Decorating a Bedroom for Your Adopted Child

Every child needs and loves his own special spot, whether he or she has to share it with a sibling, maybe even more than one sibling, or is blessed enough to have a room all to themselves.

As a mother who has adopted three children from the foster care system, I've found that setting up a bedroom was different for each one of them. My first adopted child came to live with us as a newborn infant. For this baby, we fixed up a crib in our own bedroom. Decorating for an infant is easy, you just need a warm bed and some bright toys to catch his or her eyes. We hung a mobile over the crib, and put some cute pictures on the wall. He slept contentedly there for many months.

Our second adopted child was a very verbal little girl who came to live with us at the age of two and a half years, continued in our home as a foster child for the next twenty months, and was finally adopted by us when she was four years old. In the beginning, we fixed up the bottom bunk in our older, biological daughter's room, but we soon realized this was not going to work. In the trauma of being removed from her birth mother, one of the ways she acted out was to destroy whatever she could secretly, and sometimes openly, get her hands on. She ripped wallpaper off the walls during the night, colored on the bed and the sheets with markers, and drew on everything she could get her hands on. It didn't take long to realize this arrangement wasn't going to work, as she was destroying our older daughter's much loved room. When another foster child, a six month old girl, came to live with us soon after she did - one who went back to her family a year and a half later - we ended up moving our already adopted son and the two younger girls into the master bedroom, and turned the loft into a bedroom for us. We gave each child a section of this large room for their own. Both of the girls were still having visits with their birth families at the time, so for them, I fixed a wall with pictures of their birth family. The older girl, now our daughter, and her birth mother liked to exchange real (though deceased) butterflies, so I decorated her part of the room with lace butterflies hanging from the ceiling. On the wall just about her headboard, I stapled another lace doily with butterflies on it, framed some of the butterflies her birth mother had given her and hung these on this piece of lace, along with a picture of her mother. These hang on the wall still today, and since our adoption is somewhat open with her birth mother and she still receives butterflies, we continue to add to it.

Our third adopted child was the full sibling brother of our little girl. He moved in with us the day before he was six months old. Our other little foster daughter had left us just less than a month before, so setting up a space for this child was simple: I sat back up the crib I had taken down in tears just three short weeks back, and made ready for my new son. Although he had a crib in the room with his big brother and sister, he slept in a port a crib in my bedroom for many weeks, while he adjusted to his new home and family.

Setting up a bedroom for an adopted child is not really different than setting up a bedroom for any other child, no matter how they come into your family. Each child has their own special personality, needs, and quirks. Take your cue from them, and have fun!