Adoption of a "healthy anglo infant" is possible within a year
Families wanting to adopt, and well educated in adoption issues,
are simply neither numerous enough, nor visible enough, in our local communities.
Most often, families can adopt within less than a year. The requirements
for this success are not $20,000+ adoption fees. A family simply must dedicate themselves to
mastering adoption issues, preparing the best home possible for their child, and making their plans
to adopt well known within the community where they live. I make this statement after more than
nine years in managing infant adoption programs. During these years I worked for two adoption
agencies, one Lutheran and one Catholic. At the Lutheran agency, the Region that I managed
increased infant placements 65%. Most recently, at Catholic Charities, the infant placements
increased over 100% within 3 years.
How long does the adoption process take? The adoption home study should never take
longer than 5 months unless the adopting family wants the process to go slower. Usually the
home study can be completed much sooner. Once it is finished, and families began the
networking process, over 90% of all families in recent years have receives placement within 17
months that I have worked with. The average wait for all families was 10 months. However, it is
has not been wise to give out this number to adopting families. Even if the rate of placements
does not change, there will still be over 45% of families who will wait longer than the 10 months
that the "average" families wait. Therefore, I was more comfortable only volunteering the 90%
number. Then less than 10% of families will wait longer than the 17 months, and there will be less
frustration due to high expectations. It is also correct that all of the families waiting over the 17
months were waiting for an anglo infant. The longest I have had any family wait before placement
over the past 6 years is 26 months.
Regarding the time taken before an adoption happens, it is recommended that a family exploring
adoption ask the following questions of an agency being considered:
- How long will it take from today, if we decide to select your agency, for our family to have
our home study completed and to begin to network?
- What was the average wait for an adoptive family in your system after completion of the
home study and before placement over the past year? (Expect your wait to be longer!)
- Within how many months do over 90% of your families receive placement?
Please go to the article on
Why the statement that there are forty families waiting for every child
is wrong
Please do not believe the often quoted statistic that there are 40 families waiting for every baby
placed. That is not true unless you are talking of only the "healthy Anglo baby" being placed
with NO adoption fee and NO home study needed. Once families are required to have any
education about adoption, and a home study, the number of families wanting to adopt begins to
go below 40 per child available. Once you begin to charge an adoption fee the number of
families goes down further. As the adoption fee rises above $10,000 the number of families
begins to go down rapidly. Once you move to the understanding of adoption issues required for a
family to prefer a fully open adoption for their child, the number of families goes down even
further. Once you realize that these families wanting a fully open adoption must become visible in
their own communities, then the number of families with enough self confidence to be so visible
goes down even further.
Now you have arrived at the reality of adoption in 1996. There are simply not enough fully
open adoptive families visible in their communities to accept the number of children who would be
available.
Less than 20% of young mothers with an unplanned pregnancy have ever heard of open adoption.
Far too many only know of abortion or parenting as available alternatives. That is our fault. We
must make fully open adoption alternatives more visible. While good open adoption agencies
certainly need to invest in yellow page ads and other advertising, the fact remains that families
wanting to adopt are the ones who can advertise themselves better than any agency can. A
mother wanting to place an infant comes to an agency for a family. The family is the goal. She
wants to give her child a family that she cannot herself provide at that time. That is why agencies
need to be helping and supporting their families in a networking program within their own
communities.
Please see more details in the section of these pages called
The free flow of information about adoption that is happening here every day is
wonderful! But, some of the information is bad and designed to manipulate. Parents considering
the possible placement of a child they are expecting need to be especially careful if they are trying
to find an adopting family on the Internet. It can be done, but only VERY carefully. The same
caution must be given adopting families. The dangers of the Internet when used for "matching"
and
helping adopting families find mothers considering placement will continue to be documented.
Just be
very careful. I think this is the greatest danger in the field of adoption on the Internet.
Following are some of the sources for good information on adoption on the Internet.
However, web pages change rapidly and if anyone becomes aware of information on
these pages that is less than ethical or accurate please let me know. I have
attempted to avoid such adoption pages but that is always very difficult to do.
It is impossible to keep up with the explosion of information that is
happening on the Internet. The bottom line is that a more free sharing of
information about adoption has been good for adoption practice.
