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I have been researching adoption for a while and the one thing I want to know is whether there is a need for adopting families or if there are more people waiting to adopt then there are children available. I hate to say it...but I am referring to children with little special needs and also children two years or younger. I would love to adopt to help the children and I can only imagine how much it would also help my family to adopt. I just wonder if there is more children that need homes or more families on waiting lists wanting children. Thank you for any clues on this.
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There are many families waiting to adopt children under the age of 2, especially for kids with few special needs. The kids that tend to wait for adoptive homes typically have severe special needs (medical, developmental or behavioral) and/or are large sibling groups that need to stay together and maintain relationships with bio relatives.
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the poster is right, many families do wait for children under 2 with minor needs, but that does not mean that there are more families waiting to adopt than children needing homes.
Many many many such children wait and will never find a home b/c there are not enough families. Our son was in a reasonably good orphanage in China. Special needs. His room had 48 special needs children in it. I asked the director how many of them had families coming for them. Only 3 or 4. Out of 48. Soon those kids will be over the age of 2 and they will become less adoptable. There are not enough families.
IF you family can adopt an older child, go for it. But pleaes do not think that there is no need for families for young children. The reason there are older children waiting is because there have never been enough families for the younger children too.
In my research, it depends what you mean by "few special needs" - for instance, there are many kids who need significant surgery, so many special needs in the short term, but will ultimately be "normal" after the surgery is completed, so few special needs in the long term. There's no concrete answer - the truth is that there are certainly more adoptive parents than perfectly healthy infants, at least in countries that are easy to adopt from. The more flexible you are able to be regarding age and special needs, the more the balance shifts towards need of the children. Of course, there are far more kids needing families if we're looking at the whole world - unfortunately many kids languish in orphanages in countries that are not open to international adoption and lack social and economic stability to allow many locals to adopt.