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Question: Hello! I’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while now as I consider my desire to adopt. I’ve had many models around me who adopted their children, and although the process is difficult, I have a desire to provide a home to children in need. It seems like now adoptions are declining for various reasons, and I’m trying to consider my motivations and whether it is right for me and my husband. One of our considerations is that my husband has a physical disability, and I wonder if there is anyone or data about how likely/quickly it’s possible for someone with a significant physical disability to adopt (domestic infant or international). My husband is very physically independent and is the breadwinner in our family. We have not started seriously contacting agencies as we hope to wait a few years before considering starting our family.
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Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome everyone to Weekend Wisdom. Weekend Wisdom is Creating a Family which we are a national nonprofit for foster, adoptive and kinship families. So Weekend Wisdom is our opportunity to answer your questions.
It's short. We need you to send us your questions and then we will answer them on air. So without further ado, I'm going to jump in to answer Cassidy's question.
Her question is this, "I've been listening to the podcast for a little while now as I consider my desire to adopt. I've had many models around me that adopted their children, and although the process is difficult,
I have a desire to provide a home to children in need. It seems like now adoptions are declining for various reasons, and I'm trying to consider my motivations and whether it's right for me and my husband.
One of our considerations is that my husband has a physical disability and I wonder if there is any data about how likely, quickly it's possible for someone with a significant physical disability to adopt.
And she specifically said domestic, infant or international. My husband is very physically independent and is the breadwinner in our family. We have not started seriously contacting agencies as we hope to wait a few years before considering starting our family.
Is there any information you might be able to provide to help us? Well, thank you Cassidy for this question. I'm going to answer it based on types of adoption and you don't mention why you aren't interested in adopting from foster care,
but for the sake of completeness I'm going to include that in my answer. All right, so we're going to start with domestic infant adoption. So your question is how likely is it that your family,
with your husband with a significant physical disability, would be able to adopt an infant? You may or may not know, but domestic infant adoption in the United States is expectant parent choice,
meaning that the expectant parent, she's usually an expective mom, but sometimes both parents, makes a decision on which perspective adopt a family. She wants to adopt her child.
There are so many reasons it's impossible to say why a mom will choose a specific family. But if I'm being honest with you, my gut instinct is that having a significant physical disability,
it would make it harder to adopt because I think expected moms would be less likely to choose. Now, there's no scientific evidence supporting that, but that is my gut instinct based on what I see.
Expected moms choose prospective adoptive families to match with based on adoptive parent profiles, which are usually books or something along those lines, sometimes they're digital,
that are submitted and they look through and they try to imagine what it would be like for their child to be raised in this family. The reality with domestic infant is that there are significantly more perspective adoptive parents looking to adopt than there are expected moms looking for families to place their child with.
So they have a lot of families to choose from is the truth. So if they have a lot of families to choose from, I think that they would probably be more likely to choose a family without a significant physical disability.
Now, that's not to say that you could not be able to show through your adoptive parent profile, which again, is a book. The wonderful things about your husband and what he can do and not focusing on what he cannot do.
And you obviously would do that. And it is certainly possible. But as you're approaching different options and where to spend your time and money, I think It helps to be realistic,
and that's what I'm trying to help you do. You also say that you are wanting to adopt, and I quote from you, "children in need." I suppose you could believe and make the argument that children who are being placed for domestic infant are in need.
But since there are so many families in line to adopt these kids, that would kind of belie that belief. So I throw all that out there for you. Now, you also talk about the possibility of international adoption and whether somebody with a physical disability would be able to adopt internationally and that is totally dependent on the country.
Every country makes a decision on who they will allow to adopt their kids and it varies significantly. You can get a general idea of what countries will allow from the medical and physical aspect from the creating a family adoption charts,
you would go to our website, creatingafamily .org and in the horizontal menu hover over the word adoption and then click on adoption charts and we have detailed information on the 10 top placing countries to the US.
So that's one way, But we don't go into a lot of detail, so your best bet is to contact a couple of international adoption agencies, explain your situation,
and just ask them. They truly have a finger on the pulse of what the countries are allowing. And if they have programs in multiple countries, which most do,
they could also tell you which countries would be more open to your family. So That would be your best bet then. We have a number of partners that are international agencies,
and I would encourage you to look at those partners if for no other reason than because they believe in our mission of providing you unbiased, research -based information,
and they put their money behind that. To find our partners, you would go to our website, creatingafamily .org, hover over in the horizontal menu the word resources and click on partners.
All right and then you don't mention foster care adoption but I'm going to answer that anyway just for others who are listening. There are two ways to go about adopting from foster care.
One, there are over a hundred thousand children who are waiting in foster care for a permanent family. If you're looking for children children in need, again quoting from you,
these children are in need. Their parental rights have been terminated or their decision has been made that their parental rights will be terminated and they are looking for a family to adopt these kids.
They tend to be over the age of six and they are often in sibling groups, although not always. These are terrific kids. These are kids who are in foster care through no fault of their own.
And they are looking for parents. So that is one, you could go in and the best bet is to start with your county or your parish if you're in Louisiana and ask the county child welfare agency,
it's called different things, go to them. The guiding principle is supposed to be best interest of the child and you would make the case that your family, regardless of the physical abilities of either of you,
could be the best family, the best fit for a child. That would be the first step that you would take. You can also adopt from foster care if you are a foster parent.
You have to go in with the realization that the goal of foster care is to reunify children with their parents. The goal is another way to say that is to heal families.
So if you go in as a foster parent, you're signing up for the idea that you are rooting for the child's family to reunify and that you will be asked to do things to help that process.
However, about 25 % of the time, children are not able to reunify with their birth family or birth extended family. When that happens,
usually the foster care agency or the child welfare agency turned to the foster parents and ask if they would like to adopt the child. And as I said, that happens about 25 % of the time.
If you are able to embrace the idea that the first, second, or even third child's place with you, you may not be able to adopt. If you stick with fostering long enough,
usually you will be asked to adopt a child so it is a possibility. You would also know if you have been fostering a child how significant a challenge it would be given your husband's disability so you would have a lot of information at that time.
One thing to keep in mind is that when you adopt a child in each child but in specific through foster care or international very often these kids In fact,
all of these kids, I would say, have experienced trauma. And trauma impacts behaviors, it impacts learning, it impacts physical health. So these kids have a lot of appointments just from a very practical standpoint.
There's therapies, there's appointments, there's tutoring, there's this, there's that. So depending on what your work situation is, the ability to get kids to and from appointments and therapies is something to consider.
you would need to be able to do that. Cassidy, I hope this has been helpful for you, and I wish you all the best. Before everyone leaves, let me remind you that creating a family has a terrific new training that we are offering for prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs.
I am so proud of this training. It's actually a workshop, but not a training. It is a three part workshop. Three different sessions. It is facilitated.
It's interactive. It can be done online or in person. And if we're facilitating it is being done online. If you think your child may have been exposed to alcohol or drugs during pregnancy,
this is the workshop for you. Check it out at bit .ly /prenatal -exposure -training. That's bit .ly /prenatal -exposure -training.
and thank you for listening to this week's Week in Wisdom. If you liked it, please tell a friend to subscribe to the Creating a Family dot org podcast, and I will see you next week.
