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I'm wondering what the reasons are people choose to adopt older kids or kids with special needs internationally, with the associated hassles and expenses, rather than adopting a waiting child from the US foster care system? I ask bc I would really like to be able to adopt from foster care, but we've been told by agencies that our upper age limit is too young for them. They want to work with families wanting to adopt kids 9 and up, whereas our limit is 8. Yet I find kids in our paramaters on photolistings for US foster all the time. It's very frustrating, bc I feel like we have no choice but international, but I am not looking forward to spending money we don't have and going through USCIS again (both dh and I are naturalized citizens, which was NOT a pretty process, and extremely lenghty). I'd love to hear your reasons so I can try to see if I'm making the right decision, if there's other pros to international over foster care. :thanks:
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i have done both foster and international. and for me i have decided that sometimes it is about where you live. where we used to live, the foster system was easy to navigate and understand, there were many children available within our parameters, but then we moved. here the system is not easy...it is almost like it is set up to discourage adoption from fc. we were told unless we wanted to adopt teenagers that had been relinquished by their birthfamily for behavioral problems we would not be able to adopt within our state. when i have inquired about a few children in other state's foster systems i have either been told that they don't want to place that child out of state, or that there has been over 200 inquiries and they will most likely find a family within that number that will not include me for whatever reason- large family size, out of state. next we tried to do domestic....i thought i could be patient and wait it out. but the first time we weren't chosen i realized i am not patient...and it could be we will never be chosen...and i want to parent again. so...international it is. i love international adoption....the fees and the paperwork kill me though.
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mommytoEli- thank you! Reading you say that the problem may be our location made me feel less like some sort of nincumpoop who can't figure out something that sounds like it's being spelled out for everyone else. Perhaps I am in a location like you said, bc that's what we've been hearing - it's all about the teenagers here.
we wanted a very young child with minor correctable issues. us foster care system would have made that impossible. we are not willing to be foster parents and take placement of children who might be removed from our home when they are reunited with their families. we wanted to adopt a child who needed a home.
We realized we were expanding criteria more and more, to the point where it wasn't even about what we wanted anymore, and realized we were too focused on this part of adoption, and not at all on what it'd be like once our child was home. Once we really thought about what we really wanted, not too young (babies) and not too old (school-aged), we realized international was the only way to go.
This is interesting. We are switching from adopting in Poland to adopting from US foste care. In my state we do not have to use an agency, so we are working with our social worker. She is more optimistic about our chances with foster care system than our chances with international adoption.We have not run into any road blocks with our criteria of up to age seven with minor special needs. Granted we are just getting started, but Poland was not working for us at all. We actually came to the conclusion that why we adopt internationally when we could adopt the same types of children here? Which I guess is your question. In the beginning we just didn't know all that much about foster care adoption and we thought international was the only thing that would work since we did not want to do private infant adoption.
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