Tips for Parenting an Older Adopted Child

If You Only Have a Minute:

When parenting an older adopted child:
• Prioritize stability and predictability. Consistent routines and dependable responses help them learn they can count on you.
• Build support before you need it. Find adoption-competent professionals and connect with other adoptive parents.
• Look beneath behavior. Ask what a behavior may communicate about stress, fear, grief, or unmet needs.
• Respect your child’s history and relationships. Adoption adds family; it does not erase what or who came before.
• Give connection time to grow. Do not expect immediate trust, affection, or a particular version of family closeness.
• Keep learning. Your child’s questions and needs will change as they grow.

Parenting an older adopted child can bring tremendous joy, growth, and connection. It also asks parents to make room for a child’s history, relationships, grief, identity, and the ways they learned to cope before joining your family. Children adopted at age six or older have already had years of experiences that shape how they understand family, safety, trust, and belonging.

For older children and youth, permanence is about more than the legal finalization of an adoption. It grows through repeated experiences of stability: adults who stay, routines they can count on, relationships where they feel respected, and support that continues as their needs change.

Understanding that from the beginning can help you build a family relationship that has room to grow.

What Do We Mean by an “Older Adopted Child”?

For this article, we use older adopted child to describe a child who joins their adoptive family at approximately age six or older.

By this age, children have memories, preferences, relationships, traditions, and a developing sense of who they are. Some have had multiple caregivers or moved often. Others have lived through abuse, neglect, institutional care, separation from family, or other significant losses.

They may also have strong connections to siblings, extended family members, former caregivers, foster families, their racial or cultural community, or the places they previously called home.

6 Tips for Parenting Older Adopted Children

Those experiences do not disappear when adoption becomes permanent. Instead, they become part of the child’s story—and part of what their new family learns to understand and honor.

These six practical tips can help you build trust, connection, and stability as your family grows together. They can also help you respond with greater understanding to the experiences, relationships, and needs your child brings with them into your family.

1. Put Support in Place Early

You do not have to wait until your family is struggling to look for help.

Before placement or finalization, learn what adoption-competent therapy resources are available in your community. Depending on your child’s needs, that might include a therapist, pediatrician, occupational therapist, school support team, or other professional who understands trauma, attachment, prenatal exposure, grief, and adoption.

Professional support does not mean something is wrong with your child or your family. It can give everyone a place to process major transitions and help parents recognize concerns before they become crises.

If your child has already received services, learn as much as you can about what has helped in the past. Whenever possible, continuity matters. Keeping familiar providers, school supports, routines, or other trusted relationships can add stability during an enormous life transition.

2. Build a Support System for Yourself, Too

Parenting an older adopted child can sometimes feel isolating, particularly when friends or relatives do not understand why your parenting looks different from theirs.

Connect with other foster and adoptive parents who understand that children who have experienced trauma, loss, or instability may need a different parenting approach. An in-person or online support group can offer practical ideas, perspective, encouragement, and a place where you do not have to explain every part of your family’s experience.

Think beyond traditional support groups, too. Who can bring dinner during a hard week? Who can listen without judging your child? Who will respect your parenting choices rather than telling you to “get tougher”? Who can give you time to rest?

Stable families need supported parents.

3. Look Beneath the Behavior

Children often communicate through behavior long before they can explain how they feel.

A child who argues about every direction may be trying to maintain a sense of control. A child who hoards food may have experienced times when food was unpredictable. A child who seems uninterested in family activities may be protecting themselves from another painful attachment or loss.

This does not mean parents ignore unsafe or hurtful behavior. Children still need clear expectations and boundaries. But rather than beginning with, “How do I stop this behavior?” try asking, “What might my child be communicating or trying to manage right now?”

Focus on connection, felt safety, regulation, and teaching the skills your child needs. Notice and reinforce progress rather than relying primarily on punishment for mistakes.

Over time, calm and consistent responses can help your child experience and internalize something powerful: “The adults in this family can handle hard moments and still stay connected to me.”

That is one way children begin to experience permanence as more than a promise.

Download YOUR Free Guide to Navigating Challenging Behaviors: Practical Strategies for Families

4. Make Room for the Life Your Child Had Before You

Older children do not arrive as blank slates. Nor should we expect them to.

They may have favorite foods, family traditions, religious or cultural practices, ways of celebrating holidays, or routines that feel unfamiliar to you. They may miss people they love, including people who were unable to care for them safely.

Be curious, not threatened, by those connections.

Ask about favorite memories and traditions. Keep photographs and meaningful objects available. When safe and appropriate, support important relationships with siblings, relatives, former caregivers, or other people who matter to your child.

For transracial or transcultural adoptees, stability also includes meaningful, ongoing connections to people and communities who share their racial or cultural identity.

Permanence does not require children to leave their past behind. A strong sense of belonging can make room for both the family they joined and the people, experiences, and identities that shaped them before adoption.

5. Let Connection Develop at Your Child’s Pace

Parents may have been thinking about adoption for months or years before their child arrives. Your child has been on a very different journey.

They may not immediately feel that your family is “their family.” They may not want hugs, call you Mom or Dad, participate eagerly in family traditions, or show gratitude for being adopted.

Try not to measure your relationship’s strength by those early responses.

Instead, look for smaller opportunities to build trust. Watch a favorite show together. Let your child teach you a game. Cook something they enjoy. Drive somewhere together. Walk the dog. Share music. Find reasons to laugh. Low-pressure time together can be some of the most valuable relationship-building time you have.

Fun matters, too. Laughter and shared experiences can create memories that belong specifically to your family without asking your child to forget the memories that came before.

6. Stay Flexible and Keep Learning

The parenting strategies that worked with another child—or even the strategies that worked with this child six months ago—may not work today.

Be willing to adjust.

Older adopted children continue to process adoption as they reach new developmental stages. A child who seemed uninterested in their birth story at eight may have many questions at twelve. A teenager may think differently about adoption, identity, race, birth family, or belonging than they did several years earlier.

That change does not mean something has gone wrong. Your willingness to keep learning communicates that your relationship is strong enough to hold new questions, new feelings, and even disagreement.

Creating a Family has several resources to help families continue learning about the issues related to older child adoption, including:

Suggested Books* for Toddler and Older Child Adoption
Welcoming an Older Child to Your Home – resource page with links to podcasts, articles, and free courses
Prenatal Exposure, Part 1: Parenting Babies through Elementary Ages
Prenatal Exposure, Part 2: Parenting Tweens and Teens
Adopting Older Kids: Things to Consider – CreatingaFamilyEd.org online course
Adopting/Fostering a Child Who Identifies as LGBTQ – CreatingaFamilyEd.org online course
Parenting Adopted Teens and Young Adults – a free CreatingaFamilyEd.org online course

Building Permanence One Day at a Time

Adoption finalization can establish legal permanence, but children experience permanence through everyday family life.

It is built when you keep showing up after a difficult afternoon. When you follow through on what you said you would do. When your child learns that making a mistake will not cost them their place in the family. When you honor important relationships and parts of their identity. When you adjust your expectations because you understand them better today than you did yesterday.

For an older adopted child, those ordinary experiences of consistency and stability can slowly answer an important question:

“Can I trust that this family will still be here for me?”

You do not have to parent perfectly to help answer that question. You can keep learning, stay curious, seek support, repair after hard moments, and continue showing your child that belonging in your family is not something they have to earn.

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This National Adoption Month, would you please help us raise awareness about the importance of permanence and stability for older children and youth? Follow Creating a Family on social media – @creatingafamily on all platforms. Then share this resource with families and professionals in your community and join the conversation using #NationalAdoptionMonth.

Together, we can help more people understand not only the need for permanent families for older youth, but also the ongoing support families need to help that permanence grow into lasting connection and stability.