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Questions on adoption - 12/21/2007 9:53:49 PM
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sharonjef2007
Posts: 787
Joined: 4/10/2007
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Ok ladies.......many of you know my future husband and I have a huge heart for adoption. We have not decided when we are going to try to adopt, but neither of us have any doubts that we will somewhere along the line.
So, I need info on adoption. What is the process like? Is there a difference in adopting from the state vs. an agency? What sort of training will we need since we plan to adopt children who are not infants? How much does it cost (how much should we save to do this)?
Any info you can give me I would appreciate.
_____________________________
my blog......Finally, a new last name!.......
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/21/2007 11:11:01 PM
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lexie
Posts: 3067
Joined: 6/27/2005
From: Toronto
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My husband and I are interested in adopting so we've been looking into things. Things are obviously going to be different in our countries, but here's what figures are like in Canada.
Adoption through the Children's Aid Society is free. Private adoption in Canada costs $10,000-$20,000. Adoption from another country can cost $20,000-$40,000.
That was an eye-opener for me. We had planned to adopt from another country, but we can't afford that. We will adopt through a public agency now.
_____________________________
I want to be more than an ordinary servant.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/21/2007 11:20:22 PM
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Mrs.Wifey
Posts: 5087
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From: The Gorgeous plains of Colorado
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Sharon, from what DH and I have researched the costs are pretty much the same as what Lexie said... We were planning on adopting domestically, but after seeing some things between Dh's adopted siblings and their older birth sister, I think we will be adopting internationally.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 1:28:56 AM
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PaleHawkWoman
Posts: 507
Joined: 7/14/2005
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This is a touchy subject for alot of Native folks as it used to be common practice to take Native children from their parents and put them up for adoption to non-Indian families. Unfortunately, this still happens in some places, usually thru private or religious-based organizations(and the Mormon church is the worst offender). There are laws in place in the US and Canada which give jurisdiction of Native children to the tribe of one or both parents(1978 Indian Child Welfare Reform Act, in the USA). It would be well to check out where the child came from if you are offered a Native child to make sure that the laws were followed. If you discern that they weren't, notify the child's tribe(if known) or a local Native Rights group as that child most likely has relatives somewhere who are looking for him/her.
Foreign adoptions are now coming under a great deal of scrutiny as it appears that in some instances the children were bought, coerced, or kidnapped from their parents. Also, some of the children arrive with some serious health issues which the adoptive parents weren't informed of beforehand and may not be prepared to deal with.
I do know there are several support groups for adoptive or pre-adoptive families who know the ropes very well and are happy to guide you along. Good luck in this endeavor whenever you decide to persue it. Adoptive parents are a God-send to children whose birth parents can't/won't give them the life they deserve.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 9:16:16 AM
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EmilyAnn
Posts: 1191
Joined: 12/18/2005
From: Thomasville, NC
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My husband and I plan to one day adopt a child from China, Korea, or Vietnam. International adoption is very expensive, but there are many Christian agencies, like Shaohannah's Hope, that provide grants to help cover the cost. The company where my husband works also provided a grant for families adopting. I know you have to be at least 30 to adopt from China. We plan to have a few biological children first. There is a ton of info available online. I just google "Christian international adoption" and get a ton of sites. You can also find blogs written by families describing their adoption journey. We have decided on international adoption because we want to adopt a young child. I have know a few people personally who have adopted domestically and paid all of the fees (one even paid for the birth mother's prenatal care and labor and delivery bill) only to have the parents decide they wanted the child back.
_____________________________
Baby David is here!!
6-13-08
9 lbs. 8 oz.
20 3/4 in long
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 10:00:52 AM
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HomeSpunLady
Posts: 1260
Joined: 4/12/2005
From: Lovely Pennsylvania!
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I told Andrew just last night that I wanted one more biological child (at least, I mean if we get more than that great, but I want to carry one more child) and then I'd like to adopt an older child. Probably domestically. There are so many older children who need love and healthy home situations, who are being shuffled from home to home. My heart goes out to them. I want to give them a home too.
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Kathryn
Just Me
Our little bun is here!
Rhys Athanasius
Sept 27
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 11:14:00 AM
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Kath
Posts: 17140
Joined: 2/28/2005
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moving this from Womens Only to Parenting
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 11:37:50 AM
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lexie
Posts: 3067
Joined: 6/27/2005
From: Toronto
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quote:
and then I'd like to adopt an older child. Probably domestically. There are so many older children who need love and healthy home situations, who are being shuffled from home to home.
That's what we are hoping to do. We were wanting to adopt a child from my husband's home country but now we're unsure because of the costs. We're hoping we can adopt a child domestically from the same background of my husband, and a little older, as they are not always the ones chosen first. There's nothing wrong with adopting a newborn in my eyes, we just think that our family would be a good match for an older child of that background.
_____________________________
I want to be more than an ordinary servant.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 12/22/2007 10:51:43 PM
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barbhuff
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My husband and I have adopted four children-- a little boy whose adoption we finalized at age 18 months and three sibling girls who were 5, 3, and almost 2 at their adoption.
Like many of the other posters, we had a desire to adopt when "our" children were older. We have a birth son, and after multiple miscarriages by the time he was three, we decided that we didn't want him to go through childhood as an only child and put our adoption plan into motion.
We attended an adoption information meeting at a local church and found out about the fact that there are over 500,000 "special needs" children here in the US waiting for permanency right now. (Special needs is defined as girls over the age of 8, boys over 5, minorities of all ages, sibling groups, and children of all "typical" special physical, emotional, social needs.) We knew this was the path God had for us.
The journey is different from state-to-state, even county-to-county. For us, we chose to use our county Jobs and Family Services. We were given the option of getting our adoptive family license or foster-to-adopt license. As a foster-to-adopt family, our chances of adoption were greater since the foster family is always given the first choice once permanent custody comes into play, but we knew that heartache might be in our cards as well because reunification with a healthy family member is always the main priority of foster care.
We had to go through many hours of initial training about child development, abuse and neglect, loss and behavior issues, as well as the laws and so forth. There are very intrusive interviews by numerous social workers, writing your autobiographies each, lots of checklists and questions to answers, and thorough home inspections. There are background checks and reference interviews, fingerprinting and more interviews.
All of this is good though, for you, because through this, the caseworkers are going to get to know you very well. They'll know your lifestyle, desires/expectations for your children as they grow, and parenting styles. With that information, they can place the best children for you in your household. For example, when I looked at that checklist, I thought, "I couldn't say no to any of these... blind, deaf, known sexual abuse, epilepsy, feeding tube, so forth," but our caseworker determined that our lifestyle would probably not fit a severely autistic child.
A domestic adoption through the system will have minimal if any cost. You would recoop those costs through the Adoption Tax Credit of just a little over $10,000 that can be spread out over three years. Neither of our adoptions had any expense for us.
You have to decide what's the best for you. I despise the argument of I-couldn't-do-it-I-would-get-too-attached. I'm not "special" or anything like that because I fostered 25 children. I DID get too attached and my heart DID get broken more than once. But I had a hand in seeing families fixed or kids going home to relatives who had been fighting for their safety for a long time, and that was a blessing in itself.
And then God brought my children to me.
Don't go into adoption wanting to "save" someone. Think and pray what is leading you to consider this step. I am the mother of five children-- four of them were adopted. I say "were" because it was the act that brought them to us, not an adjective that describes them.
Best of luck. If you have any more questions, I would be glad to help.
_____________________________
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~Benjamin Franklin
www.barbhuff.com
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/7/2008 9:10:28 PM
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funny_girl
Posts: 882
Status: offline
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Barb, you're still around, right?
quote:
Don't go into adoption wanting to "save" someone. Think and pray what is leading you to consider this step.
The baby was given to me to take care of because he was sick. I fell in love with him, opened my heart and now my husband loves him too. It's very hard for us because this was suppose to be our time to enjoy one another since are boys are 17 and 18. I'm getting desperate to find the birth mother and we can't travel out of the country with the baby because he's not ours legally. We too were foster parents in the states and I've had the heart ache of letting them go.
My husband told me that when I first brought him home, he let him stay because of guilt. Should I give the baby back to the home? My husband tells me now that the baby has wiggled his way into our hearts and I can't take him back to the kid's shelter. What's harder yet is that I wish I could bring all his siblings home but it's not physically possible. My housekeeper told me yesterday that the birth mother will be afraid to be found because the authorities will put her in jail.
_____________________________
"...bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as imposters; known yet regarded as unknown...poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything." II Corinthians 6:8-10
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/7/2008 9:52:21 PM
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MrsTracy72
Posts: 1800
Joined: 2/28/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sharonjef2007
Ok ladies.......many of you know my future husband and I have a huge heart for adoption. We have not decided when we are going to try to adopt, but neither of us have any doubts that we will somewhere along the line.
So, I need info on adoption. What is the process like? Is there a difference in adopting from the state vs. an agency? What sort of training will we need since we plan to adopt children who are not infants? How much does it cost (how much should we save to do this)?
Any info you can give me I would appreciate.
My husband put his son up for adoption 18 years ago yesterday and I am sitting here with the adoptive mom as we speak. She said that they spent about 15K, but the went through a private agency in IL. The adoptive parents did pay for an apartment for the last three months of the pregnancy. They paid all of the medical bills, but their insurance covered the baby from the minute he was born.
They went through a private agency but had to be licenced for foster care for the first 6 months until the adoption was final by the state. The process was easy for my husband, but the adoptive parents had to go through alot.
For us, it was a win win situation because like I said, I am sitting here with the adoptive mom and my husband's biological son, and we were just there to visit earlier in the week. The adoption was not open, but there was contact through the agency as they saw fit. Cards were exchanged, pictures were sent, and then we decided we were all comfortable enough to meet.
I didn't give you much info, but one thing that his mom said was that they thought about adopting kids from out of the country, but it was important to them to let the child have an opportunity to meet his birth parents one day so there wasn't such a huge void in his life. So there is alot to think about either way.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/8/2008 3:30:41 PM
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funny_girl
Posts: 882
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Tracy,
I think that is beautiful!
Is there a possibility to have some kind of ongoing relationship with his son now?
_____________________________
"...bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as imposters; known yet regarded as unknown...poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything." II Corinthians 6:8-10
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/8/2008 3:54:37 PM
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MrsTracy72
Posts: 1800
Joined: 2/28/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: funny_girl
Tracy,
I think that is beautiful!
Is there a possibility to have some kind of ongoing relationship with his son now?
Like I said before, we met and the adoptive mom was answering my questions as I was reading them because they were here. They actually just left to go home. They only live an hour and a half away so we do see eachother when we can, and if the mom can't drive him here for the kids events, he takes the train. And last week, my kids and I took the train down there for his birthday since my DH was working. He met us there later.
It worked out well and seems to still be working out. It has been about 8 months since we met him and we do keep in contact and are already making plans for his graduation party. So yes, we will keep up with him and with them being so close, it is easy.
My FIL was also adopted and found his birth parents and had/has an ongoing relationship with his birth family. His adoptive family is pretty much all dead, or he would still have a relationship with them too. Just today he was talking to the adoptive mom and told her how he was blessed to have two families. And the adoptive mom (who I am just going to refer to as mom) is very interested in our family tree and all that because she wants her son to know his birth family and its history.
I think that there are so many advantages to any type of adoption, but you just have to figure out what you want first. If you don't want to have to deal with a birth family, than out of the country is the way to go, but the mom who adopted my husbands son said they chose not to do that because she didn't want him to grow up and not be able to have any type of relationship with his birth family and have a void in his life. But it all depends on the child. I know a woman who was adopted and has no desire to even know her birth family at all. So in the end, you never know. I just think it is wonderful to adopt.
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/8/2008 10:35:50 PM
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zmanfan38
Posts: 8506
Joined: 9/14/2006
From: ...for it's root, root, root for the CUBBIES!!!
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Tracy, wow! You've told me a bit of your story with your husband's biological child that was adopted, but this relationship you're getting to grow with him and his mom is just wonderful!
quote:
ORIGINAL: sharonjef2007
So, I need info on adoption. What is the process like? Is there a difference in adopting from the state vs. an agency? What sort of training will we need since we plan to adopt children who are not infants? How much does it cost (how much should we save to do this)?
My story is different from others in here so far.
I could not get pregnant and after many thousands of dollars spent on fertility treatments we could not afford a private adoption. We adopted through our state and it has been a wonderful experience from beginning to now.
We started with required training, or P.A.T.H. (Parents As Tender Healers) classes. Those took 3 months to complete. I highly recommend those classes or similar ones...they equip you very well.
Whether you adopt privately or through the state, you have to have a home study done. Your home will be inspected to be sure it is safe. They will make any recommendations to you to make your home safe such as having smoke detectors in the right places in your home and having fire extinguishers on each level of your home, etc. You (each) will write a biography.
We had background checks done...got fingerprinted and had thorough reference checks. You also have to get an adoption physical which includes blood tests.
Then there's the worst part...the waiting. While you're doing the stuff I mentioned above you're at least "doing" something. Waiting for the phone to ring is torture.
We waited around a year and a half. We were told not to expect a baby because babies rarely get put up for adoption. We got a 4 DAY old. 
Our adoption is very much closed. The birth mother didn't want to see her or have anything to do with her and she was adamant that records were to be sealed in such a way that her family never found out about the pregnancy. She said it was a rape, so there was no birth father, although we did have a process to go through to terminate the (non) "father".
A big perk to adopting through the state is that you get a "board payment" check from the state every month until the adoption is finalized. What we didn't know until the day we went to court to finalize is that the money keeps coming every month even after the adoption is final, except they call it "adoption assistance". This money is the reason I've been blessed to stay at home with her for the last two and a half years.
If you have any questions let me know.
Congrats on your decision to adopt one day! 
_____________________________
«Christi»
tattoo
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/9/2008 9:27:31 PM
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barbhuff
Posts: 105
Joined: 4/11/2005
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Not every state adoption qualifies for an adoption assistance-- only those considered "special needs."
Special needs varies from agency to agency, but it usually includes sibling sets, minorities of any age, children with a prenatal history of alcohol or drugs, children with physical or developmental difficulties, girls over age 8, boys over 5, and children with emotional issues due to abuse and neglect.
Of course, most children adopted from foster care/social services fall in these categories but not all of them-- especially newborns.
An adoption assistance is an agreed-upon amount to help with covering the costs that come with raising a child effected by beyond-the-norm circumstances. A subsidy agreement has to be established at the time of the adoption. For example, if you adopt a newborn who seems healthy and normal and later in his childhood its discovered that he has learning disabilities due to fetal alcohol effects, you can't contact your agency and ask for a subsidy to help cover the costs. With the subsidy already in effect, you have that money available to you, and you may be able to ask for an increase if you show just cause.
_____________________________
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
~Benjamin Franklin
www.barbhuff.com
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/9/2008 10:03:37 PM
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zmanfan38
Posts: 8506
Joined: 9/14/2006
From: ...for it's root, root, root for the CUBBIES!!!
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quote:
ORIGINAL: barbhuff
Not every state adoption qualifies for an adoption assistance-- only those considered "special needs."
Oh, thanks for clearing that up. We only have experience with our state...didn't realize it was different from state to state.
_____________________________
«Christi»
tattoo
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RE: Questions on adoption - 8/9/2008 10:43:19 PM
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drmomjoyce
Posts: 94
Joined: 11/9/2006
From: hamilton, canada via perth aust
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My Adoption story is a little different again. I met my son when he was fe weeks old in the nursery where I worked. He has ongoing medical issues and so spent some time in hospital before going home to the foster mum. She happened (providencially) to go to my church so I got to see him quite often in that time and occasionally babysit him. At 20 months she became sick and he was moved. As I had worked to became a relief foster parent for the original mum, I still followed him and started to take him to my home for visits or 3-5 days. Over time when he became a crown ward, I started to consider adopting him. The biggest hurdle in my mind was my single state. After about 6 months I started the process and he came home almost a year later. He still has ongoing health issues which will always be there; his development is delayed; he is small; he isnt the greatest eater ... but all this is improving all the time since coming home. His speech has skyrocketed, his eating is way better, he is toilet trained but most of all he is happy and settled and attached and his imagination is beautiful.
Giving a child the gift of permanency is the best thing you can offer. It made it easier for me as i have loved him as 4 week old. But seeing what GOd has done in his life since coming home is so amazing and I feel blessed more and more that God chose me to be his mum.
Not sure if that answers anythign - i think i jsut rambled on, but i am pretty passionate about what we can do in the lives of little children who otherwise may be subjected to foster care for the rest of thier childhood lives.
Joyce
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