How do you choose a child to adopt

Being matched with a child

Information to help adoptive parents understand how the process works and make a successful match

Now that you have finished all the prerequisite adoption paperwork and training, you’re on your way to having a child or sibling group matched with you. It’s important to remain patient during this step in the process and not get discouraged while you wait. It’s also important to continue a strong partnership with your caseworker during this time to ensure you find the right match for your family.

Understanding how the matching process works
Staying in contact with your caseworker
Using the AdoptUSKids and state photolistings
Getting enough information about children to make an informed decision
Understanding and avoiding personal biases
Asking to review a copy of your home study
Writing a cover letter and creating a family photo book or video
Networking and learning while you wait
Finding other ways to help children in foster care

Understanding how the matching process works

Policies regarding being matched with a child and receiving an adoptive placement vary depending on where you live and the jurisdiction responsible for the child. As a result, the timelines and specific processes agencies use in matching children with families may vary widely.

Here is a general outline of how the matching process should work:

Once your home study has been approved, you or your caseworker can register your family with AdoptUSKids so that caseworkers of waiting children can find you. If you are unsure or have questions about doing this, contact us.
You see a child or sibling group you want to adopt and inquire about them either through a photolisting service such AdoptUSKids or through your caseworker. During this time, your caseworker is also actively searching using these same sources for children who may be a good fit for your family.
The child’s caseworker receives the inquiry and reviews a shortened version of your home study, either online in the form of a family profile or on a cover sheet sent by your family caseworker.
If your family information indicates you closely meet the needs and wishes of the child or sibling group, their caseworker may request a copy of your full home study and confirm your interest in adopting the child. Please note that child caseworkers receive dozens of inquiries for very young children and those with relatively few special needs. In these instances, it's unlikely a caseworker will request full home studies for all families who inquire.
Either while your home study is being reviewed or after it’s reviewed, you’ll be sent more information about the child or sibling group and given a period of time to ask questions and confirm or withdraw your interest in adopting them.
After a full review of your home study, the child’s caseworker will work with a team of people, which sometimes includes the child or sibling group you’re interested in adopting, to decide if your family is the best match. It’s important to remember your family may not be the only family interested in adopting this child or sibling group, and that the decision about which family is the most suitable match is based solely on the needs of the child and not on other factors, such as which family’s home study was submitted first.

A match occurs if your family is selected as the adoptive placement for a child or sibling group. At this point, you will be provided additional information about the child or sibling group so that your decision to proceed with meeting them is a well informed one. Once you have had an opportunity to review all of the available information about the child, and are satisfied that the match is a good one for you and for the child, the process of introducing your family to the child or sibling group begins.

If your family is not selected as the adoptive placement for a child or sibling group, you might be asked if you’re willing to be considered for other children available for adoption through that agency or to be a backup family for the child should the selected family decide not to proceed with adopting them.

Staying in contact with your caseworker

Your family caseworker plays an important role in helping you through the matching process. They serve as your advocate, and the better your relationship is with them, the better they can do their job in advocating for you. Child caseworkers will often prefer to communicate with your family caseworker instead of directly with you during the initial phases of the matching process. This is to ensure an accurate exchange of information about you and the child or sibling group you’re interested in adopting.

One of the best ways to develop a great working partnership with your caseworker is to establish communication lines up front. Does your worker prefer phone calls or emails? How soon can you expect a reply? How heavy is their caseload, and how does this affect their availability to you?

Read caseworkers’ advice about what makes a successful parent and tips for staying in touch with them on our blog. Youcan also contact us.

Using the AdoptUSKids and state photolistings

Make use of AdoptUSKids’ free national photolisting and state photolists as part of your adoption search. These resources are available to all families.

If you are home studied or foster-care licensed and approved to adopt, you can register on our site to access additional tools:

Search for children who are available to be adopted, create lists of children and share them with your caseworker, and contact children’s caseworkers.
Create a profile of your family that will appear in searches by caseworkers who are looking for families for children. Read workers’ advice about what makes a good profile on our blog.

When using our national and state photolistings, be sure your worker knows you are looking at these websites and making inquiries. This will help them be prepared to respond in a timely fashion to any follow-up requests for information from the child’s caseworker.

After you have made an inquiry on a child, the follow-up process may take some time, so remember to be patient. At the same time, you should feel comfortable enough with your caseworker to call if too much time has gone by and see if the follow-up contact has been made.

To find out more about using photolistings or registering on our site, contact us.

Getting enough information to make an informed decision

Try to get the most information you can about a child when you have been informed you are being considered as a possible match. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Try to gather your questions ahead of time so you don’t have to call too often, and keep notes. If a child has special needs or conditions you’re not familiar with, ask the child’s worker to explain them or provide you with resources to learn more.

If you’re being seriously considered for a child, share with other children in your family about what you’re doing and what you know about the child you hope to adopt. Have a family meeting to discuss how you would make accommodations to welcome this child into your home. Such accommodations could include:

Assuring religious training appropriate to the child’s denomination is respected
Meeting the emotional, medical, dental, and educational needs of the child
Cooperating with your agency in treatment planning for the child
Respecting the child’s feelings for their birth family
Supporting visitation plans with their birth family or others when applicable

Preparation on both your part and the child’s part is important in making an informed decision. You can have a degree of control and ownership in the matching process if you identify upfront what you want, what you can accept, and what is not acceptable. The more invested you and the child are, the more likely it will be a successful match.

Understanding and avoiding personal bias

Personal biases and value judgments can easily find their way into the decision-making process as caseworkers and others match children and families. It’s essential everyone involved in making these decisions, including you, is aware of their personal biases and understands how these biases may influence matching decisions. For example, biases about gender, sexual orientation, or race can impact decisions about who is an appropriate adoptive family for a child.

Criteria that can be used to consider if you’re the appropriate family for a specific child includes your capacity and ability to:

Understand and be responsive to the child’s safety needs that may have been compromised in their past
Meet the current, not future, expenses of caring for a particular child or sibling group (this assessment should not include your ability to cover expenses beyond childhood, such as whether you have resources to send a child to college)
Raise the child to adulthood and have back-up plans for who could assume responsibility for the child’s care if necessary
Meet the preferences and needs of the child in regard to the ages of other children in your family
Adopt all members of a sibling group
Have a strong support system outside of the agency

Reviewing a copy of your home study

If a long period of time between completing your home study and being matched with a child has passed, you will want to ensure your home study is up to date and accurately reflects your family. Many times, caseworkers involved in the matching process are making “paper matches.” That is, they don’t know you or the child personally, and they’re making matching decisions based on the written materials before them, such as your home study.

There should be no surprises in your written home study. If there are concerns about you or your ability to parent a child you’re hoping to adopt, those concerns should have been discussed with you previous to the writing of your home study.

Outside of the home study, another way to help personalize your introduction to a child caseworker is to write a cover letter and create a family photo book. See the section below for more information about this.

Writing a cover letter and creating a family photo book or video

Whether you’re inquiring about a child online or offline, you can personalize your inquiry by writing a short cover letter introducing yourself and your family.

On a photolisting website such AdoptUSKids, think of the narrative on your profile as this cover letter. If you have the ability to write a more specific cover letter when inquiring about a child, say how you heard about them and why you feel your family might be a good choice for them. Talk about how your family could meet this child’s specific needs and what resources you have in your community to help you. Include how you and your worker can be reached.

Having a collection of pictures in the form of a family photo book or video can also go a long way in helping a caseworker get a more personalized introduction to you. On photolisting websites such as AdoptUSKids, make sure you have photos of your family included in your online profile that include your home, other children, and pets.

It’s important to note that any information about your family included in your family profile on a photolisting website, or in a cover letter, photo book, or video should accurately reflect the contents of your home study.

Networking and learning while you wait

While waiting to be matched with a child, you may have a hard time understanding why the process takes so long.

Now is a good time to find your local foster care and adoption support group or network through AdoptUSKids’ Facebook community with other foster and adoptive parents. These are great sources of support and encouragement, and can help you pass the time while you wait.

Read about developing characteristics of a successful parent while you wait in ths article on our blog.

Finding other ways to help children in foster care

While you wait to be matched with a child, please consider other ways to help children in foster care. You have valuable abilities that can be put to work for children, such as being a community volunteer, respite worker, office assistant, tutor or mentor to teens, babysitter, or assistant recruiter. Discuss these options and others with your caseworker.

Things to do next:

Search for children on our website.
Read about receiving an adoptive placement.
Read other families’ stories on our blog.

Do Adoptive Parents Choose the Child They Want to Adopt?

When it comes to their family, many adoptive parents have a certain vision in mind when beginning the process of adopting a child. As a result, many families have asked, “When adopting, can you choose the child you adopt?” While the adoption process does allow the adoptive parents to specify some of what they are looking for, most of the process actually lies beyond their control.

However, by talking to your adoption specialist about your comfort level with various aspects of your adoptive child’s background and keeping an open mind, you can find an adoption opportunity that fits in with your needs as a family.

Can You Choose Your Adopted Child’s Characteristics? Understanding the APQ

With American Adoptions, one of the first steps in the adoption process is for adoptive parents to fill out an Adoption Planning Questionnaire, or APQ. This is a simple set of questions that helps the agency and adoptive parents determine which adoption situations fit best with their family. Answers to these questions will cover topics such as budget, contact arrangements with birth parents, medical history and race.

Once a family has completed this questionnaire, their adoption profile will be shown to pregnant mothers who are a good fit for their preferences. Ultimately, it is up to a potential birth mother to choose the adoptive family that’s best for her baby. So, while you do not get to “choose” the child you adopt, you will get to choose many of the characteristics you are comfortable with your future child having.

When considering your answers to these questions, it’s important to keep in mind that the more open you are to a variety of situations, the more prospective birth mothers your profile can be shown to, and the more likely you are to be chosen for an adoption quickly. Consider the issues that matter the most to your family in comparison to the time you are willing to wait for a child; each restriction on the APQ will add time to the process of adopting.

What Families Can Control

The APQ allows adoptive parents to specify their desires and comfort level with the following issues:

Desired race: It’s important that adoptive parents are confident in their ability to address their child’s potential cultural differences in a healthy way.
Prospective birth parent medical history and substance usage: Nobody has a spotless medical history, so take a look at your own and remain realistic in your decisions.
Contact arrangement with prospective birth parents: Closed adoptions are becoming more and more rare, and American Adoptions has certain openness requirements for all of our adoptive families. However, adoptive families can decide whether they are open to additional contact with prospective birth parents beyond our minimum requirements.
Adoption budget: Each adoption budget covers the fixed costs of case management and variable expenses such as living, medical, and legal fees.

What Families Can’t Control

At a certain point, the specifics of an adoption are beyond the adoptive family’s control. American Adoption’s APQ doesn’t guarantee a family’s specific desires for the following:

Gender: It is much more difficult to find potential birth mothers if an adoptive parent is only interested in babies of a certain gender.
Genetic traits: You cannot control your own genetics, just as you can’t control those of an adopted child. Instead, an adopted child will be their own unique blend of inherited and acquired traits.
When you’re placed with a child: Many factors contribute to the amount of time a family waits to be placed with a child, and the birth mother may change her mind for a number of reasons.
Emotions of expectant parents: While adoptive families may be going through their own emotional struggle, it’s important that they remain supportive of the feelings of expectant parents.

Finding a Prospective Birth Mother

For adoptive parents, the process is really more about finding the right prospective birth mother than the “perfect” child to adopt. Finding a potential birth mother that matches your needs is the most important step in the adoption process; everything else will be a result of that decision.

With American Adoptions, families can better their chances at finding the right adoption opportunity for their needs through written and video profiles, screening and counseling, advertising and marketing services, and open adoption education and support.

To learn more about adoptive parent’s choices in adoption with American Adoptions, call 1-800-ADOPTION today or request free adoption information.

Finding and choosing your child

Having come to the idea of adopting a child, potential parents begin to think about what their new family member should be like: will it be a boy or a girl, what age, what appearance, etc. As a rule, this stage of the adoption procedure (establishment of guardianship) is one of the most difficult for adoptive parents and takes a lot of time.

Practice shows that the vast majority of adoptive parents want to adopt a little girl, with an angelic appearance and as healthy as possible. Few of the adoptive parents consciously seek to adopt a disabled child, with defects in appearance or serious illnesses. However, this “ideal” idea of a foster child often has to be abandoned when confronted with reality. Firstly, in order to adopt a healthy little girl, many adoptive parents have to spend a lot of time looking for her, or rely on chance and luck. Secondly, according to pediatricians, there are practically no completely healthy children among those abandoned by their parents. There are many reasons for this, and we will consider them separately.

Summarizing all of the above, we do not recommend setting strict criteria - sex, age and health of the child during adoption. There are many examples when candidates for adoptive parents, having visited a children's institution and seeing the eyes of children waiting for their parents, having heard them address strangers with the word "mother", abandon their original intention and instead of a one-year-old girl decide to adopt a six-year-old boy . Also very often there are cases when, having chosen one child for adoption, and having learned that he also has a brother (sister), adoptive parents decide to accept both children into the family.

Quite often the decision to take a child into a family is made under the influence of external circumstances - you learned about a neighbor's child who ended up in an orphanage; saw an orphan in the hospital; a friend who works in an orphanage spoke about a particular baby; or you are somehow connected with the children's institution in which such a child ended up. But if everything happened differently for you, and you came to adoption on your own, and the image of the desired child is still very abstract, made up of stories, memories, personal experience and other trifles, how then will you approach the search for a child and what lies ahead on this path?

First of all, prospective adoptive parents should put aside myths about the process of searching for a child. Do not rely on chance: today state authorities are ready to help you in choosing a child. In our country, there is a recently developed system for searching for children for adoption, called “Hope”, which includes the State Data Bank on children left without parental care and who need to be placed in a family for adoption, guardianship, foster family, patronage. All provisions of work with this data bank are regulated by the Federal Law, certain provisions and forms of documents are introduced by Orders of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.

Formation of the Data Bank starts from the district level. The guardianship authority, having received information about the appearance of a child who has lost parental care in a children's institution (children's home, orphanage, orphanage, hospital, etc.) located in the territory under its jurisdiction, fills out a special questionnaire for the child, in which all data are indicated in detail the child, his parents and other relatives, a photograph is attached. During the first month from the moment a child left without parental care is identified, the local guardianship body is obliged to make efforts to place him in a family and keep the child's file only with himself.

If within a month the child has not been placed in a family, his/her questionnaire is transferred to the next instance, which is subordinate to the regional authorities. At this level, data about the child is entered into the Regional Data Bank, which is most often under the jurisdiction of the district committee (department) of education, or is subordinate to the social protection authorities under the Administration of the region. Manages the information contained in this data bank, the Regional operator of the data bank on children left without parental care.

Having received information about the child, the Operator, in turn, attempts to place him in a family of citizens living in this area. For this purpose, the following actions can be taken:

publication of shortened, so-called derivative information about the child in newspapers, magazines, specially published bulletins;
a story about a child in TV programs, on the radio;
posting information about the child on bulletin boards, electronic websites, etc.

If within a month it was not possible to find a family for the child, then his profile is transferred further, to the highest level - the Federal Data Bank Operator under the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.

As you can see from the reporting system below, the most complete and up-to-date records of children are held by local child care authorities and it is best to contact them directly. However, given the realities of our lives, you may encounter a lack of childcare facilities in the area with children of the desired age or information about children; you may not be satisfied with the attitude of the guardian; or perhaps you want to take a child from another area in order to avoid meeting with his parents. Then, having received the primary documents (conclusion on the possibility of being an adoptive parent / guardian /, becoming a foster parent) and capturing the necessary certificates and passport, you have the right to apply to any regional or federal operator.

Then you will need to write a statement of your desire to adopt a child for upbringing in a family with a request to acquaint you with the information about children in the state data bank that meets your wishes, as well as fill out a special questionnaire of a citizen who wants to take a child for upbringing in his family , to enter information about you in the data bank. After receiving such an application, the Data Bank Operator is obliged to provide you with the required information - profiles of children that meet your wishes.

Since the data bank is automated, the required information is issued to the applicant almost instantly. If, for some reason, it is impossible to quickly obtain information about children, the Operator is obliged to provide this information to the candidate for adoptive parents no later than 10 days from the date of acceptance of the application from him.

If a child matching your requirements cannot be found, you must leave a request to find such a child, and the guardianship authorities must notify the candidate for adoption of the appearance of a child that meets his request. In any case, the Operator is obliged every month to inform the candidate for adoptive parents about the presence / absence of information about the required child in the data bank, as well as to acquaint the candidate with the newly received questionnaires of children.

After the candidate for adoptive parents chooses a specific child, the regional operator issues him a referral to visit the child in the institution where he is. In an institution, a candidate for adoptive parents is required to provide complete information about the child, to acquaint him with the history of his life (show a personal file), to talk about his state of health, to acquaint him with a medical record, to talk about the features of development at the moment.

If the child is not suitable for you, you return to the Operator again, fill out a special application on the results of meeting the child, and the specialist (operator) issues you a new referral to visit another child. Legislative acts do not limit the number of referrals issued to visit children. A candidate for adoptive parents has the right to choose a child for an arbitrarily long time until the child is found by joint efforts.

In addition to the above, there is another option for finding a child. A candidate for adoptive parents can apply to any guardianship and guardianship authority in our country, to a regional operator or to the Ministry of Education with a request to select a child. The law provides for the possibility of selecting a child from a regional or federal data bank not by the candidate for adoptive parents, but by the guardianship authorities. The need for this may arise if the candidate for adoptive parents does not have time to visit various authorities (or other reasons). To do this, you must fill out a request form with a request for assistance in the selection of a child, which will be sent by guardianship to a regional (federal) operator. After receiving a response from the operator and selected questionnaires, guardianship will invite the candidate for adoptive parents to familiarize themselves with them and issue a referral to visit the child. However, you should remember that this method of searching for a child can take quite a long time, despite the fact that the conclusion on the possibility of being an adoptive parent is valid only for a year, and the medical certificate is only 3 months.

When contacting a regional operator, keep in mind that data for children under one year old is updated once a year, and for older children even less often: once every three years. In addition, new information about children enters the database very late and very irregularly. Therefore, the information offered to you may be very outdated: the child may be cured of these diseases, or (unfortunately) acquire new ones, and may even find a family.

According to the idea of the drafters of the law, the Data Bank was created not to establish a state monopoly on information about orphans, but to expand the possibilities of finding children and providing a chance to find a family for any orphaned child. Thus, the local guardianship authority does not have the right to archive the child's case after the transfer of his questionnaire to the regional data bank, he is obliged to continue to make every effort to find a family for him. Thus, by transferring the child's questionnaire to higher levels of the Data Bank, the circle of searching for his family is expanding.

There are other ways to find a child. So, candidates for adoptive parents can independently apply to children's institutions, bypassing the Data Bank. However, this method very much depends on the good will of the leaders of children's institutions, as well as the perseverance and willingness to spend the time and effort of future parents.

Children from 0 to 3-4 years old from maternity wards, hospitals, abandoned, taken away from unfortunate parents, get to children's institutions for younger children (children's homes). They stay in orphanages until they are 4 years old, but sometimes they are detained up to 5 years (mainly for medical reasons). Children's homes are medical facilities and are of a general type or specialized, for example, for children born to infected mothers, or for children with congenital pathologies.

Older children are transferred to pre-school or so-called “family-type” orphanages, where siblings aged 4 to 18 are brought up together. From preschool orphanages, children who have reached school age are transferred to an orphanage (or boarding school), where they live until they reach adulthood. Children living in orphanages attend the nearest district school; children who ended up in a boarding school study in a special school attached to the boarding school. Ordinary orphanages and boarding schools are under the jurisdiction of educational authorities, while special and correctional ones may belong to various organizations related to social protection, health care, the Red Cross, or other non-governmental organizations. However, the vast majority of orphanages for children over 3 years of age are run by educational authorities.

Children's medical institutions - hospitals and children's homes - are more closed to strangers than children's homes and boarding schools. This is due to the peculiarities of the regimen in children's medical institutions, the age of children, the large number of children, their weakness, fears of introducing an infection and provoking a local epidemic. In this regard, visits to such establishments by outsiders are limited. In addition, employees of such institutions do not have the right to disclose information about children to outsiders, and a direct request to show children suitable for adoption is most often met with a justified refusal. However, the head of the children's institution has the right to inform the person who has come where he should apply if he decides to adopt a child.

Another thing is that in a number of children's institutions (especially in the outback), work in which is often the only source of income for employees, and the transfer of children to families carries the threat of unemployment, the management of children's institutions does not seek to transfer children to families. In order to reduce the number of children placed for adoption, employees of such institutions may refer to various non-existent instructions or intimidate potential adoptive parents with the “problems” of adopted children. Some employees sincerely believe that it is better for a child to be in a state institution, since there is better care, timely food and treatment are provided, and it is impossible to control the living conditions of the child in the family. Others, having in their experience unsuccessful examples of the transfer of children to families, fear that the child may not be well in the family, and the adoptive parents will return him back.

Another way to find your child is to go to work for a while in a childcare facility. This method is very reliable, but very difficult morally.

If there is already a candidate for a child, perhaps you met him while visiting your child in the hospital, assisting a children's institution, or this is the child of neighbors, acquaintances, then you do not need to receive referrals for him, because you already know him. Therefore, sometimes the demand of the district guardianship authority is to go and get a referral for this child from the Regional Operator, allegedly due to the fact that they have already transferred his data there, illegally, they keep the file on the child, and in order to remove data about this child from Bank of the data, it is enough for them to notify the Regional Operator - they can do this using a standard notification - more details about this are described in the Answer of the Head of the Department for Social and Pedagogical Support and Rehabilitation of Children of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation No. 20 / 26-12 dated January 13, 2003.

First of all, we would like to draw your attention to the specifics of diagnosing the state of physical and mental health of children in children's institutions. Unfortunately, very often it is not objective and complete enough, which leads either to the failure to detect diseases in children, or to overdiagnosis, when non-existent or already compensated diseases are recorded in a child. Quite often, overdiagnosis occurs in specialized institutions, when a child is diagnosed with "mental retardation in the degree of debility" or "delayed psychoverbal (psychomotor) development" in order to justify his stay in this institution before the governing bodies. As surveys of pupils conducted by independent psychiatrists and psychologists show, sometimes up to 25-30% of children in specialized institutions have incorrect diagnoses. This is due to the fact that employees working with such children have additional payments of about 20% to the basic salary.

Therefore, we advise you not to be afraid of "terrible" diagnoses in orphans, especially those recorded in the anamnesis (for example, "perinatal encephalopathy", "organic damage to the central nervous system", "hydrocephalic-hypertensive syndrome" and others). Remember that many malformations compensate with age. For example, such a defect in the heart as an “open oval window”, which is often found in premature babies, disappears. We advise you to choose a child based not on papers, but to meet him personally, look at him, get to know him, and only after that make a final decision.

The choice of a child can be quite strongly influenced by the information about him/her that you hear from the specialists of the children's institution. In turn, the reliability of the information given to you will be affected by the impression you yourself make on the employees who receive you. Here the saying “they will meet by their clothes” is appropriate. If the chief doctor or director liked you, then at first they will tell you about what this child is good for, how handsome, capable, obedient he is, and they will say about shortcomings or diseases in passing, without focusing on this. If, for some subjective reason, the employees of the children's institution do not want the child to become a member of your family, then in the first place in the description of the child will be his illnesses and shortcomings, and the merits will be mentioned in passing.

Besides the age and health of the child, you should definitely pay attention to the history of his life, find out where and how long he was before adoption. Remember that the presence (or absence) of maternal care has a huge impact on the development of the baby. A three-year-old kid who grew up even in a bad family is very different from a peer who was brought up from birth in a good children's institution. Children who have been in an institution for a long time differ in development from their "home" peers and may not psychologically correspond to their biological age, which makes them seem younger than their peers.

Due to poor nutrition of the mother during pregnancy, unfavorable lifestyle, complicated childbirth, many children are often born prematurely and get sick more often, which is expressed in malnutrition and stunting. Outwardly, they also seem younger than the children who ended up in the institution after some time of living in the family. Poor and malnutrition leads to stunting and underweight, rickets, and in older children removed from the family. The lag of older children can be easily seen by the teeth, which are either translucent, with horizontal relief stripes just above the cutting edge, or small and damaged.

However, quite often the choice of a child is influenced not by the history of development and state of health, but by his appearance. This is how one of the adoptive parents describes her feelings and the choice she made.

“They gave us a referral to choose a child, and we rushed to one of the orphanages. If only you knew what a shame and torment it is to choose, examine and die from embarrassment in front of these kids from the fact that you won’t take them!!! We stayed there for a long time, I fiddled a lot with those with whom it was possible, they are nice, small, but I didn’t feel about any of them that this was my son. The husband almost cried in general, clenched his jaw, so his jaws went. Terribly hard and ashamed, ashamed, ashamed! They felt like pigs.

The next day, without any call or prior arrangements, we were already at the door of another orphanage. They accepted us and, having heard that we needed a boy under eight months old, they immediately declared - there is just one for you! And they called such a telling surname that it became clear that this baby needed to be pulled out of here, and everything should be quickly changed for him. While we were being led along the corridor to his group, we had already decided that there would be no repetition of yesterday's elections - we would take this child, whatever he was. To be honest, I was very afraid that I would not feel anything again. But I also firmly knew that I could not refuse any more. The husband said the day before that he hopes for my intuition and is not capable of choosing in such matters at all! We were asked to wait as the kids were running out of breakfast. Those who had already eaten ran up to the door on their walkers and greeted us kindly. They were extremely pretty, very lively, but not one of them was written - He. Yesterday was repeated, with the only difference that I knew that today I would not refuse. So we squatted in front of them and mentally asked the kids who they were. And then the nanny finished feeding the last one and they told us - this one! He roared, got angry, tried to return the bottle, but both of us simply felt relieved from the heart - tearful, angry, but Ours. It is inexplicable, but there is such a Feeling! Then we were little worried about the data read from his card (although during the neonatal period the baby underwent a very serious operation) - we thought about how to take him home as soon as possible.

Someone adopts a child after seeing a photo in a newspaper or on the Internet, watching a story about an orphanage on TV, or hearing from a doctor friend about an orphan who has been admitted to a hospital for treatment.

As you can see, there are many ways to choose a child, and which one you choose depends on many, sometimes random, circumstances.

Having decided on this step, carefully consider your possibilities (physical and material). If you want to take a child under one year old, determine if you can quit your job and take care of raising a child at home until at least three years old. It is worth inquiring about the prices of clothes for babies and other accessories he needs.

If you are planning to take an older child, think about who will take him to kindergarten and pick him up, who will see him off and pick him up from school.

It is also worth thinking about what traits of the child's character will suit you (and vice versa, will annoy you): slowness, slowness or, on the contrary, restlessness, talkativeness. Best of all, if he is not your opposite, since overactive children are difficult to withstand for a long time people with a calm character, and calm children annoy impulsive adults with their slowness.

In order to understand whether you have made the right choice, it is best to look at how children of your chosen age and gender behave, using the example of children you know (relatives, neighbors' children). If you do not have relatives with children, or you are deprived of the opportunity to communicate with children, we strongly advise you to find time and watch the children of your neighbors, communicate with the children in the institution: this will help you better evaluate your decision.

how to search for a child using the Internet

Among more than 50 thousand questionnaires in Russian orphanages, it is difficult to find exactly the child whom the family wants to adopt. Specialized websites work to help such families.

Elena Almazova Family and children 01/30/2018

Photo: Konstantin Chalabov / RIA Novosti

Where to start searching for those who want to become adoptive parents?

1. Decide where to look

Usually, when children are officially abandoned by blood parents or parents are deprived of their rights, the child receives the status “to be placed in a family”. From this moment begins the search for a new family. A personal file is started, it is “attached” to the district guardianship of an orphanage or an orphanage (depending on age). If within a month the child has not been placed in a family, data about him are transferred to the regional catalog.

So, from the custody of the district of any city near Moscow, these questionnaires fall into the bank of the Moscow region. Moscow and St. Petersburg have their own databases. And almost every subject of the Federation has its own websites with catalogs of children's questionnaires. Within the home region, you can find a child faster than at the federal level - in addition to posting on websites, announcements about babies in need of a family device are regularly published in local publications, special social videos are shown on regional TV channels, all kinds of events and promotions are held that attract attention to orphans.

The federal data bank “Adopt.ru” unites all kids and teenagers looking for adoptive parents or adoptive parents. 51,072 questionnaires of orphans in need of a family have been collected here. In the questionnaires, in addition to the photo (video) of the child, they usually indicate the name without patronymic and last name, month and year of birth (the date is not written in full). They also give a brief description: interests, hobbies, temperament, health characteristics. The questionnaire contains contacts of the guardianship and guardianship authorities in charge of the child, and indicates the possible types of family placement - adoption, guardianship. The reasons for the lack of parental care of mother and father are also explained. More detailed information can be obtained only at a personal meeting with the child and employees of the guardianship authorities.

The regional or federal data bank issues a referral to visit the child, but first coordinates the meeting with the district guardianship authority: it is possible that someone has already begun to visit the child by contacting the district directly, or relatives have appeared who decided to take him to the family.

Photo: Vladimir Pesnya/RIA Novosti

NB : in many cases, it is very difficult for adoptive parents to choose a child from a photo, since most catalogs contain low-quality photographs, many of the pictures were taken by guardianship officials themselves. For a full-fledged questionnaire of the federal base, such photographs are clearly not suitable, experts say.

“I am studying the Adopt.ru website. It is good that there is such a resource, and it helps to find orphans who can be taken into the family. But how children are photographed - there are no words. Like before being shot or after serving time in a zone, - Alexander Gezalov, publicist, public figure, expert of the Fund for Supporting Children in Difficult Life Situations, member of the Council of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on the protection of rights and legitimate interests of orphans and children left without parental care. - In a number of regions, the photos were taken as if on purpose - "do not take these children. " When will foundations and NGOs start helping film orphans in such a way as to reveal the real pluses and minuses?”

Unfortunately, there are not many NGOs in Russia that deal with the problems of children left without parental care, who can create high-quality videos and take presentable photographs.

One of the pleasant exceptions is the Change One Life Charitable Foundation. The foundation's website contains the largest database of video profiles of children who dream of finding a loving family. There are currently 19,724 children on the waiting list. Each video is a mini-story about a child, his hobbies, dreams and desires. It is these video stories that give a child a chance to find their parents faster. The Foundation's employees also help the family prepare for the adoption of a child in a family: they advise on family placement, regularly hold webinars, and provide free tickets for parents who go to another region to pick up their child.

There are also examples in the regions. For example, the Happy Children charity foundation from Krasnoyarsk also makes high-quality photos and videos, specifically collecting donations for this. Professional photographers and videographers are invited, a colorful portfolio of the child is created, which is subsequently published on the Web.

2. Learn to read announcements. Including between the lines

What should be paid attention to in advertisements and questionnaires?

1) Child's health. It is not customary to write in detail about health characteristics in questionnaires. Therefore, when communicating with representatives of the regional guardianship, it is important to find out a detailed history of the life and development of the child. Often, social workers know the directors of orphanages personally, so when visiting guardianship authorities, you can ask them to call the orphanage where you are going to pick up the baby. It is important to ask how the child grows up: whether he is constantly isolated from his peers or, on the contrary, tries to be in the center of attention, etc. But it must be kept in mind that the wards of orphanages are sometimes diagnosed with developmental delay for no reason, as many families who have adopted children note. This is because in most cases the attention of the staff is not enough for all the kids, and the development of a child without the constant help of an adult may be delayed.

Photo: Vladimir Pesnya/RIA Novosti

2) Presence of brothers and sisters. According to Alexander Gezalov, it is necessary not only to indicate whether the child has them, but also to provide a link to their profiles. Indeed, according to Article 124 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation, the adoption of brothers and sisters by different persons is not allowed, except in cases where the adoption is in the interests of the children.

It is possible that the guardianship authorities will not allow children to be separated, and then the adoptive parents must decide whether they can take into the family several at once, and even different ages. The charitable foundation from St. Petersburg "Children are waiting" in the questionnaire of each ward indicates links to the portfolio of brothers and sisters, which makes it possible for future parents to consider further actions.

3) Relevance of information. Data on children enter the federal databases with delays and are updated quite rarely. For example, information about children under the age of one is updated once a year, and for babies older than one year, the update is updated every three years. Therefore, you need to double-check whether this child has a family. This can be done most quickly at the regional level.

Updated 2/1/2018 Update: in accordance with paragraph 23 of the Procedure for the formation, maintenance and use of the state data bank on children left without parental care, sends updated information to the federal operator on the establishment, change, clarification or removal of a diagnosis in children left without parental care within 3 working days from the date of its receipt, but at least once a year; photographs of children left without parental care, until the child reaches 3 years old - every 4 months; for children aged 3 to 7 years - every 6 months; for children over the age of 7 years - every 2 years.

3. Remember the deadlines

If the parents-to-be have already decided which child they want to meet in person, they will be given (by local or regional guardianship authorities) a referral to get to know him. It is valid for a month, after which a decision must be made and reported to the guardianship authorities. It is worth remembering that while one family thinks, other potential adoptive parents are not allowed to date this child.

Update 2/1/2018 Bug Fix: referral to visit a child left without parental care is valid not for a month, but for 10 working days. We apologize to readers.

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Tags: Alexander Gezalov, video passport for orphans, adoption experience, adoption of orphans

NGOs: Children are waiting for the Children's Charitable Foundation, Children's Charitable Foundation "Happy Children", Charitable Foundation for Assistance to the Family Placement of Orphans "Change One Life"

Services of organizations one life"

The Change One Life Foundation helps children and parents find each other: creates video questionnaires for children in need of a family, provides consultations on pedagogical, medical, legal issues, provides nannies to prevent emotional burnout of adoptive parents.