Since we are getting a little closer to the possibility of being matched, I’ve had a few questions that I wanted to answer.
Do we get to choose what conditions, if any a child might have? The answer is yes! About a month ago, we were required to complete a medical checklist where we had to check yes or no to about 80 different possible medical issues. These ranged from a small birth mark to a language delay to a cleft lip/palate to infectious diseases or more severe issues. So we were able to do our research and mark yes to the conditions that we would be comfortable with.
So does this mean our child will have “problems”? The answer to this is not necessarily. Marking yes to a medical condition just means that we have a larger pool of children to be matched with. Although there are many children with moderate to severe medical issues that need to be adopted, there are also many children that were simply born prematurely or just couldn’t be kept by the birth parents and there is nothing medically wrong with them. One thing I would like to add however is that because the child will have been in an institutional setting, we most likely will have attachment issues to work through and possibly some learning delays.
How does the agency match us with a child? Now that the agency knows what medical conditions we are willing to accept, they can look through files they receive to find a good match for us.Agencies are given files for children in batches and can hold on to them for three weeks.Once they have the files, they look at the children and then look at the families that are waiting and try to match the children with the best fit.Unfortunately just because the agency gets a batch of files doesn’t mean we will be matched just yet.There is also something called the “shared list.”These are children who have not yet been assigned to a specific agency and can be matched with waiting families also.
What happens if we are presented with a file that we just don’t feel like is “our child”? We have the right to say no. If we are presented with a file where the child’s condition is not something we are open to we can pass on that child and wait for another file to be presented to us.
**This is just a reminder that this information is my own writing and is how we have interpreted the information given to us. There are other ways of being matched with children through adoption, but this is the method that we will be following.