Older Child Adoption

Many people may not know how many children there are waiting for families in China. While the wait for healthy babies continues to get longer, there are children on the waiting child list who wait almost as long for their families to find them.

Choosing the waiting child path may not be for every family, but there are so many amazing children who wait every day. These children may have may have medical special needs and others may be older. Right now, there are a number of children who are in LWB programs that wait.

One story of the special needs path has unfolded over the last six months on the Motherlode blog, part of the New York Times. Last week, the story of an older special needs adoption from China was featured, “An Adoption, Six Months Later”. Jenny Staff Johnson and her husband adopted a six year old little who had severe scoliosis from China this past July. Jenny, who has written periodically about her adoption of her daughter Rosemary, wrote an essay about what it means to bond to an older child and to be a family.

In this essay, she talks about the process of bonding with her colicky, biological children and then how surprisingly easy the bonding process has been with Rosemary. She had planned for the worst, but says that it has “exceeded my wildest dreams.”

She summarizes her experience this way:

Parenting both biological and adopted children has taught me this: fit is different with every child, regardless of how they come to you. Sometimes you just have to work at it for a while. It’s natural, and it’s O.K. We expected our daughter to grieve, and she has. To sometimes be angry at us, and she has been. But mostly, she is a game member of the family she joined already in progress.

This essay was very well written and honest, and the comments that follow are just as informative. What an uplifting and inspiring story…..our only hope is that another child waiting will find their family.

Have you considered the adoption of an older child or a child with a medical special need? What concerns do you have? If you have adopted an older child, what were your experiences? What advice would you have for someone considering an older child?