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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
With luck, she's already absorbed the important lessons.
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Unfortunately, we didn't get her until she was about 12 (both our kids are adopted from China), so it's been rather hit-or-miss how much we've been able to provide in the way of positive examples. Orphanage life hadn't provided much of a moral code, and some of the foster families she'd been with didn't give her very good role models either. (Others were great.) That's part of older child adoption -- you have to respect that the kid had a life before coming to live with you, and you're not going to be able to just erase or ignore that part.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The only advice I could give was to move away from the town she lived in as soon as possible. At that point, he was five years old, and Mom was the most important thing in his life. When he got older, the opinions of his friends would attain far more importance. She needed to be somewhere where he could associate with a better class of people before things reached that point.
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That's a tough one. I'm not sure there's anywhere in the world to move to that wouldn't have some kind of threat like that-- just different flavors of the same. Talking with kids about tolerance early and often seems to help. (As does encouraging reading a wide range of works, of course.
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