Adopting Older Boys - Sibling Issues/Birth Order

When you are adopting an older child, sibling issues are something that tends to be forgotten.  The most that you tend to hear about is birth order.  While birth order matters, I think there are other issues that are just as important. 

Our two new sons fall in birth order as follows:
GW - 1st - new son
JA - 2nd - bio
AT - 3rd - bio
TJ - 4th - new son
SG - 5th - bio
HJ - 6th - adopted 5 yrs ago

We violated birth order with both boys and we are having very different responses to this from our children that were already in the home.  According to Dawn Davenport at Creating A Family, there are 9 Rules for Successfully Adopting out of Birth Order .  I'm going to walk through these and talk about how they are playing out for us

1-3) Displacing the Eldest: This issue was brought up by our SW before he would agree to us bringing home GW.  For us, the displacement of our eldest hasn't caused any problems.  I think this is mostly due to the laid-back personalities of both GW and JA.

4) Larger Families: I would agree that this has come into play for us, especially with SG and HJ.  They have been the least affected of anyone by the addition of GW and TJ

5) Personality:  I think this is the SINGLE BIGGEST indicator of success.  At least, it has been so in our situation.  While TJ is younger than AT by 11 months (and therefore does NOT violate birth order), they both have a very competitive nature.  AT has been unfazed by the addition of GW (laid-back), but has had more issues with the addition of TJ. JA has also had some run-ins with TJ as well. This is exacerbated by TJ's behavior in some instances which isn't always conducive to good sibling relationships.  Unfortunately, they tend to "feed" off of each others actions/words and the situation tends to quickly spiral out of control if an adult does not step in. 

6) Emotional Support:  We are working on finding the right balance of emotional support while also holding each child accountable for their behavior.  We quickly find ourselves being accused of "favoring" one child over another when the offender is disciplined for their own behavior.  I guess this is what they mean by putting on your "Big Girl Panties" and being a parent :0)

7) Get Help:  We are fortunate in that we are in contact with a number of parents who have been down this road before us.  We also have a great support group to turn to when things get frustrating. 

8) Preparation:  I would say that we were fairly well prepared to address the issues of the adopted child, but one area that is sorely lacking is information regarding the existing children's issues when adopting an older child - out of birth order or not.  I have recently found some online info on this topic (Older Child Adoption's Impact on the Familly) which references other works that I have not been able to find (Ward, M. & Lewko, J. H. (1988). Problems experienced by adolescents already in families that adopt older children. Adolescence, 23 (89), 221-228.)  So far, we are looking mainly at Sibling Rivalry information and how to address the issues from this perspective.  Unfortunately, many of the suggestions don't work well when one child doesn't speak the language of the rest of the family.

9) Buy-in:  It is so hard for kids to really know ahead of time what adopting an older child will look like.  They may say they agree, but when faced with the reality, they may quickly change their mind.  If your older (10 and over?) child is not agreeable to an adoption to begin with, you need to pray long and hard before you bring another older child into the family.