Open Adoption and Older Children
What about the placement of older children? These can take two widely divergent paths. Generally speaking, when a child has bonded to a birth parent (perhaps being raised by her or him for an extended time) then a need for an adoptive placement arises, it is usually critical for that child's emotional welfare to maintain ties with the birth parent. It's like uprooting a tree. If it is not transplanted in special manner, serious consequences can follow. Sometimes a parent raised a child, but a problem has arisen, and parenting is no longer possible, and there are no family members able to take over the parenting role, so adoption is the best option.
Another way older children can be placed for adoption is where the birth parents' rights were terminated by a court due to improper parenting: abuse, et cetera. Although the child may still foster idealized feelings for that failing parent, it is not uncommon in these adoptions for there to be no contact between the child and adoptive parents, and the birth parent.
Read more about this topic: Open Adoption
Famous quotes containing the words older children, open, adoption, older and/or children:
“Young children step on your feet, older children step on your heart.”
—Proverb.
“But let me open up my heart to you completely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not being a god! Hence, there are no gods. I drew this conclusion, to be sure—but now it draws me.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The older one grows the more one likes indecency.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)