When you start out choosing an adoption agency, you’ll need the answers to these common questions. Learn how to make the best decision for your family.
Where to Start When Choosing Your Adoption Team
Should you choose an agency or attorney? Where should you start? Answers to these common questions, and more.
Parent-to-Parent: Deciding to Adopt
When did you know adoption was in your future? AF readers reflect.
The Federal Adoption Tax Credit
There’s no way around it — expanding your family is expensive. Can the federal adoption tax credit help?
Webinar Replay – “Imagining Your Future Child”
View the replay of the webinar “Imagining Your Future Child,” with Lauren Jiang, LMSW, to learn how to decide on the age, racial identity, and medical history of the child you will be best equipped to adopt and parent.
Summer Reading Special
AF’s 2011 picks for best adoption books.
“Should I Play the ‘Adoption Card’?”
I began to have second thoughts about sharing my story in application essays — just as it’s no one else’s business, it shouldn’t factor into a college’s decision to accept me.
Your Step-By-Step Guide to Foster Care Adoption
There are many misconceptions about adopting from foster care. Are children juvenile delinquents? Is it free? Two legal experts separate fact from fiction.
Child Care, Pre-Child?
Should you arrange for day care during the wait, or after your child is home? Readers weigh in.
Ask AF: An Agency Hurdle
Answers to your parenting questions.
Before the Adoption: Connecting With Expectant Mothers
What to share, what to discuss, what to look for, and what to expect when you start to look for an expectant mother.
Should I Adopt a Child with “Special Needs”?
Peg Studaker, supervisor of the Waiting International Child Program at Children’s Home Society and Family Services, in Minnesota, says: “Parenting children with special needs should be a family’s first choice. Adopting a special-needs child should never be a second choice because the family could not get the child they really wanted to parent.”
Choosing Which Age Group to Adopt
For lots of adoptive parents, the hardest part of the process is the “choice” — particularly what age they should adopt.
Crazy or Gutsy? Parenting in Your Forties and Fifties
Older, wiser — and adopting more than ever.
“Just Adopt”
When I was struggling with infertility, friends and family mistakenly said insensitive things. Now that I’m an adoptive parent, I’m more careful with my words.
Selecting Gender in Adoption
What prospective adoptive parents need to know if having a boy or a girl is important to them.
“From Heartbreak to Hope”
When our first adoption match fell through, we were devastated.
Finding an Expectant Mother Match
How you go about searching for your child’s birth mother will depend on what you feel comfortable with.
Ask AF: Adopting an Acquaintance’s Baby
Answers to your parenting questions.
“I Needed This All Along”
Five years on: We have been “trying” for three years, and now are deep into the medical crapshoot of infertility treatment. Soon it becomes clear that we will never have our own biological children.