ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a social and cognitive model of the adjustment to adoption. Adopted children and adoptive parents are individually faced with stressors and developmental tasks, and the adoptive family as a whole also experiences the effects of adoption. Adopted children—indeed, all children in unconventional family circumstances—are burdened with stressors and resource deficits because of the nature of their unique situation. The older adopted child is likely to have a shortage of resources that reduce the child's coping repertoire. Adoption workers and parents help to promote more functional coping strategies for any particular child through a variety of efforts, including counseling, providing appropriate reading materials, modeling, offering the chance for the child to reconsider expectations and fears, and engaging in anticipatory coping and rehearsal. Children are often initially seen as the vulnerable party in adoptive families but are viewed as responsible to change their behavior to suit that new environment.
