Teaching and guiding children regarding behavior is always a challenging parenting issue. With older adopted children, however, you often need to work even harder to teach them what they've missed learning from their past life. Be very clear and explicit from the beginning about what your family rules are. Don't allow for any guessing or speculation.
Pick your priorities
Your child may arrive with a multitude of bad habits and misbehaviors. Work through them slowly by selecting
the most offensive first, working on those, and then tackling the next ones.
Consequences
While many parents use time-outs as consequences, older adopted children often respond better to alternative consequences. You might have your child do extra chores. Or, you might have them do jumping jacks, sit ups, or jogging in place to help them be strong enough to follow directions the next time.
Restitution
Especially during the early months home, older adopted children's emotions may escalate to tantrums, throwing, hitting, or breaking. This stressful time for you and them is often overwhelming. They need to be held accountable for their actions even if it is a difficult time for them. Have them do restitution to re-pay their misbehaviors. If they've been mean, have them do kind things i.e. fold laundry, give a back rub, do the other person's chores. If they break something, have them work it off in extra chore time. (These come from therapeutic parenting approaches as advocated by Nancy Thomas in her book, When Love Is Not Enough.)
House Rules
Create a series of rules that address the most egregious behaviors: hitting, kicking, biting, throwing. Write the list, and/or draw pictures of each action. Also draw the consequence i.e. instant timeout or 100 jumping jacks. Act it out so there is no question about the rules. Be absolutely consistent about enforcing the consequence each and every time one of these house rules is broken.
Developmentally delayed
Our children may arrive home with developmental ages that differ from their chronological ages. They may be seven, but regarding many issues, they may only be four years old. The additional complication is that their developmental age may vary according to their task at hand. They may be on target with gross motor skills, two years behind regarding emotional maturity, and stuck at two years old when it comes to cause and effect thinking. You may need to adjust both your expectations and your consequences according to the needs and abilities of your child.
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