Welcoming an adopted infant or child into your life can bring tremendous joy. And rest assured, though there is a small but significant risk that your child’s birth parents might change their minds and decide to keep the child before the adoption becomes final, most adoptive parents complete the process successfully. These days open adoption, which allows children to know their birth parents, is increasingly possible.
There are many different ways to adopt a child and many different public and private agencies nationally and internationally that can help you through the process. Whatever options you choose to pursue, be prepared to contend with what can be a wait of many months, or even years, and lots of paperwork, particularly in the case of international adoptions. These hurdles and delays can be a useful test of your commitment to completing an adoption.
Here are some helpful tips for how to adopt an infant or child and information on some of the options available.

Getting Started

The following adoption checklist, which can help ensure a successful adoption, was provided by Deb Harder, adoption information supervisor at Children’s Home Society & Family Services, a not-for-profit organization based in Saint Paul, Minn.:
1. Examine what’s motivating you to adopt. The first step for anyone considering adoption is to make sure you’re firmly committed to rearing and nurturing a child. Look very carefully at your skills and strengths as a person, and how they translate to being an effective parent.
If you’re dealing with infertility, it’s important to acknowledge that you’re unlikely to bear children. You should see adoption not as a second-best option, but as an alternative way to become a parent and create a family. You may also want to learn more about gestational surrogacy, or third-party reproduction. But be aware that the field is still a maze of legal issues, which are being addressed through laws and regulations proposed by the American Bar Association and the American College of Pediatricians and Gynecologists.
2. Decide what kind of child you can effectively parent. Some families consider adopting only a healthy same-race infant, and seldom think of a child with special needs or one born in another country. Assess your strengths and decide what you are open to and can manage.
Consider whether you can integrate the rich yet different cultural background of a child from another country. You will need a plan to incorporate that heritage into your family’s life.
3. Learn as much as you can about adoption and how it meets a child’s need for a family. Find out about the children waiting for adoption in the United States and other countries. As you consider the types of adoption programs available, you will come to an understanding of how your desire to be a parent matches a child’s need for a family.
You will also learn how your hopes for a particular kind of child affect your program options and wait times. Take advantage of educational opportunities that prepare you for adoptive parenting and set the stage for you to begin the process of adoption with good information and confidence.
4. Learn what your state law requires of agencies and families to complete an adoption. Also find out what is required by the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services for international adoption.
Among the first things a family should do is contact their state’s department of social services and talk to an adoption supervisor to learn about legal requirements.
5. Choose the type of adoption that interests you. One of the first decisions is whether you’d like to adopt an older child, in which case you can also adopt through a public agency, which primarily works with foster care and group homes. Some infants are also placed in foster care.
If you want to adopt an infant or a child from another country, including older children, you will work with a private agency. You can also opt for an independent, or private, adoption (state law permitting), in which adoptive parents work with a lawyer or other non-agency adoption provider to find a birth parent or child. There are certain risks with private adoptions and more of a safety net with an agency.
6. Assess the costs. The cost of adopting a child ranges from several thousand dollars to upwards of $40,000, particularly for an adoption done with a private agency and/or an attorney. However, parents adopting a child through a state system do not pay for adoption expenses and actually receive adoption assistance after placement, including certain out-of-pocket expenses.
Private adoption has the reputation of being more expensive because the costs usually aren’t set up front. Some agencies may charge on a sliding scale basis.
Different agencies have different fee structures, services and missions. Try to get details about the services they provide, and insist that they assign a service to each fee.
International adoptions also tend to be more expensive because of the costs for additional documents and travel.
7. Expect to feel as though you’re being examined during the adoption process. Most agencies now offer open adoptions, which means that the birth parent(s) choose(s) which prospective adopter(s) they want to adopt their child, and the two families make an adoption plan together. The agency staff can and does compile a book of dossiers with biographical information about prospective families for birth parents to review. Some prospective adopters choose international adoption because they feel uncomfortable with the open plan or the feeling of “marketing” themselves.
8. Be honest during the adoption study, commonly known as a “home study.”All prospective adoptive parents must undergo the process, which helps agency personnel assess your readiness for adoptive parenting.
It’s not unlike applying for a mortgage, with lots of personal questions to answer that require verification. For example, staff members assess what’s motivating you to adopt, how you were parented and how you plan to discipline the child. They’ll also ask for references and look at your finances and psychological stability.
If you have a criminal history or a history of psychiatric illnesses, you need to fully disclose these details — don’t lie about the situation — or it will cause greater problems than if you’re upfront and explain what’s what. Agencies will also follow up with thorough background checks.
Think about the type of child you want to adopt and which program helps you meet that goal. If you want to adopt a domestic newborn, then you need to consider your comfort with an open adoption. You and the adoption staff members will likely work directly with a birth family in devising a plan for communication after you adopt the baby. Think not only about your feelings now, but also about how your relationship with your child’s birth family might evolve.
9. Find out how quickly adopted children join their adoptive families. In the case of open adoption, agencies have a difficult time estimating the wait time. The agency should be able to give you a time line, though — how long the home study takes and the average wait period. Be flexible and remember that agencies really act as a family’s advocate in the process. Because they work on a child’s behalf, they are seeking families that are good matches for the children.
10. Make sure you’re working with reputable people. Unless the people you are working with are competent, qualified and ethical, the whole process is jeopardized. If you opt for a private adoption, don’t go to a family lawyer unless he or she has experience in adoption. And bear in mind that just because a lawyer knows how to complete an adoption according to the letter of the law, it doesn’t mean he or she has a background in or understanding of the sociological and psychological aspects of adoption.
11. In an international adoption, be aware of cultural differences. What may be culturally acceptable in other countries may be counter to your experience or what may be deemed acceptable. For example, some adoptive families said they were asked for gifts that they thought were bribes. A reputable, ethical American agency won’t allow gifts other than the small customary presents you would take to a host.

Open Adoptions

While there are no national statistics, open adoption has become increasingly common. In such adoptions, birth parents choose the adopting parents for their child. Prospective parents get more information about the birth parents and in some — not all — cases even have contact with them.
Harold Grotevant, a University of Minnesota professor who is a leading experts in open adoptions, says there has been a clear-cut swing from confidential to open adoptions. Adoptive Families magazine started an “Ask the Experts” column on open adoption in 2007. The column now gets more queries than any other column in the magazine, said Susan Caughman, the magazine’s editor.

Transracial Adoptions

A grow ing number of white couples are pushing past longtime cultural resistance to adopt black children. In 2004, for example, 26 percent of black children adopted from foster care, about 4,200, were adopted transracially, nearly all by whites. That was up from roughly 14 percent, or 2,200, in 1998, according to a 2006 New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell Universityand from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It is a significant increase,” said Rita Simon, a sociologist at AmericanUniversity, who has written several books on transracial adoption. “It is getting easier, bureaucratically and socially. With so many people going overseas, people are also increasingly saying, Wait a minute, there are children here who need to be adopted, too.”
The 2000 census — the first in which information on adoptions was collected — showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children. Adoption experts say there has been a notable increase since 2000.
The reasons for the increase are varied. The Multiethnic Placement Act and its amendments prohibited federally financed agencies from denying adoption based on race. The foster care system has sharply changed in recent years and now includes financial incentives for finding more adoptive families.
In 2008, a report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute criticized the Multiethnic Placement Act, which plays down race and culture in adoptions. The report, based on an examination of the law’s impact over a decade , said that minority children adopted into white households face special challenges and that white parents need preparation and training for what might lie ahead.
At the same time, the combination of legal changes and greater embracing of multicultural families — Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas in the past 20 years — have lessened resistance from both blacks and whites. The long wait for white children and the high costs of international adoptions have also played a role.
And agencies are offering courses to help adoptive parents enter the process with more cultural openness and awareness.
To read more about transracial adoption, click here.

The Ethnic Choice

One of the largest studies of transracial adoptions , released in November 2009, focused on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea. The report issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption research and policy group based in New York, found that 78 percent of those who responded had considered themselves to be white or had wanted to be white when they were children. Sixty percent indicated their racial identity had become important by the time they were in middle school, and, as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.
Most Korean adoptees were raised in predominantly white neighborhoods and saw few, if any, people who looked like them. The report also found that the children were teased and experienced racial discrimination, often from teachers. And only a minority of the respondents said they felt welcomed by members of their own ethnic group.
As a result, many of them have had trouble coming to terms with their racial and ethnic identities.
Since 1953, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, the vast majority of them from orphanages in Asia, South America and, most recently, Africa. Yet the impact of such adoptions on identity has been only sporadically studied. The authors of the Donaldson Adoption Institute study said they hoped their work would guide policymakers, parents and adoption agencies in helping the current generation of children adopted from Asian countries to form healthy identities.
The study recommended several changes in adoption practices that the institute said are important, including better support for adoptive parents and recognition that adoption grows in significance for their children from young adulthood on, and throughout adulthood.
South Korea was the first country from which Americans adopted in significant numbers. From 1953 to 2007, an estimated 160,000 South Korean children were adopted by people from other countries, most of them in the United States. They make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the United States and, by some estimates, are 10 percent of the nation’s Korean population.
The report says that significant changes have occurred since the first generation of adopted children were brought to the United States, a time when parents were told to assimilate the children into their families without regard for their native culture.
Yet even adoptees who are exposed to their culture and have parents who discuss issues of race and discrimination say they found it difficult growing up.
Heidi Weitzman, who was adopted from Korea when she was 7 months old and who grew up in ethnically mixed neighborhoods in St. Paul, said her parents were in touch with other parents with Korean children and even offered to send her to a “culture camp” where she could learn about her heritage.
“I was 21 before I could look in the mirror and not be surprised by what I saw staring back at me,” she said. “The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”
Ms. Weitzman’s road to self-discovery was fairly typical of the 179 Korean adoptees with two Caucasian parents who responded to the Donaldson Adoption Institute survey. Most said they began to think of themselves more as Korean when they attended college or moved to ethnically diverse neighborhoods as adults.
For the complete article, click here.