Adoption
New here and have an honest quesiton?
I wanted to know what made you choose or know for sure that adaption was the path for you? I was blessed with a baby boy, and we would really like to have a baby girl so we are thinking about adaption for the second one. We have not attempted to have a second of our own, so we don't know that adaption is our only choice, but we have been discussing it. The thought that there are children out there without homes that we can give one to it was draws us to adoption.
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Re: New here and have an honest quesiton?
I have a lot of things to say about your question, but don't really know where to start, and so I thought that you might want to see these two threads that mention gender selection. The responses contain a lot of what I was going to say:
https://community.thebump.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/51494863.aspx
and
https://community.thebump.com/cs/ks/forums/1/14014336/ShowThread.aspx.
Personally, I think Fred said it best in that first thread. Adoption comes with a lot of loss, for everyone involved, and is not as simple as picking what you want in a child. I'm not saying it's not the right path for you, but you may want to do a little preliminary research into how adoption works and what it means to all members of the adoption triad.
ALL people touched by adoption suffer loss, whether they think they will or not. I was pretty sure that because I chose adoption without TTC that I would not experience this, but a quick look at my post below shows you that my biggest sadness is that I wasn't able to be there to protect my little one from the hurts he's received.
If you adopt a newborn, you generally won't be "giving a child out there without a home" a family, unless you are willing to adopt a child with special needs. Typically, birthfamilies of healthy newborns are presented with the profiles of approved, waiting prospective adoptive parents, and the children are placed at birth. The children in foster care are generally harder to place, not yet legally free for adoption, and/or have suffered some type of trauma. I don't know how old your son is, but you refer to him as a "baby." It's also often important to maintain birth order when adopting, so I'm guessing that you are only considering infants.
One final note, I know you didn't mean anything by it, but adopted children are children of your own. A good way to differentiate is "biological" verses "adopted."
Adoption is a wonderful way to build a family, but it's not easy, and it comes with challenges that the family must decide to take on. I chose adoption twice, and wouldn't have it any other way, and you may feel the same. But from your post, it doesn't sound like you are very familiar with all adoption entails, and I wanted to point some of the main issues out. If you really believe that this is a path that your family is interested in, please do some research. A great place to start is with the FAQs at the top of this board and an introductory book (some are recommended in the FAQs). The members here will be more than happy to answer any specific questions you may have.
I apologize for my wrong use in terms, hence the ?I am new here? and have honest question.
To be honest when we discuss the idea of adopting, we have not even thought about newborn, we only every discussed bring in a child that is 1-3 into our home. Thank you. this information of where to start is what I was looking for. I had no intention or thought it would be easy. Frankly I think it will be hard and overwhelming, and was looking for some good guidance of where to start and find information to help determine if our family is right for adoption. I want to know as much as I can the good the bad and the ugly so I am fully informed so we knowing enter into the adoption process on the right foot. We have talked about foster care, but my worry would be to fall in love with a child and the child fall in love with us, and be lost with really no actual rights. Where is this FAQ section you are speaking about? I am still trying to get familiar with the bump in general and I cannot seem to find what is right in front of my face. You mention to maintain birthing order? Our son is coming up on 2, and we were thinking about adding another child to our family when he is around 3. Are there complications outside of "jealousy" that I would expect to happen even if the child brought into the home was biological.
Thank you for understanding that I wasn't trying to jump down your throat. I am admittedly oversensitive today, and realize my tone may have been harsh (I promise I'm usually much less edgy), but these were all things that I thought of when reading your post, and wanted to bring up so you were aware.
I apologize for jumping to the conclusion that you wanted to adopt a healthy newborn solely for the purpose of gender selection, without considering the impacts to your family. Unfortunately, there are people who do see adoption as a vehicle for creating the "perfect" family.
The FAQs are here, https://community.thebump.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/44555679.aspx, and can be accessed through the link at the top of this board, to the right of where it says "Adoption" (in white) in the green box above where the posts start.
The adoption process can be overwhelming, but raising a child who's been adopted doesn't have to be any harder or more overwhelming than raising a biological child. It does come with different emotions and loss, but in many cases, being adopted is just part of who they are. The more trauma a child has been exposed to, of course, the more difficulties he may have to deal with throughout life.
Adoption/foster professionals often cite jealousy and the child's understanding of how they fit into the home as a reason for preserving birth order, but there's a much bigger side to it than they often choose not to discuss when not relaying the circumstances surrounding a specific child. It's that children who have been abused often act out those same behaviors on younger children. So, if a family adopted an older child, and that child had been abused, he might in turn abuse a younger child already in the household in a similar fashion.
There are several people who foster(ed) here, and I'm sure they will be more than happy to share their stories with you. I have no personal experience with this, but I know it is possible to adopt a child in foster care without fostering first (adopting a non-legal-risk child), although in many instances these children are older, have suffered more trauma, or have more extreme acting out behaviors or extensive special needs.
In rereading your original post, I realized I never really answered your question about how I knew adoption was right for our family. I always thought about adopting since I had a grade school friend who was adopted, but I also imagined having a mixed family of biological and adopted kids. As I grew up, I second guessed this with a lot of the typical questions of whether I could love them equally, etc. When I met my husband, he told me he would adopt at least one child; so before deciding to marry, I had to be on board. We discussed it a lot, and I decided my fears were just that, unfounded fears. We both feel that we've been incredibly blessed in this life, and since we wanted a family, we wanted to use the opportunity to share all our blessings with someone who could really use it. At the time, we still planned to have both bio and adopted kids. When we were ready to start a family, it was in the middle of the financial crisis, and he's in capital markets. I wasn't ready to have a kid in the next 9 months (if everything went perfectly) with him working all the time, but I figured that since adoption would take longer, we could start with that. Little did I know at the time that our adoption would take 2 and a half years! Now that we are planning our second child, it just feels right to us that he/she be like M, so he's not the only person of color or adopted child in our family.
So, in short, we decided that we wanted to share our blessings with someone who could use it; we wanted children, so why not adopt a child who needed a loving family? Our motives led us towards older child international adoption, because we wanted to adopt a child who might not otherwise get that chance.
Thank you all, I did finally find the FAQ that literally was right in front of my face on the home page for the board. Duh... and I have started collecting and reading. There is a lot of infomraiton out there. My fear and why I started here, was you cannot alwyas believe what you read or find on the web, and I figured individuals wilth real life exerpeiecnes would help to weed out the false infomraiton and the myths adn fears.
We did purchase the Adoption for Dummies this weekend, and little did I know we have 3 contacts of coworkers for my husband that have adopted, or are going thru the adoption process now that we can use as information sources as well. I am excited to be at the beginning. I never considered the thought of abuse, and having children being children and the possibility of olders taking out their fustrations before I could catch them.
For those of you that have adopted older children, did you find them harder to open up to you and allow you into theirs lives? I ask becuase I had an aunt and uncle that tried to assist a family member and they took in at the time he was 8 or 9, and she was 12 or 13. The children did not want to be there, which is understanable. But even with therapy nothing seemed to work. I am the type of person that can't see myself giving up on someone, but at the same timeit would be killing me inside, to hear my child tell me he/she woudl not want to be there. I know all children will go through becuase i remember I did. But my questions is do most adoptive families that taken in older childern 8-13, do you partake in group family therapy?