[AdrienneG]

When I joined this board I noticed discussion on whether or not its a good thing to adopt an older child when you have a younger child (baby) at home.

Some people said its not a good idea to have your first child that you adopted be the oldest and then suddenly isnt the oldest.

Does anyone know or have any opinon as to why that is a bad thing?

What if you adopted an infant and then later adopted a toddler and the first child is younger than the second child that you are adopting?

Thanks in advance for reading and commenting on this issue.

[mumofone]

I guess for most people it is a personal choice.

We have two adopted sons (both adopted as infants). Our older son is now 8, and our baby is only 16 months.

For us, we would never adopt a child older than our 8 year old. He is the oldest and first/oldest grandchild. We don't want to "rob" him of that.

However, we do plan to adopt again and hope to adopt a daughter from newborn up to about age 3. This will mean that our baby could fall in as the middle child or could remain the baby if the new child is older.

I am not saying this is the correct way, but rather a personal choice for us.

[nsanders]

AdrienneG,

I believe that it depends on your family and the child/children you are adding. For some it can work out beautifully, for others it won't.

We chose to add out of birth order eventhough we received a significant amount of pressure to do otherwise. Personally, we were wanting an older child at this time and not a baby. Our other 2 kids were 6 & 2 when we began the search. For them, a child 5,4,3 or younger would have caused a good amount of competition.

We now are a family of 5. Our kids are 11, 7 and 3. It has been great. They get along very well without fighting. Is it an adjustment to automatically have an older child? Yes. Were there benefits as well? Yes.

She was able to tell us if she wanted to be with us & our family. Being 11, a lot of her personality has developed. We already know many of her strong points and challenges. She is able to express her needs, likes, dislikes to us.

Works for us.