Parenting Your Adopted Older Child: How to Overcome the Unique Challenges and Raise a Happy and Healthy Child

by Brenda McCreight

If you've adopted a child older than two years--from the U.S. or abroad--this practical guide will provide you with all the information and tools you'll need to overcome difficulties and develop a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1572242841
• ISBN13: 9781572242845
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

One of my favorites

Over the past 8 years we have adopted an 18 month old, a 3 year old and a 12 year old and amassed a large adoption related library. I just stumbled across this book last week and found it to contain a lot of information that is not adequately addressed in any of my other books. I sure wish I had found this book 2 years ago, before we brought our 12 year old home. Not everyone who adopts a child over age 2 will need the material presented here, but most everyone who brings home an elementary age or pre-teen child will benefit from this book!

A helpful resource

I read this book prior to adopting my daughter at age four. I felt it was helpful in preparing us for what to expect, including emotional and behavioral issues resulting from past trauma. Like many older child adoption books, it can 'scare' prospective adoptive parents a bit and have them thinking "is this really something I can handle?" But that is good, because parents can not go into older child adoption thinking that love will fix everything. I just loaned this to a friend who is struggling in the first year with her new children through older-child adoption. I think it will help her understand that this is challenging for most parents and she is not alone in feeling discouraged sometimes. Christine Mitchell Author and Illustrator of Family Day: Celebrating Ethan's Adoption Anniversary and Welcome Home, Forever Child: A Celebration of Children Adopted as Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Beyond

Provides great insight! An excellent book for older adoped children

An excellent read and very insightful for parents of older adopted children. I highly recommend this book. Gives you insight into what the child may have gone through and reasons why they may be behaving in certain ways. A valuable book and great for reference as the child grows older.

Adequate but not stellar...

We adopted a four-year-old boy from Russia during the middle part of last year, and, of course, we faced many of the challenges that other families encounter in building trust, establishing a bond, integrating a new family member, and so forth. Having nearly survived the difficult early period, we were recommended this book by our social worker as something of interest to parents in our situation. I found this book to be okay: helpful on the diagnosis side, but not so helpful on the resolution side. As with other books about parenting, it does to tend to present issues more in the light of nightmare scenarios (exaggerating what most parents encounter, which is not to say that some parents don't encounter situations just like those presented, of course). It's nice that the book immeidately goes beyond the catch-all rubric of "attachment problems", a phrase that is uselessly vague and helplessly non-specific. Our son faced (and continues to face) a number of challenges that this book does help identify (sexual abuse, abandonment, language skills, etc.) and categorizing the different kinds of issues in their own framework is a huge benefit. It then proceeds to give bullet-point ways to try and address the situations. This is not an entirely satisfactory. Instead of seeming surefooted, these come across more like folk remedies (with no measure of success, no case studies showing whether something is working or showing lack of progress as well). Some things just seem like they are thrown out because they worked for the author. For example, why is it that giving your child a massage is a constant suggestion? I mean, yes, by all means, use physical contact as appropriate, but really now... family foot massage time is such a specific recommendation. It seems like the suggestions could use more polish. I found a lot of the suggestions to be rather indistinctly delivered as well. Having validated one's observations (or stirred one's fears) there is relatively little material on how to work on various problems. I don't know how things will ultimately work out for our family, of course. I like to think that, for the most part, we have the issues under control and are creating a happy, safe environment for our son. This book in many ways recognizes the challenges this presents and is valuable in helping identify challenges that might otherwise go unnoticed. But it is not so helpful in resolving the problems. For that other books might be more suitable.

Rare, practical book in the adoption literature

While my wife and I have not looked far and wide, it seems that much of the non-academic adoption literature is very "adopt at birth"-focused.McCreight's book is a rarer find, focusing on the differences older-child adoption presents. It is also rare in its presentation: wonderful, bulleted recommendations in bullet form, covering all of the major behavioral problems adoptive parents might run into. (Easy to look up in crisis situations!)Lastly, McCreight has all the best street-cred: she's both a child therapist and an adoptive parent of seven.I'd highly recommend this text for any prospective or current adoptive parent of an older child.