Adoption
butterflygrooves
member
Questions to ask the adoption worker?
butterflygrooves
member
in Adoption
My wife and I are going to meet with our adoption worker in the next few weeks and I wanted to see what questions everyone asked when they met with their adoption workers.
We are adopting through the foster system using a foster/adoption agency and I'm not sure if there are specifc questions regarding adopting this way that we should ask.
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Re: Questions to ask the adoption worker?
Two Mommies Healing Hearts
We did fost/adopt and used an agency. I really hate to say it, but asking questions really got us nowhere. Everything was constantly changing. Everytime we got a new social worker (they had a very high turnover) we'd ask the same questions and get completely different answers. Doesn't mean I still wouldn't ask questions but I took the responses with a grain of salt after awhile. What state are you in? We quickly discovered that in our state, the agency is a middleman for the state. They actually didn't do much for us. In fact the state got annoyed with the agency quite quickly.. took them longer to get what they needed from us, and the state social workers started dealing with us direct (even though we were going through the agency). That ended up working out very well for us, as the state workers had the say in everything and could relay info directly to us rather than having the agency pass info on and sometimes incorrectely relaying info. Sorry that's slightly off topic from what you asked! But if your county offers a fost/adopt info session through the state, I'd attend that as well. We did both.
The agency ended up being great for us because (1) they got us more funding and (2) if for some reason we got a crazy state worker, we could resort to our agency worker to deal with. and (3) the state pretty much drops you off their radar once finalization happens and the agency will still be there to help with post-adoption needs.
A few questions we asked were:
1) What is the criteria we give to select (for lack of better words) our child? They let us give an age range, choose the extent (if any) of medical and psychological issues, gender, ethnicity
2) How long does a home study take to get completed and what does it entail?
3) What costs (if any) are associated with the fost/adoption?
4) What kind of assistance is available if needed (financial assistance and post adoption services like counseling for child if needed)?
5) How many home visits are required and how often?
6) Are we required to do all transportation for family visits (if court ordered)? and where would the location be?
7) Are we required to monitor the visits or stay for the entirety? (our agency would monitor only upon our request).
I'm sure there was other but they are not coming to me at the moment.
Good luck!!