Finding A Safe and Loving Home for Your Child

Choosing to place your baby for adoption is a very difficult decision. You need to know that your child will be in a safe home with the type of loving parents you want. At Adoption Services we very carefully explore with you exactly what you want and need in an adopting family, and then we work to carry out your desires in the best way possible.

In order to make sure the family is the type you want and to help assure a safe environment for your baby, every family needs to be carefully screened and evaluated.

The screening of the family can be done by you, the adopting family's attorney, a referral service, a person hired by the adopting family to approve them, or by a licensed child adoption agency. Clearly, the adopting family's attorney, a referral source, or people hired to approve the family are not exactly objective. They all want to approve the family and present them in the most positive light.  If they don't, the family can simply hire someone else to redo the whole thing until they get what they want.

The best, most careful, objective assessment can be done by a licensed child agency that has the child's interests at heart. Once an adoptive family has been pre-approved by the child adoption agency, you can find out about the family to make sure you are comfortable with this family. And this way you know the family has already passed a rigorous, objective, unbiased screening process.

The official name of this evaluation of the adopting family is called the Home Study. A really good Home Study takes about 20 hours to complete. It includes and in-depth psychological and social assessment of each adopting person, the stability of their relationship, background information regarding themselves, their family, their interests, medical history, attitudes toward adoption, discipline practices, and much more. Our agency also obtains child abuse, criminal record, and FBI clearances on every person. They must provide us with personal references, get recent physical examinations, provide copies of several years of income tax returns, as well as bank records regarding their financial stability. We tour their home and their neighborhood, the places of worship, and the schools. With our agency, Adoption Services, Dr. Berger, a Ph.D. psychologist with almost 40 years of experience, chooses to do the Home Study himself and we do not farm the Home Study out to a less qualified person. So by the time we are finished, we think we know almost as much about the family as they do!

After the families have been pre-screened is when you should enter the process of helping to select the family for your child. At that point, you can meet and select the family yourself, let the child adoption agency do the whole selection job, and/or you can set requirements (religious affiliation, marital status, age, etc.) you want the agency to use in selecting the family and then let them do the rest.

Finally, the child adoption agency should be prepared to tell you if they have ever had one of their placed children be abandoned, neglected, or abused.  The adoption agency should be willing to tell you this and you can confirm it with the agency's license authority.  In working with thousands of adoptive families, birth parents and children over the last 40 years as an evaluating psychologist, and over the past 20 years as the agency director, Dr. Berger has never had a problem with a child placement, and has never had a child abandoned, abused or neglected.

Even after the placement is completed, the child adoption agency staff will follow up with the adopting family, making sure the child continues to flourish.  Frequent home visits, telephone conversations, doctor's reports, pictures, and updates are a regular part of every one of our adoptive placements.

Adoption Services is a fully licensed non-profit adoption agency that helps birth mothers living in any state in the U.S. The Agency can also help a U.S. citizen living in any foreign country. Adoption Services has helped over 9000 birth parents and families. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or if you want our guidance or help.  We can make sure your child is placed with the perfect family, your rights are protected, and that you receive all the financial assistance and medical help as well as other types of help that the law allows. There is never any fee to you as a birth parent whether you work with our agency or decide to look elsewhere.  Please visit the link "Ways we can help you".