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Off Your Rocker?
Should You Adopt When You're Older?
By Elise Kaplan
Most older adopters offer both advice and encouragement to those who contemplate adoption at a later age. Gustafson's advice is practical: "Read books about what to expect, and make sure you have your estate planning documents straightened out." If a couple has previous marriages and children before the adoption, figuring out what's his, hers and ours can be very complicated, and your arrangements may change as older children graduate from high school or college, or are no longer minors.
McDaniel knows the ins and outs of providing for large groups of diverse children. She not only has 10 biological and adopted children of her own, she also co-runs a medical mission that brings children with health issues to the United States for treatment and cares for them during their stay. "It helps to be educated in attachment disorders," she says. "Also, what are you made of and what do you think you can do? Can you deal with attachment issues? Heavy-duty medical issues?"
Above all, she believes that adoption can be a wonderful option later in life. "I think people worry that they'll be 65 when their child graduates from high school, but my mother was 65 when I graduated, and I never felt deprived in any way; I felt kind of lucky," she says.
The phrase that comes up most often when older parents describe their adoption experience is "win/win situation." McDaniel sums up her experience by saying, "I've done a lot of different things in my life, but I can think of nothing I'd rather be doing, nothing more enriching or more wonderful." Poisson-Dollar agrees. "What a privilege it is to add a child to your family," she says.