I don’t know if it is an obsession or a deep concentration but as I go about my daily business, my brain whirls with thoughts of my children and how I can help them grow past their issues and problems. They all came to me as older children and I was denied the earliest opportunities for nurturing them. They were denied normal childhoods; trauma laden, abused and neglected instead.

I believe they are very resilient children, most of them at least, deeply desiring to become as normal as possible, if only to fit in better with others.

We as adults have also had many problems. Everyone faces challenges, some more so than others, and the manner in which we handle crisis and problems is carefully watched by our hyper-vigilant children.

Ruben Gonzalez says, “Next time you experience a major setback, do what top achievers do; recover quickly. Right away, they force themselves to look at the bright side of things. If you recover quickly, you don’t lose your momentum and your drive.”

How parents chose to react to something significantly improves one’s chances of success.

We need to model this one thing daily. Our older adopted children came to us with major life events beyond their control. How they reacted to those events made them what they are today. Just because they are now adopted does not mean that they won’t face other tremendous hardships in life. We all do, and I deeply believe that we need to model optimism and positive reactions to problems.

I don’t always do so of course. I go ballistic, I have petty temper tantrums, but I console myself with the fact that I try hard to be hopeful, cheerful, buoyant and positive about life. My children have observed me carefully in all my interactions with what life has thrown at us. They’ve seen me stand strong. Even if I fall apart, I quickly get back on that bucking horse and ride.

I’ve studied optimism and I’ve never read anything that even begins to suggest that this is a pie-in-the-sky mentality.

In his book, Learned Optimism, Dr. Martin Seligman maintains that optimism

• Inoculates against depression
• Improves health
• Combines with talent and desire to enable achievement

Even if that is all that happens when one practices optimism wouldn’t that be more than enough?

I know I’m preaching to the choir here. Everyone must possess a degree of optimism before one faces the world of the adoption of older children. The real challenge then becomes teaching this theory to children who have lived in a world of otherwise. The world of pessimism that many wrap around themselves protectively, a self-fulfilling prophecy that backfires and hurts them, is a world that can be improved upon.

It’s a battle certainly. I ask my children to hold me accountable, point out if and when I too sink into negativity. Make me get it together and practice what I preach. They then find themselves pointing out when they slip as well. It’s kind of slow, surely uphill, but so worth it in the end when their own successes boost them up, then I work on showing them how to build upon what they’ve learned from not failing, from looking at life positively and counting their blessings.