Make sure that your adoption agency thoroughly screens and prepares adoptive parents

It may surprise you how much this differs by agency.

When considering placing a child for adoption, you deserve to know how the agency screens people interested in adopting. You want to make sure that your child will be safe, of course, but may also wonder how the adoptive family will tell the child about you and your adoption decision.

You need to rely upon an agency that takes time to really understand who the prospective adoptive parents are and that they understand how important it is to talk openly about adoption to the child from a very young age. And, even if you are not sure you want an open adoption with ongoing direct contact, you deserve to have that option should you change your mind later and want to reach out to the child and family later on.

Be sure to compare what the agency tells adoptive parents about what they need to do to become qualified with what the agency tells expectant parents about how adoptive parents are selected. One agency, for example, says to expectant parents, “our screening process is often more extensive than nearly any other adoption agency in the country” yet tells adoptive parents that “Initially, the home study process frightens some families… Our goal is to make the process both easy and relaxing”.

You should be able to choose from a wide range of families. And if you are interested in ongoing contact of any kind with the family, that should not pose a problem. One agency routinely tells expectant parents that if they are interested in open adoption, they will need to wait a long time to select the family and that their child may end up in fostercare during this wait. This is nonsense! There are plenty of families that not only accept ongoing contact with birth families, but welcome it.

And should your baby be born with special medical needs, your agency should stand by you and your child and find a suitable adoptive family. Do not settle for anything less!

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