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This site created & maintained by
Suzanne Chandler, M.Ed., copyright 2005-2008.
This is my own privately-funded website and in no way represents any university or college that employs me.
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Last updated 07/16/2006
So you're thinking about adopting internationally . . .
Gather:
Envelopes: regular size and document size -- I've used at least 20 of the big ones so far.
Lots and lots of stamps or an account with http://www.stamps.com/ , or both
Address labels, both to and from size as you will be sending out lots and lots of self-addressed stamped envelopes.
A master list of addresses, dates, work history, references etc. You'll need this data for a zillion forms. Gather it up once and for all.
Right this minute visit VitalChek and order certified copies of birth, divorce, and marriage certificates. They can take a long time to come and hold up the process. One certificate held us back a whole month. Your agency may tell you that you only need 1 copy, but I ordered 3 of each and needed them.
Learn:
Get a clue about the basic process:
Get a clue about different countries/issues/agencies
Visit Yahoo! Groups and sign up for listserves -- post questions and answers on either an e-bulletin board or via e-mail, you get to choose. I especially recommend these Yahoo! lists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/InternationalAdoptWA/ if you live in Washington State, there are probably similar lists for other states.
Counties of Interest: There are also groups for every country and sometimes for areas of countries.
Russia
If you are thinking of Russia set aside a couple hours to devour the extremely helpful Russian Adoption site called FRUA at : http://www.frua.org/home.shtml . Be sure to read the "Chat" boards, well, not read, scan.
China
There are so many families adopting from China that they have self-organized by time frame. We belong to an OctDTC2005 group which is for families that will send their paperwork to China (DTC = documents or dossier to China) in that month. There are hundreds of these groups.
Great overview of China process and details. Not updated recently, so verify addresses etc. http://www.worldchild.org/china/paperchase/index2.htm
Taiwan
Choose:
Agency/Agencies
Country? Agency? Agencies, we learned, work in countries and regions of countries. You can't just pick and agency and then announce that you are interested in Mongolia. You must pick an agency that works in Mongolia and in the part of Mongolia that you want. But, how on earth will you know what you want? I recommend that you research these in parallel. We ended up picking a local agency (not a facilitator) for our home-study which made scheduling appointments very easy, and an additional agency that specialized in the country we want for the actual adoption. This also allowed us to get started with the home-study while still researching country and adoption agency.
Questions to ask other who have used the agency you are considering.
Did the process unfold close to how the agency predicted?
How did you like the folks you worked with in region?
Were you asked to provide bribes/cash gifts?
Did you or the agency take care of gifts for officials, caregivers etc...?
Was the cost indicated up front equal to the end total or were there surprises?
How long did it take you to hear back when asking a question requiring information be obtained from the contact in (country)?
How long after receiving a potential referral did you have to decide?
Do people travel "blind?"
Once you had a referral, how long until travel?
How long was it between trips?
Were you provided with good care in the country for getting embassy appointment, pictures for visas, transportation, hotel, etc...?
Was there a refund policy should something really unexpected happen?
Is the agency accredited in the country and if not, did the agency self-disclose this and educate you? or were you left to figure this out yourself?
What was a normal wait time to hear back from your agency after sending an email or a phone message?
Would you adopt with this agency again. Why or why not?
Was the bulk of the money due before or after you received a referral?
Be sure that you have a clear idea of the difference between an adoption facilitator and an adoption agency. Facilitators are not licensed social workers and operate completely unregulated. They function as match-makers (or brokers, depending on how cynical you are). They are notorious for excellent customer service before the match is made and -- when the adoption gets complicated -- for being remarkably unavailable, disinterested etc. If the match is not going to take, they are not going to get paid (or they already did), so why should they bother with your broken heart?
Read a cautionary tale at http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/adoption/b1.html
Photolistings, as you will find if you check out the adoption e-bulletin boards, are highly controversial. Yes, they function nicely as an emotional incentive to get crackin' on your paperwork, but they are fraught with peril.
Photolisting Peril 1: The cute kid pictured is fictional, as is the accompanying text. You pursue the child, pay your fees, and "oops! he or she was just reclaimed by his or her maternal grand-cousin-twice-removed. We have another lovely child for you right over here." In the business world this is referred to as bait-and-switch.
Photolisting Peril 2: The child really does exist and is being pursued by several families simultaneously, none of whom are aware of the others. Our hearts were broken in this way. Later we found out we were but one of seven broken-hearted families for that particular pair.
Photolisting Peril 3: The child really does exist, but live in a country that uses the referral system. In the referral system, prospective parents request age and sex and the country refers them to a matching child. Referring countries dislike the idea of people baby-shopping with the photo-listings and they forbid licensed agencies working in their countries from listing children on photo-listings. However, the site you saw your maybe-future-child on was an unlicensed facilitator site, not an agency site, so the referring country has no means for enforcing their policy. When it is time to formalize the adoption, a licensed agency must be used, and you will find in the fine print a little clause about "Adoptive parents recognize that agency cannot promise adoption of a specific child." So you get to the country and find out that you have no legal hold whatsoever on the child that you have been bonding with all these months. Maybe you get him or her, maybe you don't. You can't complain to the country, as you weren't supposed to see the children prior to referral anyway.
Social Worker -- Interview your potential social worker. Things we wish we had asked:
To whom to you go when you have questions?
How quickly do they respond?
What do you consider to be a reasonable time for us to wait to hear back from you?
If you don't know an answer, will you tell us that straight-out?
How long have you been doing this job at this agency?
What is your degree in?
How many homestudies have you done for this country in the last 12 months?
How long should I expect to wait for a reply if I send you an email or a phone message?
From the last homevisit to the final approved Homestudy report in my hands, what is a usual time-frame?
What is a typical caseload?
What do you consider to be an excessive caseload?
How many cases are you working with right now?
What is the typical wait time right now for I600A processing in our state (if they don't know, keep shopping; you can easily check this answer).
Are there agency requirements regarding room sharing for opposite sex kids?
Are there country requirements regarding room sharing for opposite sex kids?
I would recommend using a local sw for your homestudy and the best agency you can find, regardless of location, for your adoption.
Country How to pick a country? Things to consider:
Race: sure, you are color-blind, but is your community? Can you socialized in a mixed race community so that your other-race child can feel a part of a multi-racial whole, and not a one-of-a-kind?
Culture: are their resources around you that will allow you to cultivate and nourish your child's curiosity about their first culture?
Travel time: Some countries require a six week residency abroad. Some require two shorter trips. Some will send your child via a courier. Which fits for you?
Time: Some adoptions take 2-3 years, some take less than one year. How patient are you?
Security: Some countries' adoption programs are new and somewhat unstable. Some programs are old and well-traveled. How much risk can you afford?
Age and Sex and Special Needs: Some countries offer no newborns, or only special needs newborns, or only girl newborns. Most countries offer older kids.
Your age: do you qualify to adopt in that country? For China you must be over 30. For Korea you must not be too old - I don't remember the age cut-off as we were well over it.
Type of Care: Some countries arrange for foster care, so your future child has some connectedness to family life. Some countries look after their orphans in orphanages; your future child may have to be overtly taught how to be part of a family.
Tips and Tricks:
Be sure to fill out your DSHS background check forms in BLACK ink, not blue, or the forms will come back and you have to start over. This error, which was not caught by our now ex-agency, cost us at least a month.
Make arrangements to get your lab work done before your Doctor appointment (call your nurse about this), so that when you see your doc everything is signature ready.
Go now to your Police Department and ask for your Police Certificate. Make sure the notary's license is good for at least another year.
Use the free notary at your bank for stuff you have to notarize. Make sure the notaries' licenses are good for at least another year.
Read:
send me an email - ask questions or give feedback
Adoption Advice: click here if you would like to learn along with us and/or from our mistakes.
Please do:
Use considerate adoption language, i.e., don't ask us about the real parents; we do not plan to be synthetic. Need a little help with this? Visit the link above.
Pray for our children, that they be healthy and have loving friends.
Pray that the Lord will prepare our children for the adventure/stress of leaving their country and language.
Please don't:
Burden us with every adoption horror story you have ever heard. We don't (I hope) assault pregnant women with stories of still-borns and other heart-breaks; why do people feel that it is okay to do this to adoptive parents? I've heard plenty already.
Assume that we are doing this out of sheer goodness and say things like "that's so good of you to do this." While we do hope to do some good in their lives, we are also motivated by a keen desire to be parents and build a family. We have a mixture of motives, but being noble and self-sacrificing is not necessarily one of them. We are willing to be noble and self-sacrificing at times (as is any parent), but that's not why we are adopting.
Great article:
'Does she cry in Korean?' Parents get questions when raising adopted kids
Bill DawsonAugust 10, 2005 ADOVARONLINE0810
Adoptive parents of foreign-born kids get these questions all the time:“Is she your real daughter?”
“How will you teach him English?”
“How much did she cost?”
Kris Huson of Children’s Home Society and Family Services in St. Paul calls these “the grocery store questions.” Though usually well-intended, they can make an adoptive parent cringe.
Or laugh. “Does she cry in Korean?” is one of the bizarre questions asked of Kim Brown, adoptive mother of a 2-year-old daughter.
“I always thought babies cried in a universal language,” says Brown, who lives in Crow’s Landing, Calif.
My wife, Ila, and I, who adopted a baby girl named Sonali from India, are constantly amused at what people say.
Ila, who is of Indian descent, had a co-worker tell her, “It’s so amazing you were able to get such a beautiful child from such a poor country.”
Hmm.
Mary Sjoberg of Apple Valley got a similar jolt after she decided to adopt a child from Calcutta. Her aunt asked, “Oh, are you going to India to adopt because they’re so smart in math?”
Kristin Vonnegut’s mother asked, “Are you going to become Buddhist?” after Vonnegut decided to adopt from India.
“Which is funny,” says Vonnegut of Avon, Minn.,“because most Indians aren’t Buddhist.” Vonnegut’s father-in-law wondered why she wasn’t adopting from Mexico, where “they’re so much more docile.”
Speak to me
Ila and I also have discovered that curiosity around language abounds when you adopt a child, even a non-speaking infant.
“Is she learning English?” is a popular question. Sjoberg, a teacher, was surprised to hear this from a colleague.
“My school is half ELL [English Language Learners], so, excuse me?” says Sjoberg. She adopted Kiran, now 4, when the child was 8 months old.
Kristi Jenkins of Marion, Ill., will soon be united with a 20-month-old boy from Mumbai, formerly Bombay. She’s also mom to two stepchildren and one biological child. Her stock answer for those who wonder how she’ll be able to communicate with her newest child?
“I tell them, we didn’t understand our biological daughter when she spoke to us in English at 20 months,” Jenkins says.
Harsher words
Not all comments are so amusing.
Before her baby joined her, Sjoberg was asked if her little girl would be “dots or feathers.” Sjoberg was baffled until the questioner explained that dots meant dots on the forehead —India-born —and feathers meant feathers in the hair — American Indian.
She’s also heard, “Thank God she’s here and growing up a Christian,” and, from an elderly man in Hoyt Lakes, Minn.: “If you rub her skin, will that make her lighter?”
Others stand out:
“Does that dot on his forehead scratch off?”
“I couldn’t bring a person like that into my home.”
“Aren’t you afraid people will think he’s Middle Eastern?”
The last came from a co-worker who said, “People will think he’s a terrorist,” prompting Jenkins to ask, “How can a 20-month-old be a terrorist?”
Jenkins blames some of this on where she lives in Illinois. “I think I’m kind of in redneck land here, and I think there still is a lot of racism.”
But similar comments are heard in Minnesota, which has the nation’s highest rate of foreign adoptions per capita.
Ask Becky Steeber, who works at Children’s Home Society and is an adoptive mother of three. A physician tending to one of Steeber’s adopted boys, who has spina bifida, asked, “Do they [the adoption agency] have any healthy white kids?”
“One of most appalling comments I ever got,” Steeber says.
What’s worse, Sjoberg said, is that often, “they’ll ask these questions right in front of the child. It really amazes me how people can be so … unsmart. I really want to say stupid.”
Brown sees this as a growing challenge now that her daughter is getting old enough to understand what is being said about her.
“I have to think how Natalie is going to think about these questions,” says Brown. “I don’t want her saying, ‘Are you my real mother?’ ‘Do you love me as much as your other kids?’\u2009”
Cautious questions
So what is the right thing to ask? First, know that adoptive parents aren’t hypersensitive souls who parse every statement, looking for something offensive. We love talking about our kids. And we understand that most people aren’t trying to be insensitive; they just don’t know how, or sometimes what, to ask.
Still, when addressing an adoptive parent, you might want to rethink the following questions:
“How much did he cost?”
What you probably mean is, “How much did the adoption process cost?” That varies, with much of the cost going to administrative fees. “It’s not just paying someone off and taking a child across the world,” Brown says. Some parents find this an intrusive question, others are happy to answer, but none of us likes to think of our kids as having price tags on their foreheads.
“What happened to her real mom?”
We know you mean “birth” or “biological” mom, but it’s still a sore semantic subject. Adoptive parents are real parents and some can get really touchy about this. Try to use the b-words, birth or biological, and we’ll try to understand when you forget.
“Why did you adopt overseas when there are so many children here?”
Multiple reasons. One is the domestic adoption laws that give U.S. birth mothers time to change their mind and reclaim the child. Bonding with a child, and then losing him or her to the birth mother, is heartbreaking, especially for couples who adopt because of infertility. This seldom happens with foreign adoptions.
“Why was he put up for adoption?”
A fair question, but don’t be offended if we decline to answer. Many parents consider the details private, and want the child, when he or she is old enough to understand, to know this information before others do.
“Do you get to go to an orphanage and pick one out?”
No, it’s not like choosing a puppy at a kennel. Usually, the prospective parents submit a preference for a boy or girl, a range of ages, and whether they’d be willing to take on a “special needs” child, which is usually a youngster with a disability or health concern. The agency or service eventually sends them the picture and profile of a possible “match,” which parents can accept or refuse. If they refuse, they’ll get another match, until they finally find the right child for them.
“Isn’t she lucky, being raised by loving parents in the U.S.?”
Sure, but it works both ways. Adoptive parents feel immensely lucky and blessed themselves. Even non-religious couples often feel that Providence has stepped in and given them the perfect child.
For more information: http://www.childrenshomeadopt.org
Bill Dawson is at wdawson@startribune.com.
