Adoption Magazine: Adopting an Older Child From Foster Care

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Adopting an Older Child From Foster Care

author: Rebecca


People often ask me why I decided to adopt from foster care. As with so many things in life, there is no one simple answer. My husband and I had a desire to grow our family and a vague awareness that there was a need for parents to adopt older children, who are considered difficult to place compared to infants and toddlers. (I'm even more conscious of that need now, having since acquired additional awareness about the challenges faced by teens who age out of foster care without finding permanency with adoptive families.) I thought that my husband and I would be good candidates to parent an older child. Though I had loved parenting my biological daughter Mackenzie when she was an infant, I had also enjoyed moving into later stages of child development. I didn't really want to return to the baby stage. I'm a word person -- I like interacting with children when they have acquired language and I enjoy them even more as their sophistication with language increases; my husband is similar to me in this regard. I have enjoyed every stage of parenting, and I have never wanted to go back to an earlier one. I seem to like each stage better than the one before. (So far, at least. I'm aware that I may feel differently when the teen years arrive.) Adopting a child who was close in age to the one we already had allowed us to stay at the same general stage of development, more or less. (Because of her challenging history, there are some ways that our adopted daughter is developmentally "younger" than her chronological age, but that discrepancy is decreasing already and will likely continue to dissipate.)

Prior to becoming a foster-adopt parent, I had read a lot of books about trauma and attachment issues (including Heather Forbes'?Beyond Consequences?books, which were especially helpful in increasing my understanding of the child's fears and anxieties, though, to be honest, I never quite mastered her techniques). I believed that I had a pretty good grasp of the challenges we were likely to encounter, and I believed that my husband and I were up to those challenges. I underestimated. I really could not have imagined just how challenging the first year would be. Ashley entered our home with a lot of emotional baggage and behavioral issues. In the beginning, we experienced melt-downs almost daily. She swore at us. She threw things. She destroyed things. She hit.

But after each one of these melt-downs (and she wasn't always the one having the melt-down -- sometimes it was me!), we would find our way back to connection, and she learned that we were going to stick with her no matter what. We weren't going to send her away (as previous foster parents had done) when she "misbehaved." Over time, the difficult behaviors decreased and the good days increased. Eventually, the good days became the norm. Today, she is a different child. The aggressive behaviors are gone, and the truly amazing child that she is has emerged.

Would I go back and do it all again? In a second! Yes, those early months of her placement with us were difficult, but the joyful outcome is worth every one of those "labor pains."?


Rebecca Hawkes is both an adoptive mother, via foster care, and an adult adoptee in reunion. She writes about adoption from both perspectives on her blog Love Is Not A Pie:?http://rebecca-hawkes.blogspot.com/. She is also a cofounder of?ashleysmoms.org, a fledgling organization devoted to helping others create successful open adoptions.

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Source: http://www.adoptionmagazine.ca/2011/09/adopting-older-child-from-foster-care.html

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