Helping Children Understand Adoption Through Heartfelt Stories and Compassionate Metaphors
Holly Marlow, author and parent, creates stories that help children understand adoption, foster care and kinship care with empathy, clarity and emotional depth.
Holly Marlow brings a deeply personal and compassionate voice to the world of children’s literature, drawing from her own family’s journey through both biological and adoptive parenthood. With a focus on therapeutic parenting and emotional understanding, Holly has created a collection of thoughtful, accessible stories that gently explore the complexities of adoption, foster care and kinship care. Her debut book, Delly Duck, was born from a heartfelt conversation with her daughter, and it set the tone for a growing body of work that continues to resonate with families around the world. In this interview with Reader’s House Magazine, Holly shares the inspiration behind her writing, the careful process of shaping sensitive narratives for young minds, and the overwhelmingly positive response from families who have found comfort, connection, and clarity in her books.
Marlow’s books offer comfort and clarity, opening up sensitive conversations for adoptive and foster families around the world.
What inspired you to write children’s books focusing on adoption and foster care themes?
All of my books so far have been inspired by questions my children have asked me! My husband and I have a biological daughter, Zoe, and an adopted son, Jake. Zoe was four years old when we started the process to adopt Jake, and she asked me why some children can’t stay with their birth families. It surprised me that she was asking such a deep question already, and I wanted to make sure I answered it properly, in a child-appropriate way, so I made up a story to help explain it to her, and then decided I wanted to use it to help other families to have the same conversation.
Can you share the creative process behind ‘Delly Duck: Why A Little Chick Couldn’t Stay With His Birth Mother’ and how you approached explaining complex topics to children?
My main focus was to find a way to answer “why can’t some children stay with their birth parents” so I decided to use metaphors, so that the adult reading the story could help the child to see how the story relates to their own personal experiences. For example, the birth mother, Delly, keeps chasing butterflies and leaving her egg alone. Chasing butterflies can be a metaphor for an addiction, or it can represent memory and concentration problems that might come from health issues, trauma or a learning disability. The reader can interpret the metaphor in the most appropriate way for the child they are reading to. I chose animals that lay eggs, so that parents reading the story to their child can explain that there were concerns even before the child was born.
I had a few other goals that I wanted to achieve with the story. I wanted to support the empathy my daughter was feeling for birth parents, so I made sure the birth mother character was likeable, even though she didn’t manage to consistently keep her child safe. I also wanted to reassure children that these decisions aren’t made lightly, so I made sure that the story showed that the social worker intervened several times and offered support, before the duckling went to live with the foster family.
‘Room in the Nest’ addresses various aspects of foster care, including reunification and kinship care. How do you balance the emotional depth required to address topics like adoption and fostering with the need to keep your stories engaging for young readers?
Illustrations are really important for keeping children engaged, so I included bright, colourful scenes of the characters doing things that children might find interesting, like playing football, flying a kite and reading one of my other children’s books. I kept the language simple, and used metaphors for the more complex concepts.
In ‘Adoption After a Biological Child’, you discuss your personal journey of adopting after having a biological child. What challenges did you face, and how did they influence your writing?
Oh, it was such an emotional book to write! I had to take a few breaks while I was writing some chapters, but it was also cathartic. It was great to take the time to reflect on the positive experiences we’ve had too.
I was very conscious that although I wanted to share my experiences to help others, I had to respect my son’s ownership of his story, so I kept asking myself “how will he feel when he reads this?” and I avoided going into too much depth about his birth family and his early life experiences.
Your books are available in multiple languages, such as French, German, and Spanish. How has the international reception been, and have cultural differences influenced your storytelling?
I’ve been thrilled to see how well the books have been received in different countries! “Delly Duck” and “Cousins by Adoption” have been bestsellers on Amazon in lots of different countries, which has been incredible.
Cultural differences have definitely affected how things are phrased in the translations. The translators I’ve worked with have been really helpful and they advise me when I need to use more direct language or more subtle language, to evoke the right emotions. The Spanish translation was the most complicated. I had to consult with Mexican and Spanish translators, to find wording that felt right in both Mexican Spanish and European Spanish, without changing the meaning too much.
What feedback have you received from adoptive or foster families about the impact of your books on their children?
I feel incredibly lucky, because I receive messages most days from parents or foster carers saying that they’ve found the books helpful and thanking me for helping them to talk to their child about their birth families or what’s going to happen next. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of hearing that someone has enjoyed one of my books! It’s so fulfilling to know that something I made is helping people.
What advice would you give to other authors aiming to write children’s books on sensitive topics like adoption and foster care?
Metaphors are your friend! They can make emotional concepts relatable and much easier for a child to understand. I also think it’s important to research all of the perspectives in your story, to make sure you shape your characters respectfully. I took a lot of time to talk to adoptees, birth parents, foster carers and other adoptive parents, and I feel that my stories really benefitted from that.
