Another honest, real life, older child adoption guest blog from John. He is a retired commercial airline pilot who has adopted five boys, over three decades, from domestic foster care as a single parent. John and his family live in southern California.

Tyler, age 12, had been home seven months. It was great, and we finalized our adoption. This was the honeymoon though, and Tyler has Reactive Attachment Disorder. He was beginning to attach, and for a kid with RAD, there is nothing more scary. All parents quit, it is just a matter of when. (According to RAD) Kids like him get sent back, always. He knew that first hand, after 16 placements in 5 years of foster care.

Kill the placement before it hurts even more, do it quick, and do anything it takes, but force the move. Problem, I don’t like to quit, in fact, I hate quitting. First, it was the beginning of summer break, and Tyler began hanging out with only older kids, two years older, and not the good ones. He also kept going over to a girl’s house, she is 14 and a HS sophomore, what on earth would she have in common with a 7th grade 12 year old?

I know several adoptive families who have adopted a traumatized child out of foster care, poured themselves into trying to help the child heal, and then had to make the difficult decision to place the adopted child into a residential treatment facility. Is this decision a “failure” on the part of the adoptive parents? Absolutely not!

In fact, it takes a lot of wisdom to reach a place where you recognize that the child will best be served in a residential treatment facility. In some cases, the focus is on what is best for the family as well. If you have other children in the home, it isn’t fair to them for their home life to be tumultuous for long stretches of time. While they might be able to endure it for a few weeks, or even months, it really isn’t fair for the other children to suffer for years on end as all of the parents’ focus must be on trying to contain and control an out-of-control child.

Unfortunately, those who have never parented an out-of-control child, or known someone who has, are likely to be judgmental of this decision.

Linny and her husband have adopted several times: Internationally, through the foster/adopt system, and transracially through domestic adoption. Five of these adoptions were infants; three were "older child" adoptions. They have known the joys and disappointments of adoption having placed one child into residential care, dissolving the adoption of another child, and having one child re-adopted. Linny and her husband have adopted one more time.......bringing a total of four at home....ages 8yrs to 1yr. Dissolution of an adoption…Linny …copyright 2010

Before anyone dares to think that a family who disrupts an adoption does it easily and without heart, or that a homestudy should have 'caught this family before letting them adopt', let me assure you, there's much more to all of this than you'd realize.

Our family is one that has 'disrupted' two adoptions. If you really wanted to get technical, we've actually disrupted three...and while it sometimes makes me sick to think about it, as John has written, it was because our family had done everything humanly possible and nothing worked. Our disruptions were due to dangerous behaviors...not the least was RAD (Reactive attachment disorder)...and again, as John has stated, unless you've been there, you can't have a clue. Further, these children were all adopted as older children....one--had a LOT of information the state had deliberately withheld from us (had we only known); and the other became a sexual predator.

A common misconception is that, if you adopt a young traumatized child, you will not need to worry about aftereffects or resulting behavior issues. This could not be further from the truth. The unfortunate reality is that reactive attachment disorder (RAD) develops by age three. So, if you adopt a three-year-old child who suffered from severe abuse, you could wind up parenting a child with all sorts of serious issues, even if you provide a very loving home from age three throughout the rest of the child’s life.

Another serious reactive disorder that can be develop in a young traumatized child is dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder. To develop this disorder, a child must have suffered severe and ongoing abuse that began before the age of six. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop in a person of any age who experienced trauma.

Many people who have not been abused themselves or been around people who have fail to appreciate the level of trauma that children experience when they are abused.