Search Results for: adoption adoption process post adoption

Guiding Others To Adoption

Every time my husband or I hear that someone is considering adoption we jump in with our story through the adoption process. Now my mom is even starting to do it. A client of her has a daughter that is considering adoption and so now she passes my information on to them. She tells people about the wonderful children just waiting in the foster care system for a forever home. It was funny she calls me up asking me what agency we used, who our case worker was and how long the process was. Do you know what my answer … Continue reading →

The Adoption Process – Part I – Orientation & MAPP Classes

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How is the adoption going? Have you heard anything yet? Have you met the child you are going to adopt? How long does it take? So many people ask us these questions, so I thought it would be good to lay it all out here. This is not a quick and easy process; it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. Please keep in mind, also, that this process is actually quicker and easier for people who want to adopt older children, like us! This is an overview of the adoption process in our area, as we … Continue reading →

Single Parent Adoptions

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More and more single people, especially women, are choosing to become single parents. One way for a single person to become a parent is through adoption. Adoption.com defines adoption as “a legal process that creates a new, permanent parent-child relationship where one didn’t exist before.” While many adoption agencies still deem married couples as the best candidates for adoption, many do now allow single people adopt. Domestic Adoption Domestic adoptions are adoptions that take place within the adoptive parent’s own country (in the case of this post, this is the United States). A domestic adoption typically costs between $15,000 and … Continue reading →

Book Review: Children of Open Adoption and their Families

Children of Open Adoption and their Families, by Kathleen Silber and Patricia Martinez Dorner, is an important read for adoptive parents, whether their adoptions are open or not. Other books describe the process of adoption. This book explores how the children in open adoptions actually feel and think, and how the adoptive and birth family members feel. These stories of children and their parents are a gold mine for those of us who’ve always wondered, “But how does open adoption work, exactly?” This book was written in 1987, but open adoption had already been in place in some agencies for … Continue reading →

Book Review: Adoption is a Family Affair–What Family and Friends Must Know

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Prolific adoption writer Patricia Irwin Johnston is herself an adoptive parent of three. Her husband and sister-in-law were also adopted. Pat has been a writer, speaker, educator and advocate on adoption topics for nearly 20 years. While moderating an internet support group for waiting parents, she found many prospective adoptive parents reporting insensitive comments and myths about adoption that they were hearing from family members. Many waiting parents also noted that people didn’t seem to know what to say when they announced that they were adopting, and that before and after the baby arrived they didn’t have the traditional supportive … Continue reading →

“Proxy Adoptions” from Other Countries

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When international adoption became common in the U.S. after World War II, “proxy adoptions” let Americans adopt thousands of children in foreign courts–especially in Japan, Greece, and Korea–by designating a representative to act for the adoptive parents. Thus the children entered the U.S. as the legal children of their adoptive parents. While enabling adoptions which doubtless improved the living conditions of many children, this process also left out the standards involved in adopting a child in the U.S. , such as the background checks and social worker visits to prepare and follow up on the adoptive family. By contrast, adoptions … Continue reading →

Kinship Adoption and Its Advantages

Naturally, all adoptions are about creating real kinship relationships, but the term “kinship adoption” refers to members of the extended birth family assuming a parental role. Most often, the kinship adopter is a grandmother. The next most common kinship adopter is an aunt. (The term kinship adoption is not referring to the common situation of a stepparent adopting his/her partner’s child. This process is usually referred to as “second parent adoption”.) There are many advantages to kinship adoption. The most obvious advantage is that, if the relatives are known to the child, the move will be much less traumatic than … Continue reading →

Top Ten Adoption Myths, Part Two

Continuing yesterday’s blog on the top ten myths I hear about adoption: 6. Myth: Social workers will make surprise visits to my home. Reality: Most of our homestudy took place at the agency office. There was one required—and scheduled—visit to our home. Most of our time was spent talking in the living room. The only other room the social worker asked to see was the room where we planned for the child to sleep. We did not have to have this room prepared. She only wanted to make sure there was “enough space”—and she judged that what I considered to … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Adoption Life Cycle

The Adoption Life Cycle,by Elinor Rosenberg, fills a niche in adoption literature by talking about issues such as separation, loss, identity and family relationships not only as they emerge at different stages of children’s development, but also in the context of family systems. Rosenberg has seen adoption from several perspectives—as a social worker working with birthmothers, as a therapist working with adopted children in residential treatment centers, and later as an adoptive parent of two. She devotes her first chapter to the myth of adoption as “the perfect solution”. While strongly supportive of adoption, she recognizes that it usually leaves … Continue reading →

“To Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity”

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Most parents would assume that once a child is legally theirs, their citizenship extends to that child. After all, plenty of parents serving abroad in the military or on business give birth overseas and their children are citizens. We have always been told that having one parent who is a U.S. citizen automatically makes a child a U.S. citizen. Except, adopted children haven’t always had this protection. Until recently, children adopted from other countries had to go through a separate naturalization process (forms, filing fees, sometimes court appearance). There have been cases in which adoptive parents assumed that their citizenship … Continue reading →