Adoptive Mom Courtney White on Ending the "Grateful Adoptee" Story and Building a Parenting Tool That Actually Helps

Resources & Links Mentioned

• Get Courtney's self-regulation tool for foster/adoptive parents here
• Courtney on Instagram 
• Parenting Different website

Chat with Julie here

Join The Refuge Membership Community here

Foster and adoptive parents are so often set up to fail their kids - not because they don't love them, but because no one ever taught them how to regulate themselves first. In this episode, Julie sits down with Courtney White, an adoptive mom who, alongside her husband, welcomed three siblings (ages 7, 9, and 11) into their family after the children's parents were incarcerated. Courtney and her husband made the choice to stay closely connected to the kids' extended birth family rather than create distance - all while navigating a layoff and two parental leaves at once.

Out of that season, Courtney - a technical writer by trade with no background in child psychology or marketing - built Phrasewell, a research-based tool that gives foster and adoptive parents the right words to say in hard, high-stress parenting moments, so they can stay regulated and help their kids feel safe.

Julie and Courtney talk honestly about the cultural "rescue narrative" around adoption and fostering, why kids shouldn't have to perform gratitude to feel safe and loved, what it looks like to hold space for a child's grief while parenting them day to day, and why supporting every side of the adoption triad - the adoptee, the birth family, and the adoptive family - matters. This is a conversation about honesty: one that doesn't flatten adoption into a feel-good story, and doesn't flatten foster parents into saints or villains either.

In This Episode

• How being a technical writer shapes the way Courtney approaches parenting and problem-solving
• The gap Courtney saw in state-provided foster/adoptive training
• An update: the three siblings' adoption finalized in December
• Choosing to stay close with the kids' birth siblings and extended family rather than create distance
• Navigating a new blended family alongside her husband's layoff and two parental leaves
• What surprised Courtney most about the day-to-day reality of fostering
• Why she and her husband sought their own therapy and support
• The cultural "rescue narrative" - kids expected to be grateful - and why it's harmful
• "Performing gratitude" for safety and belonging, and how to recognize it
• Julie shares her own adoption story and the difference between physical and emotional safety
• Where the idea for her self-regulation tool actually came from
• A hard, honest conversation with her adopted daughter about feeling treated differently
• What "self-regulation" really means in practice for a foster or adoptive parent
• From a free AI job-search tool (built after her husband's layoff) to building Phrasewell
• How Phrasewell works - research-based, no AI, no stored personal data
• From a 2018 e-commerce podcast to this conversation - why this one feels different
• Phrasewell's free trial and pricing model
• The resource Courtney still wishes existed: local, in-person foster/adoptive parent community
• What she'd say to a parent in the middle of a hard moment right now
• What's next - including a new study app she built for her daughter

If this episode landed for you, sit with it for a minute before you move on to whatever's next in your day. And if the podcast has meant something to you, a five-star review - or even a few written words - helps this work reach more adoptees, more families, and more people who need to hear that they are not alone.

Remember: you are never alone in this.

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