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Originally Posted by nekokami
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.
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Oh, certainly. And you cross fingers that you've done the best you can, and that if the kid does make mistakes, they can be corrected, and that the kid will learn from them.
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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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She needed to move to a big city or equivalent. Yes, there will always be threats like that, but at least there will be countervailing influences. The town she was in struck me as basically bigoted working class poor white, with the corresponding attitudes, as witness the fact that the Aryan Nation
was a local force. In a bigger city, people might think that way, but they'd think hard before admitting it in public.
I met a girl years back, during a dog and pony show my then employer was putting on at the Louisiana State Fair. The State Fair was in Shreveport, which I considered a cultural wasteland. She was a daughter of the local contractor who was largely responsible for us being there. She was about to graduate high school, and was considering where to go to college. All we could say was "Go somewhere
else! If you stay here, you'll wind up like every other girl like you we've seen at the Fair, with a baby in a carriage and another on the way, and future options narrowed to wife and mother. If that's what you
want to do, fine, but if you have other aspirations, you need to get out of Shreveport to have a realistic hope of achieving them."
Environment counts. A lot.
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Dennis