Letters

Gary Walega

Lafayette, Colorado

May 2005

Thinking about the decision to adopt an older child versus an infant: there are many advantages to adopting the older child. Since you will always have cultural issues when you adopt international you might as well adopt someone who already has a culture instilled in them. A child coming with a sense of culture will add to the home teaching those parts of the culture he/she already treasures. If you adopt a younger child who has no sense of culture, it puts a greater burden on the parents to instill the old culture into the child and create a sense of importance about what you chose to celebrate. If you’re adopting international, you have to embrace the whole culture. Your child will feel more important being able to teach you and will have a sense of ownership by enriching the family.

Softening the emotional scars that the older child has already experienced seems to be a concern. However, I've seen other children who were adopted as infants and they seem to have the same scars. Those scars of rejection by the birth parents will always come to the surface. Adopting the older child allows you to deal with it immediately and can be a wonderful bonding experience. For the child adopted as an infant, anxiety grows over the years as they don't want insult their adoptive family by bringing it up and seeming ungrateful. Adopt the older child and get this issue out of the way right away.

Thinking about Brazil as a choice for an older child, I realize that one of the things that made it easier is that Brazil is a multinational diverse country similar to the United States. This has been an advantage because our daughter has seen people who act and look like us. She has been able to accept us as not being so terribly different from what she has seen in Brazil. Many families in Brazil have children of varying skin tones. In her eyes, we could look like a normal Brazilian family. I think that an adoption from a single ethnic culture country may have this as a higher hurdle to jump.

I understand that the six to eight week stay in Brazil may seem like a huge barrier to some. We thought so, too. However, it turned out to be a big advantage in dealing with our daughter for a couple of reasons. First, we got to experience first hand and enjoy some of the things that she loves about her culture. This gives us common ground to build trust. It fills in the gaps that will need to be filled. Those gaps will need to be filled in regardless and it makes a future trip to experience these things less necessary or less urgent. When she tries to play on our sympathy regarding the country she left behind. We're not totally naive and defenseless.

The older child will always maintain the sense of national pride, this serves as a protection for her as various groups in our culture try to assimilate her into their world. Her sense of pride and the knowledge that her family knows and celebrates the Brazilian part of her encourages the formation of a stronger family. This prevents her from searching for this identity and acceptance in groups that may harm her. The younger child may have greater difficulty in this area.

Is adopting an older child from Brazil easy? No. You must be strong, determined, culturally competent and patient. You must be willing to be the parent that you need to be.

Lastly, whether you adopt a child when they are an infant or sixteen, they remain your child all their life. It doesn't stop when they become eighteen. Look with great joy and anticipation to the years ahead, and not to the early years that were lost.

Jeni has been our daughter all her life, we just had to wait 15 years to receive her.