If you are beginning to think about adopting a child, this is a good place to start. The first step is understanding what adoption really is or isn’t and then deciding what type of adoption you wish to pursue.

What is Adoption?

Adoption is a legal process in which an adult becomes legally responsible for a child’s needs as if that child was born to him or her.

Adoption is an Extended Family Network

Families are the best way society has found to rear its children. Some children, unfortunately, are born into families who – for whatever reasons – are unable to rear them. Adoption provides a means for other families, who are committed and able to meet the ongoing needs of these children, to legally incorporate them into their families. Adoption always introduces its own set of conditions that complicate the lives of those adopted and of the families who adopt them. This is independent of the particular people involved or other circumstances of their lives.

Every child coming into an adoptive family arrives already permanently connected to another family by birth. Since adoption cannot end that birth connection, this means that former family boundaries must be reconfigured.

Adoption can best be defined as a means of meeting the ongoing needs of children by legally transferring the parental responsibilities for them from their birth parents to adoptive parents. We must recognize that this process creates a new “extended family kinship network” that forever links together the two families involved through the child they share. As in marriage, forming and recognizing such a kinship network may not always be easy. In both marriage and adoption the ongoing support of such a network usually makes a significant difference in the success of the newly formed marital or adoptive family unit.

Most families who adopt usually want to feel a sense of “family ownership” of their adopted children – just as if the children had been born to them. They may even wish to deny the importance (or even the existence) of the adopted child’s birth family. If the circumstances that led to a child’s adoption involve neglect, abusive behavior, or abandonment, the adoptive family’s wish to protect the child or help the child avoid the pain may reinforce their denial.

Regardless of the adopted children’s histories the genetic/biological connection between them and their biological parents can never be severed. To the extent that an adoptive family excludes the family that is permanently and biologically attached to the child they adopted, they deny that child full membership in the adoptive family.

Perhaps the most difficult task adoptive parents face is totally accepting their adopted children – which includes the birth parents to whom they come connected.

Source: Kenneth W. Watson, MSW, LCSW, ACSW , 2006, reprinted with permission of the author.  Mr. Watson is an internationally known consultant, trainer, and author. Until his retirement in 1994, he was assistant director of the Chicago Child Care Society. His extensive publications include the influential book, Adoption and the Family System. 

Considerations Before You Adopt

However, adoption always introduces its own set of conditions that affect the lives of those adopted and of the families who adopt them. Adoptive families are indeed different from families created by birth, and every adoptive family experiences, and is affected by these differences. Try as ever well meaning parent might, there is simply no way to truly mitigate the realities of adoption now spare the children we love some of the inherent loss and grief that accompanies it.

The following resources explore some of those differences and issues which may emerge and re-emerge as all family members go through life’s developmental stages.

ISSUES TO CONSIDER BEFORE ADOPTING

Explore Adoption Options

There is no typical adoptive family. An adoptive family can have a single parent or two parents. The family may have birth children, other adoptive children, or no other children. Adoptive families can vary by age, income, lifestyle, and marital status. You may apply to adopt a child if you are LGBTQ+, single or married, young or old, childless or a parent, a renter or a homeowner.

LEARN ABOUT DIFFERENT OPTIONS FOR ADOPTION