You have waited for years to finally bring home a child to fill your home and your heart with joy and laughter. While working on your pre-adoption education requirements, you dreamt of seeing your fridge plastered with silly photos and crayon art. You survived mountains of adoption paperwork, piles of books, and countless budget overhauls because you knew it would be worth it once this child joined your family. However, now that your child is here, things are not quite what you expected. They are irritable, shut down, and uninterested in your attempts to connect. What do you do when older child adoption isn’t panning out the way you expected it to?
An Older Child Brings Unique Challenges
Older children (in adoption circles, this means any child over the age of 4) come to us with personalities already formed and life experiences already under their belts, including challenging memories and trauma already wired into their brains and hearts. Everything they endured on their way to your home impacts who they are on the day you meet them. They may struggle with challenging behaviors, fear, anxiety, and difficulty making the transition to your family.
It’s incredibly frustrating and painful for everyone when older child adoption feels hard all the time. Frequently, the experience feels more challenging because there is a mismatch of expectations. Many adoptive parents will benefit from adjusting their expectations. Our
Executive Director, Dawn Davenport, often says that adoptive parents should lower their expectations of themselves and their children. And then drop them some more. Coming to this new relationship with loosely held expectations of how the relationship will unfold and what you can do will help pave a path forward.
These tips can help you adjust to this new relationship and help your family be flexible and adaptable to meet these challenges. You can learn how to grow together into a loving, trusting relationship!
Tip #1: Expect the Unexpected
This transition into a new, adoptive home is enormous for an older child. There’s a wide range of “normal” behaviors and feelings about the experience. It’s never too late to adopt the mentality of “expecting the unexpected.” You are less likely to feel like you are constantly reacting in crisis mode. Instead, you can hold your plans and expectations loosely and flex to meet the child’s needs as you encounter them.
Tip #2: Put Your Detective Hat On
While you may have spent months or years building a delicious sense of anticipation and joy around welcoming this child home, their lead-up was likely quite different. Many kids don’t understand the process by which they have come to your home, or they have significant pain, fear, and sadness about leaving their first family, foster home, or other familiar surroundings. Even if their foster family, case worker, or orphanage staff prepared them for the change, living it out is often nothing like they could picture.
You must be a detective, observing their mannerisms, emotions, and reactions to understand how they process things. While your child may be excited about the gains they are experiencing, they may also struggle with the many losses adoption brings. Moving into a new bedroom with their own bed and a full closet is exciting. But they might miss sharing their room with their foster siblings. The love and support of a permanent family is a gain, but they cannot process the idea of “permanency” yet, and they miss playing with all their friends from the orphanage. Being a detective about their experiences and how they are processing them can help you give them the words to go with the feelings inside.
Tip #3: Lend Your Calm
Be a calming presence.
These emotions confuse your child, and they need your calm when struggling. Remember that many kids who feel confusion, sadness, and fear will act out in anger. They are still learning how to navigate their mixed feelings and how to express them. Offering calm, reassuring comfort and maintaining a safe presence can soothe the struggle and help them understand they are not alone in solving these confusing emotions.
Look for the underlying need and narrate it.
Another way to lend your calm to your child is to consider what need is under the meltdown or dysregulation the child is stuck in. For example, if you adopt internationally, your child may not have the language skills to say, “I’m scared I won’t get breakfast tomorrow.” So they sneak into the kitchen to grab snacks and stash them under their bed. Your calm, regulated response can help them name the emotion, identify the behavior you want to correct, and offer them tools to learn a new way to handle that fear.
When you can hold your emotions in check and narrate your way through your child’s dysregulation, you help them understand their big feelings. You can respond with love, compassion, and presence in ways that validate what your child is feeling without approving of their challenging behaviors or dysregulated emotions. For example, you can say, “I think I’m seeing a lot of sadness on your face. Are you missing your old bedroom (first Mom, foster family’s dog, etc.)?” Once you determine where the sadness comes from, you can say, “I get it. That feels really sad, and I will sit here with you while you feel it. Can I hold your hand (or hug or rub your back) while you feel that sadness?”
Your validation of their emotions and calm, regulated responses will diffuse the challenging behaviors and show them in tangible ways that you are with them in the good and the hard stuff.
Tip #4: Convey Respect for Your Child’s Experience
When you bring an older child home through adoption, they have already lived through many years of life experiences. This includes developmental milestones, cultural norms, and a unique understanding of who they are and where they fit.
Introducing this child to a new family, social norms, cultural experiences, and expectations can be the ultimate culture shock. If you traveled to another country to adopt this child, you might be able to relate to this shock in a small way. Your child may have had strong ties to their birth name, traditional foods, daily rhythms, language, belief systems, etc. Suddenly, those all disappear, and your child is expected to adapt to a completely new everything!
Raising a Transracial or Multicultural Adopted Child
Be on the lookout for ways to tangibly show respect for the experiences your older child brings to your home. If you learn that they love a particular comfort food from their family or country of origin, learn how to make that dish. Without interrogating them, be curious and ask about what they experienced before joining your family. Pay attention to what music they love, their favorite shows or books, holidays, etc.
Some of this information will come out as you get to know your child. You can also refer back to the training for this adoption you did. Look for details on culturally significant holidays, foods, or traditions. Research or work with a case worker to fill in gaps so you can support the child without expecting the child to educate you.
Tip #5: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
It’s never too early to ask for help! And it’s also nothing to be ashamed of. There are many places to get help, including the CreatingaFamily.org Adoption Resource Guide. Here are a few we think will also be helpful as you navigate older child adoption.
- Your home study caseworker or social worker
- Our online support community (Creating a Family)
- FREE courses from our partner, Jockey Being Family
- Therapy Resources for adoptive families
Tip #6: Recognize that Transitions Take Time
We often see a fairy-tale, “love at first sight” version of adoption in the media. So, some new adoptive parents are thrown for a loop when they feel like babysitters instead of loving, giddy new parents. Others feel frustrated that they may have all the feelings, but their new child seems distant and uninterested.
Please don’t worry – taking time to warm up to each other is entirely normal. Again, this older child comes to your home with their own set of experiences and expectations. You can get to know each other and let trust and connection develop. Recognize that it develops differently for everyone; your challenge will be keeping pace with your child.
Tip #7: Have Fun with Your Older Child
One great way to work on building a secure, loving attachment with your older child is to have fun together. Laughter and happy experiences are like glue in your relationship. While you are being a detective about what makes your child feel fear or sadness, observe what elicits belly laughs and joy. Playing together, finding something they enjoy doing, and having fun will ease the challenging moments and give you all the fuel to keep developing your parent-child bond.
Build a Foundation Together
Adopting an older child brings unique challenges to your family. But when you practice safe presence and demonstrate your willingness to welcome and respect this child, you will show them the love and support they need to thrive in your home. Even if it takes a little while for that love to grow, and the transition may feel bumpy, you are building a foundation with them that will be sure and true.
This post was originally published by Creating A Family on February 6, 2025. View the original post here.
