Many people are not able to have children on their own, so they look to adopt. In the U.S., there are nearly 400,000 children living in foster care, and about one-third of those are eligible to be adopted. Around the world, there are nearly 18 million children who are orphans. Whether you want to try to adopt one of these children or hope to adopt a baby from a mother looking to find a home for a child she can’t care for, you have choices. Working with adoption centers can help you figure out which of those choices will work best for you.
When you work with adoption centers to find a child to adopt, you can set out parameters of what children you will accept, and the adoption agency will then seek to only find those children. For example, you might only want infants or children under a certain age. If you are adopting internationally, you might only want children from certain countries. An adoption center also will take care of all the legal issues involved with adoption and make sure all paperwork is taken care of. This can be especially important when you are doing an international adoption, because each country has different laws and requirements for adoptions.
Outside of adoption centers, one way to get started on the adoption process is to become a foster parent. There is a tremendous need for foster families, as nearly 60,000 foster children each year are placed in group homes or institutions rather than in traditional foster homes. Children who are in foster care wait an average of three years to be adopted, but families who take in foster children often have a better chance of adopting those children permanently. People who apply to be foster parents also get thoroughly vetted, which can make the process easier when you attempt to make a permanent adoption.
Adoption is a very complex process that takes a lot of time and involves a lot of legal hoops that you have to jump through. These issues can be magnified when you are attempting to adopt a child from another country. To make the process go more smoothly and to give yourself the best chance of having a successful adoption, it makes sense to get professional expertise from adoption centers.
