Lounge of Tomorrow

Quote:

Originally Posted by madmonkeygirl (Post 154234)

My cousin and her husband are both adopting. They make a decent living (she's a school teacher, he's assistant principal of a school) so they can afford it but i don't think it's that much money to adopt i could be wrong. Plus there are so many kids out there who need a family.

There is more than one way to adopt.

One can go through an agency. This can cost $, but I am not sure how much. Typically, the agency matches prospective parents with either women having a baby they wish to put up for adoption or via surrogacy. The adopting parents not only pay the agency fee, but also medical care for the birth mother.

You can also work with the county child welfare agency. We are lucky in Orange County (CA) to have one of the best County Foster and Adoption programs in the US (or at least it was so rated a few years ago when Susan and I were looking into this).

Technically, anyone working through the county is a Foster Parent first until the adoption process is complete (typically 12-18 months). One can also be just Foster Parents as well - the majority of the training with the county is the same for Fostering as it is with Adopting. There are different levels of adoptability of children in the county welfare program (I am paraphrasing here a bit as it has been a couple of years since we went through this):

Level 1 children are typically cases where the child is only temporarily being taken away from its parent(s) for a few weeks/months. These children are almost never adopted out.
Level 2 children are where it is probable that the child will be going back to the parent(s) or other family member(s), but there is a small chance of adoptability.
Level 3 children are probably going to be adoptable, but there is still a chance that the child may go back to the family.
Level 4 children almost always are adoptable (but there are no guarantees!)

The level ratings are determined for each child by Social Services case workers. Typically, if a couple/person came to the county wanting to adopt, they would match them up with a level 3 or 4 child (after they went through all of the requisite training).

There are no direct costs (agency fees, medical support for the mother, etc.) that are associated with working with the County. While the child is still considered a foster child, the foster parents do receive some money from the state and medical needs for the child are covered by Medical, but one will not "make" money by being a foster parent.

Sometimes, if the foster parents are willing, a special needs child (such as a drug baby, etc.) can be cared for. One interesting thing we learned about babies of mothers who took drugs is how disparate the effects the drugs can have on the baby. There have been cases with twins where one baby has severe impact as a result of the drugs and the other has no ill effects.

Susan and I went through the full Foster/Adoption training with Orange County a few years and we only backed out because we wanted to make one more try at having our own children naturally (though when they learned of our collective backgrounds, they were excited and were immediately trying to convince us to take whole families :) ). We had planned that even if we did end up having our own children, we would probably still have had foster kids as well.

I am not trying to downplay the agency approach, just trying to let people know that working with the county is a very viable option.