If you had to adopt with these two as your only choices, would you adopt a toddler or an early to mid teenager?

I'd adopt a teenager, for sure, though my methods of creating discipline and structure would likely pose a problem to adoption agencies. I support tough love and rewarding ONLY healthy behaviour.

Love and understanding, by themselves, don't create healthy bonds, they only encourage teenagers to never grow up.

Teenagers seeking adoption don't want pity, being pushed into a family relationships and so on, they want to be treated as people with opinions. This is the main problem I've seen with adopted friends I've met, they felt infantilized and/or like the pet project of those adopting them.

I really appreciate your thinking. And everyone deserves to be loved and nurtured. But some that have been abused to horrific degrees will come with a lot of problems, these include violence and hiding food and lying. I say have patience and love them more, but most people aren't equipped nor ready to love, nurture and understand where this child is coming from. Why? Knowing how crapppy their life started out as. It creates guilt and often times prevents the loving parent from offering structure.

It's a tough decision, each with its own difficulties. Teenagers nearly inevitably pose challenges right away. The difficulties with young adopted children come later (16-20) when they fully realize that their roots are outside the family. In both cases, foster parents need a tremendous level of love and stability to deal with all these challenges successfully. But power be to them, we need them and their big hearts more than ever.

Do I really have to?
If I'm forced to I take the teen because that'll be gone sooner.

A toddler. Young kids bond better with parents. You'll watch them grow and actively learn a lot about them, since they have a very short past anyway. Plus at 26 I don't think I'm mature enough to handle raising a teenager. I doubt they'll take me seriously as a parent because the age difference is not enough.

definetly the child because the teen will feel even more alienated because they cant form a emotional bond with me, but thats just me. i just know form personal experience that foster care teens are hard to work with and they are usually a lost cause, its better to jest help out the child.

msfuzzwuzzoreocat if i had a choice i think i would opt for the toddler although it will be hard work for me at my time of life to look after and raise a toddler but i would manage i guess some how plus i think another problem maybe i will be in my late sixties when they are teenagers

The toddler because it'll be easy to form a bond and emotional attachment if adopted at an early age. Teenagers go through a rough, rebellious phase. They'll find it tougher to adapt

I would also adopt the teen, if he or she accepted my offer. Helping such a child would benefit me as much as them, in a spiritual sense. :)

To be fair a lot of people that adopt , do it because they can't consieve