[SandyKassia]

I would like to please talk with people who adopted OLDER kids from Brazil.

My husband and I want to adopt an older child and are thrown away (and scared) of how many issues (severe emotional and psychiatric) is within the US foster care system.

I wonder how was your experience adopting from Brazil.

Did you have many attachment issues? Did you have many problems of ODD, RAD, and other serious emotional/psychiatric side?

Any insight very helpful!!

Thanks,

Sandra Skolny

[LisaF]

I brought my 2 kids home 9 months ago at the age of 7 and 10. I also adopted my daughter from Guatemala at the age of 10. I would be glad to answer any questions that you might have. You can PM me.

Lisa
mom to 5

[Sheriv]

I adopted mine when he was almost 3. I also have a 24 year old we met when he was 19 and he had lived in the orphanage until he was emacipated but he is my son now. You can PM me and I'll share my experience good and bad.

Sheri

[Sheriv]

Attachment issues, especially in older child adoptions are an option no matter where you adopt and Brazil is no exception. Brazilians do not recognize RAD as a disorder. The one thing the psychologist said to us that still rings true is "there are no warm and cozy situations in the adoption process" so there is some degree of trauma.

[Empty_Nest]

Our Brazilian daughter came from an orphange at the age of eleven. We went through four years of hell with her. The placement finally disrupted when she was fifteen and we had to place her in foster care. By then she was threatening to kill the other kids, and we all believed her. It reached a point where we didn't have much choice but to remove her from our home. We lost track of her when she turned eighteen and have had no contact since then. She is in her thirties now.

It's fantasy to believe you can avoid problems by adopting outside the US. Our daughter was routinely beaten at the orphanage where she grew up, by the nuns who ran the place. Although there was nothing in her social history about it, we also believe she was sexually abused by at least one person, based on her behavior. She lied constantly, manipulated, played one parent against the other, got other kids blamed for what she did, tripped the other kids on the stairs, slapped and otherwise abused them, ran away, and in general treated our family in the worst ways possible. To people outside the family, she was the most wonderful child you could ever imagine, polite, helpful, charming. She did very well in institutional settings where no one had any real emotional investment, but completely fell apart in a real family where family-type behavior was expected of her. She was eventually diagnosed with some type of attachment disorder, a disorder which made it difficult or impossible for her to accept change, and a variety of other problems.

All of this has nothing to do with her Brazilian heritage. She was a victim of the circumstances she grew up in, and her behavior was not a result of being from Brazil. How kids cope with their situations and what the result is of whatever traumas they've suffered comes down to each individual. It's impossible to predict, based on what system they may have been in before you get them, which kid will have insurmountable problems and which will overcome them. All older adopted kids have been traumatized in some way. Some are able to overcome horrendous events in their past, while others cannot cope with 'only' being moved from one home to another.

As a contrast, one of our other daughters went through severe, sustained abuse until age four and the US foster system until age ten and is the happiest, most optimistic person I've ever known. She's a true survivor who put herself through college and is now a department manager for a large retail chain. Why she was able to cope with what happened to her and our older daughter was not all comes down to their own unique personalities and coping skills.

[Sheriv]

Amen, sister!!!! I think that people need to take off their rose colored glasses and assume that everyone can be saved if you love them and put up with their abuse enough. It is not true!!!! Sometimes you have to let go....a square peg does not fit into a round hole and sometimes they don't want to despite our desire to help them.

Our mental health community needs to be more forthcoming with this in their assistance helping families. Each child of trauma absorbs, and survives differently no two stories are exactly the same and it is their circumstances, and not their country or gender that drives that.