Selecting an Adopting Family

Nothing is more important than your child being with a loving and caring family who can provide for all of his/her needs.  Below you will find information on how to select the right family for your baby.

Choosing to place your baby for adoption can be one of the most difficult decisions in your life. You need to know that your child will be in a safe home with the type of loving parents you want. At Adoption Services we very carefully explore with you exactly what you want in an adopting family and then we work to help you find the perfect family.

The best way to go about selecting an adopting family is to have a careful and objective assessment completed by a licensed adoption agency. Once an adoptive family has been pre-approved by the agency, you can make sure you are truly comfortable with this family. And this way you know the family has passed a rigorous, objective, unbiased screening process.

The official name of this evaluation of the adopting family is called a Home Study. A good Home Study takes over 20 hours to complete and should include and in-depth psychological and social assessment of each adopting person, child abuse, criminal record, and FBI clearances, background information regarding each adopting person, medical histories, discipline practices, personal and work references, recent physical examinations, copies of income tax returns and bank records, a tour of their home and their neighborhood, places of worship and schools, and much more.

After the families have been pre-screened is when you should re-enter the process of selecting the family for your child. At that point, you can meet and select the family yourself, let the agency do the whole selection job, and/or you can set requirements such as religious affiliation, marital status, age, lifestyle, number of children in the family, where the family lives, or any other factors which are important to you.

You should be able to have as much or as little involvement as you want. You not only can choose the adoptive family if you want, but you can also spend time with them to get to know them. You can meet them for lunch or dinner, go to doctor visits together, talk on the telephone and/or write to each other. You can even be the one to hand the baby to them at the hospital. You can receive pictures and updates or not, have an open or closed adoption, and meet or not meet the family and child at some time in the future.

Or, you can choose not to do any of these things. The decisions are really yours to make if you want to make them.  For more information please visit the Adoption Services page Finding A Safe and Loving Home for Your Child and please feel free to contact Adoption Services.