I have been ruminating this morning about last night’s Older Child Adoption meeting. Two pre-adoptive couples were at this support group meeting; one couple who has three young bio kids are planning to add a teen girl, and the other couple is bringing home two kids under the age of 5 or 6. Looking at their excited, anticipatory faces, I couldn’t help but sit there and wonder if their idyllic image would last, or if it didn’t, how long it would take to fade.

I have blogged about this before.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

When the bough breaks, Part Two

Zebras, not horses

Owl or fowl


I’m not spending much time on the FRUA board these days; time simply doesn’t allow for it. But I often saw posts from pre-adoptive parents or kids-newly-arrived-home parents, describing how they were planning to integrate their kids or how they were already doing just that.


One thing that always made me cringe was the concept of putting newly arrived post-institutionalized kids in the same bedroom as kids already in the home. Ouch. I don’t want to be a pessimist, but this is a disaster waiting to happen. Most folks don’t want to know what goes on in kids’ orphanage rooms. Newly arrived kids need to have their own sleeping space, and ideally that space should be right next to mom and dad. That doesn’t have to be in bed with mom and dad; a nest on the floor is just fine. But someone needs to be watching that child pretty closely for quite some time.


Line-of-sight supervision has many advantages. Consider this: if you just came home from the hospital with a brand new baby, would you leave that child unattended for long periods of time? Isn’t the explosion in baby monitoring devices recognition of the fact that vulnerable kids need close supervision?


If you bring home a toddler, you will instinctively plan on supervising that child more closely than you might consider supervising an older child. But for the couple I mentioned above who has three biological kids, how closely should they watch the teen girl? Are they planning on allowing her to babysit at some point?


The reality is, that child will not likely be 14 in too many ways except chronologically. And Lord knows what things will have happened to her in her 14 years. She will have some feelings of resentment towards the younger kids—how could she not? How could she not look at the happy, easy, non-traumatized existence they have experienced their entire lives and not feel resentful, angry and cheated about her own experiences? Even if she recognizes and fights those feelings, she has them nonetheless. And who, at age 14, is that good at reining in negative feelings? So what will she do with those feelings?


This comment left on yesterday’s post says it all:

I spent some time yesterday with a sweet, smart, teenaged girl, who was sobbing her heart out over all the hurt she has experienced as a result of ten years of living in chaos with two older adopted siblings (adopted as older children). She is struggling with abuse she has suffered, and the deep sadness of seeing her older siblings cast off their adoptive family and fly back to their bio family as soon as they turn eighteen. She was crying to just be "normal" and be able to trust again, like "she used to when she was little".

I know one of Deborah Hannah’s fiercest regrets is the impact her troubled kids had on her healthy birth children.


More coming about this.

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