Initially I thought $14.95 was a steep price for what looked like a magazine issue. But the 2008 Adoption Guide is in fact more informative than many books. It is a combination news digest, workbook, telephone and website directory, statistics almanac, and collection of personal essays.
The annual guide, from the publisher of Adoptive Families Magazine, is a concise introduction to adoption topics, but it also provides the insight from personal experiences that people exploring adoption crave (and that experienced adoptive parents can’t seem to resist reading either).
The guide covers the four major types of adoption: domestic infant adoption through an agency, domestic infant adoption through a privately arranged or “independent” adoption, adoption from state agencies/foster care systems, and international adoption.
The guide is a handy overview of trends, statistics, anticipated timelines, requirements and costs of various adoption programs, both domestic and abroad. Properly, the guide advises prospective adoptive parents to verify the exact regulations and amounts as they are changeable. In fact, the guide provides an article on choosing an adoption agency, which includes red flags to look for and makes suggestions like checking several references and the Better Business Bureau. It also includes a worksheet of questions to ask an adoption agency before you begin to work with them. There is a similar worksheet for interviewing attorneys. I recommend making several copies of these forms and using one for each agency and/or attorney that you speak with.
The guide talks about help with adoption expenses, including the federal adoption tax credit, the fact that most adoptions from the foster care system are free or nearly so (and that there ARE infants available), grants and loans, and employee benefits.
One article is made up of adoptive parents saying why they chose to adopt when and how they did. Other articles include a husband-and-wife-authored article about adopting their daughter from Vietnam, an article by a woman whose husband was reluctant to adopt at first, articles by people who have adopting infants, who have adopted transracially, and who’ve adopted from an orphanage.
In addition to personal essays, there are concise and informative articles on changes making it easier to adopt foster children and on what a homestudy is and isn’t. There are one or two-page overviews of adoption from the 12 countries Americans most commonly adopt from.
One nice feature is a detachable “adoption planner” which begins with questions to ask yourself. These include: what age, gender, physical ability, and ethnicity child could you best parent? How do you feel about birthparent contact? The guide then provides a chart comparing international adoption, U.S. infant adoption, and foster care adoption in terms of costs, typical ages of children and typical wait times, degrees of control the adopting parents have in the different types of adoptions, and more. A timeline planner of tasks, from “learn about adoption” to “post-placement”, a sheet breaking down some typical costs of adoption, and the above-mentioned sheets for interviewing agencies and attorneys.
The final section is the directory of agencies by state and adoption attorneys by state. (The Adoption Guide’s website includes a separate category for homestudy providers as well.) What I particularly liked about this section is that it lists under each state not only adoption agencies headquartered in that state, but all the adoption agencies which can place children in that state. This greatly expands parents’ options as it is not at all uncommon for a family’s primary agency to be out of state and a local agency is retained to do the pre-placement homestudy and education and the post-placement follow-up. Some agencies can place “waiting children” (those with a special need, older children, or sibling groups) in any state.
The Adoption Guide is available at www.theadoptionguide.com. The cost, including shipping and handling, is $14.95 in the U.S., $19.95 Canadian and $24.95 to other countries.
Please see these related blogs:
Types of Adoption Part One: Domestic Infant Adoption
Types of Adoption Part Two: Adoption From the Child Welfare System
Types of Adoption Part Three: International Adoption