Your Adopted Child

Continued from Part Two… Children being adopted from Haiti or other countries generally come home with some issues. Besides being developmentally delayed, they will most likely also be malnourished. They will most likely have skin problems (be it scabies or ringworm or molluskum). They will probably have quite a bit of dental work to be done. They may even come home very sick. They will be unsure of their place in your family and in their new country. They may have issues with food—gorging and hoarding. You can count on them to be grieving and/or feeling angry about how their life has changed. They might have attachment issues. They might be very distrustful of… [more]

Continued from Part One... Why should one consider homeschooling the internationally adopted child? Many children adopted internationally, including those adopted from Haiti, are past the baby stage. With the length of the international adoption process, among other varying reasons (such as a child needing to be older than a certain age to be considered available for international adoption), internationally adopted children usually join their adoptive families labeled as “older children”. They come with life experience, however small it may be. They speak a different language and are used to an entirely different culture. They may be developmentally delayed and beyond. For instance, our three and a half year old daughter in Haiti, Georgia, can barely walk. She can… [more]

We homeschool our children. We haven’t always homeschooled them. We started our first two children in Kindergarten at public school, like most people do. We had issues here and there, but told ourselves that homeschooling was a last resort—something to fall back on if we had no other options left. We started having more and more issues with one child in particular. Our confidence in our local elementary school was quickly declining. And then, we adopted a nine and a half year old girl from Ethiopia. Just getting her registered in public school was a joke. I wanted to start her a grade below her chronological age. The school was not so keen on… [more]