Adopting Older Children: A Practical Guide to Adopting and Parenting Children Over Age Four

Adopting Older Children addresses the most significant challenges surrounding older-child adoption (both domestically and internationally), including mental health, behavioral, and educational concerns. This thorough guide enumerates the issues an older adopted child faces and provides a comprehensive overview of problems and how adopting parents can successfully deal with them, including critical information about developmental issues; problems related to the adoptee's emerging sense of self, including sexual orientation and cultural identity; and other special needs that children may have. Adopting Older Children provides prospective parents the essential tools for coping with transition and family dynamics, educating others about adoption, and understanding the personality, background, and problems of an older adopted child. It also provides a comprehensive methodology for coping with a traumatized child who faces grief and loss, attachment issues, difficulty with development and learning, or physical or mental health concerns, as well as critical resource information for single, LGBT, or older adoptive parents. Adopting Older Children furnishes key parenting strategies, insights, and resources in a clear yet sensitive style, the definitive handbook for adoptive or foster parents and professionals.

Stephanie Bosco-Ruggiero is a communications and research assistant for the National Center for Social Work Trauma Education and Workforce Development at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. She lives in Wappingers Falls, NY. Gloria Russo-Wassell is a nationally certified counselor and doctoral candidate in Educational and Developmental Psychology at Cornell University with a private practice specializing in child and adolescent development. She lives in Dover Plains, NY. Victor Groza is a professor of Social Work at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, with an area of expertise in child welfare and institutional care of children, focusing on family, children, and service system issues in domestic, older-child adoption and inter-country adoption. The author of numerous books and articles relating to child welfare and global adoption, he lives in Cleveland.