Adoption Self Help Manual
Introduction
Where to Begin
Where do you begin? Just how does this complex process of adoption work?
The number one question people ask is, "What do we have to do first?" After that, "What's next?"
After you have read this manual, you will have the answers to these questions – and answers to many more questions you don't even know to ask.
Nobody can guarantee you'll be successful in adopting a baby. However, if you follow the steps, guidelines, and techniques you are going to learn in this manual, you will greatly increase your chances of success. And decrease your chances of making mistakes.
Even with the expert information you are going to learn here, the process of adopting a child is difficult. After the initial excitement of beginning the adoption process has worn off, the going gets tougher. The tendency to give up may become almost overwhelming. DON'T GIVE UP. PERSISTENCE IS THE NAME OF THE GAME!
You must be vigorous in your efforts to find a child. You must remain steadfast and firm in your decision not to let the maze of laws, rules, and regulations entangle you and bring you down in defeat.
Over the past 40 years, I have worked with thousands of families who have come to me after repeated frustrations. Some have been waiting years and years. They feel they are no closer now than when they first started looking to adopt a baby years earlier. Whether I have been able to place a child with them directly, or have helped them through private adoption sources, or have made suggestions which have let them locate a baby on their own, there is one common thread. It is this: IF THEY HAD GIVEN UP, THEY WOULD STILL BE CHILDLESS. INSTEAD, BECAUSE THEY KEPT GOING WHEN THE GOING GOT TOUGH, THEY WERE SUCCESSFUL!!
No matter what people tell you, there are many children available for adoption. You may have heard that there are so many families wishing to adopt a child, you will likely have to wait six, eight, ten or twelve years to locate a child. That does not have to be the case for you. You may have heard that if you are a couple over 40, or are single, or belong to a religious minority, you may never be able to adopt. Wrong again! This manual can help change that for you. By using what you learn here, by expanding your knowledge, you have taken a major step toward insuring your success.
There are children available for adoption out there somewhere. I know. I work with hundreds of birth parents every year.
To put it simply, you have two main problems:
First, you must find the most efficient way to locate the children that are available. Then, you must find the correct way to obtain legal, unshakeable, undisputed, and irreversible parenthood of that child.
Your Game Plan
You need to develop a plan.
Your plan should allow you to find and contact all the appropriate sources. Your plan should dramatically increase your likelihood of being one of the couples or single parents who succeeds in obtaining a child for adoption.
Your plan must do more than include strategies that will let you progress from being childless to becoming a family. Your plan must protect you from the possibility that just after you think everything is done, something goes wrong and you lose the child.
Like everything else, the more you know, the better job you can do. This manual will provide you with tremendous advantages in obtaining your goal: the successful adoption of a child.
This will not be easy.
The adoption process is a very complicated one, filled with international, federal, state, and county laws. In addition to the laws, there are a great number of regulations, procedures, and requirements you will have to satisfy.
To make matters worse, THERE IS NO SINGLE, CENTRAL SOURCE OF EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND INFORMATION. Believe me – there is no quick, easy way to get a "handle" on the problem.
So, what's your best bet?
Your chances of success are greatest if you do two things:
1. Educate yourself so that you do not have to completely rely on other people.
2. Become aware of all the options and alternate possibilities open to you.
It is precisely to help you get that education and to learn about those possibilities that this manual was written.