Search Results for: adoption adoption process deciding to adopt

Open, Semi-Open or Closed Adoption

There are many women out there facing an unplanned pregnancy and if you are considering placing your unborn child up for adoption GOOD FOR YOU. As I am sure you know there are thousands of potential parents just waiting for a child to call their own. Before you begin deciding on the parents for your child you need to give some other issues some thoughts. Choosing the adoptive parents is an extremely important decision but there are other decisions that you need to make before you begin the process of choosing the family. First you need to think about whether … Continue reading →

Deciding to Foster Parent, Part 1

We tried to conceive for over seven years. We had one failed IVF, three failed IUIs, three unsuccessful rounds of Clomid, and two miscarriages with D&C. So many disappointments and so much money wasted on the endeavor to birth a child. We didn’t want to adopt, but were open to it. Our attitude was that if God wanted us to adopt, He would make it perfectly clear. When we moved to Texas from California the first people we met lived across the street. They were in the process of adopting from China and helped to found the adoption ministry at … Continue reading →

Book Review : For the Love of a Child: The Journey of Adoption

Monica Blume, a social worker and counselor with LDS Family Services, once saw a young woman who had been adopted watch a film entitled “ Adoption and Unwed Parents”. Tears ran down the young woman’s face. “I never knew that my birth mother loved me,” she said. Blume, who has worked with many, many birthmothers, birth fathers, birth grandparents over the years, wrote For the Love of a Child: The Journey of Adoption not only in hopes of being helpful to birthmothers, birth families, and clergy who may be involved in adoption decisions, but in hopes, she says, that she … Continue reading →

Preparing for and Processing a Reunion: Expectations and Emotions

My last blogs talked about children’s experience of open adoption and possible advantages of a meeting between the child and birth family members. Counselors and social workers familiar with adoption issues can provide invaluable help in preparing for and dealing with such a reunion. Adoption workers may help birth and adoptive parents share and manage expectations, and help them process their own adoption issues so that they can be focused on the needs of the child. For one birthfather, these sessions covered the circumstances of his daughter’s birth and adoption, his feelings for her then and now, his relationship with … Continue reading →

Adopting When You Already Have Children: Travel Considerations, Part Three

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When deciding whether your children should travel with you to pick up their new sibling, think about how your child or chidren will react to the settings and events you expect to be in and encounter. If it is an area of extreme poverty, will it distress your child? Will he find it hard to see other kids in an orphanage who are not being adopted? Parents who adopted from China describe their first meeting with their children as taking place in a hotel where their children were brought to them. That might be an okay scenario for an older … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Adoption Decision

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The Adoption Decision, by Linda Christianson, is not a how-to manual for adopting. He book’s subtitle, 15 Things You Want to Know Before Adopting, only hints at the insight contained within its pages. This book doesn’t just tell you 15 facts about adoption. Its 15 chapters deal with issues families who contemplate adoption must think about. The issues include: attachment and feeling like a “real” parent, affording adoption, managing the grief of infertility, waiting for an unknown length of time during the adoption process, birthparents, open adoption, adopting an older child, international adoption, transracial adoption, integrating a different culture into … Continue reading →

What’s Available At Adoption.com

Adotion.com is a partner site with Families.com and it is an amazing resource for everyone who is impacted by adoption. Adoption.com is so big that it literally takes weeks or even months to find everything that they offer. Actually, I’m not completely sure that I even know everything that they offer yet. However, here are some of the great things that are available at Adoption.com: Forums Adoption.com has the largest adoption forum on the internet. It offers forums for every aspect of adoption. There are general sections for adopted people, birth parents and adoptive parents and then also more specific … Continue reading →

Semi-Open and Open Adoption in Domestic Adoption

At some point during the adoption process a prospective adoptive couple or individual has to decide whether they would like to have a closed, semi-open, or open adoption. In my previous post I discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of a closed adoption. In this post I will discuss the option of semi-open and open adoption. Open Adoption tends to be defined as when the birthmother or birthparents and the adoptive parents share identifying information about each other. This would include last names, addresses, and phone numbers. The adoptive parents and birthmother may also get together with the child … Continue reading →

Adoption Words

Many adoptive families receive wonderful training before they get too far along in the process of adopting a baby or child. Part of this training often includes discussion of positive adoption language. In the past, certain phrases and choices of words were considered normal. Today we have learned that some of the old language was hurtful to one or more members of the adoption triad. The Adoption Triad is one of the more recent terms developed to point out that with any adoption there are three different groups of people who will forever be connected by adoption. The adopted person, … Continue reading →

Why We Choose Domestic Adoption

When the decision was made by husband and me to adopt a child it really didn’t take us much time to decide that we wanted to adopt domestically. Now, I spent some time in the last week, knowing that I would be writing about our decision, thinking about the reasons why. What came to mind was the primary reason we adopted domestically was because we wanted to adopt a newborn. I’m sure my husband and I are no different then many other couples who have found that they have infertility issues and then decide to adopt as a means to … Continue reading →