FAQ update #2 Home study experiences

Dr.Loretta

Please remember to include what type of adoption you pursued and what avenue you used (lawyer, agency, etc.)

Dr.Loretta

We completed a domestic infant adoption through a large, regional agency. Our homestudy process was pretty painless.

DH's biggest concern was how invasive the HS would be, so he spent an hour on the phone with our agency and another one we were considering, just to have them walk through the homestudy. Don't be afraid to ask questions!

We had a pre-HS meeting with the SW just to get to know each other. At that meeting we got all of our paperwork: forms or sites to do our criminal background checks and clearances, all the questions for our autobiography, etc. The autobiography focused a lot on our thoughts and feelings on adoption, our families our upbringings, our marriage, etc. A lot of our in-office meetings touched on the same topics we saw in our autobiography.

Once we had all the paperwork and clearances done, we had our in-home visit. Since we'd already had the other meetings at the agency office, the home visit was relatively quick, maybe 45 minutes. She had a list of questions, mostly about the size of the house, location of certain features (I think for safety they only focused on smoke and CO detectors), and the vibe of our neighborhood, town, and region in general.

Once our SW wrote up the homestudy, she sent a copy to us to review for things like names spelled wrong, incorrect dates, that sort of thing. Then we were notified that it was officially done and we could move on to the next step in the process.

BTW, our HS took 4 months, mostly because 1) DH took a while to complete his autobiography and 2) the state lost one of my clearances for a couple of months. our SW was also the only one in our particular office, so she had her hands full doing everything else along with writing up our report.

arbutusbride

DIA, local adoption agency

 Our social worker was at our house for less than 30 minutes. I am glad that I didn't spend a lot of time cleaning. She even told us that it was unnecessary. Instead of doing my cleaning on Friday I switched it to Sat with HS being on Monday.  It was easy peasy.  The hardest part of the pre-homestudy stuff was the questionnaire which included 119 questions.  It took forever!