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How old are your kids? The biggest issues with children with problems influencing their siblings is often if they are older and particularly if they are placed in possitions of responsibility over the younger children.
I haven't had a lot of personal experiences with adopting relatives, but we had family friends that eventual adopted two of their neices from a pretty disfunctional family. It worked out well for them mostly because, the kids were young, and the family spent a lot of concentrated efforts to spend enough time making up for past issues, and the other children were very supportive. It usually comes down to how much effort and time you're willing to take to love and suffer through untill she becomes a child with a stable image of the world.
Personally my greatest fear if I were doing this would be time, I would really be aware of how much we would be able spend with her. While I might still keep working if I was orginally, I'd really want to have at least one parent working less than full time if at all possible. Half this girl's life hasn't been spent without supportive available parents and just like other children, she needs that to grow up well, so there's a lot of make up time.
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TCK"s or Third Culture Kids are difined as "[A] person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The third culture kid builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the third culture kid's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background."
How being a TCK relates to my desire to adopt some day: I grew up an international child, and while the walls between country and race mean less to me than most, I grew up with an understanding of the influence of clashing cultures that is hard to explain to someone who exists in solely one culture. God has given me the gift of experiences to fuel my desire for international adoption and to understand an internationally adopted child's world.
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