Because each month a child spends in orphanage contributes to lower intellectual ability and more behavior problems in that child, officials arranging international adoptions from orphanages should aim to place the youngest children available whenever that is possible. When older children are placed, parents must be made aware of the greater commitment and resources that will be necessary to rear these children. No parent should ever adopt an older child believing that because the child is past infancy, parenting will be easier. Some countries of origin will not release young children. Some specify a maximum permissible age difference between parents and child, so that older parents must adopt older children.
Some prospective parents are willing to, or prefer to, adopt a child with severe problems.
The intention of this Recommendation is not to deny prospective parents the opportunity to adopt older children, but to make them and the people arranging the adoption fully aware of the greater commitment involved. Agencies and individuals facilitating international adoptions should be required to provide specialized pre-adoption preparation for parents planning to adopt from orphanages. Pre-adoption preparation should stress the personal and family resources necessary for parents to deal with the problems of orphanage children, especially older children who have spent a long time in orphanage. Parents should be cautioned that the time and energy necessary to meet an orphanage child's needs are such that it is unwise to adopt more than one child at a time, or to bring the child into a family that already has several young children. Pre-adoption programs should provide opportunities for the prospective adoptive parents to have contact with support groups or individual parents who have already adopted children from an orphanage setting similar to the one from which, they hope to adopt.