Phil Weglarz BIO:

In 2013, Phil Weglarz became a first-time parent of an infant through a private, local same-race adoption with an ongoing direct two-way relationship with his daughter’s birth mother. Prior to this, he had professional experience as an attachment-based play therapist and parent coach for birth/first parents seeking reunification, and foster-to-adoptive parents in an agency that specialized in working with children with co-occurring mental health and learning challenges.

Phil’s interest and specialty have always been trauma-informed, sensory-based, and creative modalities for parent-child and peer-to-peer engagement. He currently serves as core faculty and program chair for the Expressive Arts Therapy program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, based in San Francisco. Most recently, he completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled, “Kaleidoscopes of Kinship: A Narrative Inquiry of Birth Fathers’ and Adoptive Fathers’ Experiences of Open Adoptions” (2022), in which he interviewed 5 birth fathers and 23 adoptive fathers about what it is like for them to belong to families created through foster care or private adoptions. This work has already been recognized by the Rudd Adoption Research Program at UMass-Amherst, and he will be sharing these intimate stories of men’s perspectives of adoption in various ways soon.