Reply to Seeking Adoption Agency Recs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Using Barker or Adoptions Together for an adoption from foster care does cost a lot because they do your training, homestudy, and help you with out of state matches. You get a tax credit back if you adopt but you need the money up front. I used one of them and I think nobody in our class successfully adopted. Of the eight, two disrupted placements, one switched to international adoption, one I don't know, and the others decided not to pursue it before doing the homestudy and paying extra money.

It is free through the state or county but you are generally restricted to kids where you live (they aren't going to share your homestudy that they paid for with another state--they want you to take their kids). DC and MD make relatively few kids available for adoption, and especially few kids are legally freed without a relative or foster home willing to adopt them.

If you are going to adopt an older waiting child for foster care, you 100% need to assume that the child will have PTSD, family history of addiction and serious mental illness, learning disabilities requiring an IEP, and major behavioral problems that will at some point require a stay at home parent/private school/inpatient hospitalization/residential mental health treatment. Few kids will have all of these. Most kids will have some of these. You may not know right away and you're often not going to find out from the paperwork you're shown. For a social worker to be considering out of state placement, it means the kid was treated badly enough to be removed, parents did little enough to have their rights terminated, no foster home they were in was willing to adopt them, no relatives were stable enough or willing to adopt them, and the state couldn't find someone from its already-licensed group of foster and adoptive families. It's not something to go into lightly (not that OP was!). I want more people to do it but they need to be really well-screened and well-trained and well-supported. Most people, even if they're good parents in general, are not going to be good at parenting a severely traumatized and often mentally ill tween or teen.

Same thing with fostering. Most people, even if they want to adopt, are not going to be naturally good at taking care of a kid who isn't theirs and probably isn't going to stay with them, helping the kid stay connected to bio family, and living with the uncertainty of the court case plus not knowing what the kid was exposed to before placement and how that will manifest as the kid gets older. [/quote]

OP here.  We adopted our first child when we lived in another state.  We used a private adoption agency.  We adopted from foster care, but adopted a child who lived in state, but a different county about 5 hrs away.  We paid absolutely nothing.  I'm just shocked at the price tag on this.  Most kids in the system have siblings. It's no wonder there are so many kids in the system waiting for adoption when you have states that make it so cost prohibitive.[/quote]

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