Thinking of adopting a baby? Each year in the U.S., more than 120,000 children are adopted, getting stable, loving homes they might not otherwise have had. Perhaps you too are considering adopting. Naturally, it can be a joyous, meaningful experience, but it can also be a tireless, complicated process, and one that affects your life — and the life of the child — in countless ways, so there are some important issues you need to consider before making the leap. “Adoption is a lifelong commitment to another person,” says Laura Lamminen, Ph.D., lead psychologist at the Rees-Jones Center for Foster Care Excellence at Children’s Health in Dallas. “Prospective adoptive parents should weigh out all of the positives along with the challenges that come with adopting a child before following through.” To shed some light on the subject, we spoke to Lamminen, as well as adoptive parents and adoptees themselves. Here’s what you need to know before you adopt:
ADOPTION IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY.
“Parents should take their time to think through the adoption process and the impact it will make on their family and on the life of the child,” says Lamminen, adding that you need to ask yourself three tough questions before proceeding: 1) Why do I want to adopt?, 2) How will adopting a child impact the people in my family?, and 3) Is my home environment stable and emotionally able to support the child?
YOU DON’T NEED A SO-CALLED “TRADITIONAL” HOUSEHOLD.
The idea that there needs to be a husband and wife present to adopt is a common misconception about the process. A 2014 Pew Research Center analysis revealed that fewer than half of all children in the U.S. lived in a traditional family; thus, as the structure of the American family is changing, so too are the adoption opportunities for nontraditional households, with more and more children being placed with single parents, same-sex parents, and older parents over age 55.
ADOPTION DOESN’T ALWAYS COST FIVE FIGURES.
“Private and international adoptions can cost several thousand dollars to upwards of $40,000 or more,” acknowledges Lamminen, “but adopting a child out of foster care usually costs very little to nothing. In addition, many foster-to-adopt families are able to collect a monthly stipend through their state while they wait for their children to be adopted. Many states also work with foster-to-adopt parents to continue to provide medical and mental healthcare to children after adoption.”
NOT EVERY BIOLOGICAL PARENT WHO GIVES UP A CHILD IS UNFIT OR UNWORTHY.
Birth mothers come from all walks of life and the only thing that can be assumed about them is that they decided, for one reason or another, their child would be better off being raised by someone else. Mark Molzen, a spokesman for a Fortune 150 company in Phoenix, who was adopted when he was three months old, says that when his parents shared his adoption story with him, they told him that his father was out of the picture and that his biological mother was just 14 years old and hadn’t finished school. They explained about the difficult and emotional choice his biological mother had to make and said that the bottom line was that she had put him up for adoption because she loved him.
YOU’RE NOT “SAVING” A CHILD WHEN YOU ADOPT.
Molzen says the distinction between believing you’re saving a child versus adopting a child is important because it has to do with the issue of gratitude. You do a lot of things for your child as a parent, and probably expect and deserve some measure of appreciation, but you should never make an adopted child feel as though they owe you for “saving” them from their previous circumstances. He adds that his parents always said how much better their lives were because he was in it rather than the other way around.