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Originally Posted By Mother of two

Hello,

my husband and I are presently going through the training classes for fostering/adopting a special needs child, offered by the state bureau of human services.

The thing is, we'd like to add to our family -- we have two biological children, preschool-aged. But I don't know whether we should start the process by fostering, or just go ahead and adopt.

At first I thought fostering would be a good way to "get our feet wet" with the issues of taking a non-infant into our home, and possibly issues of transracial placement, etc. But now I've started to suspect that maybe we should cut straight to adopting.

The reason is mostly that our real goal is to add a permanent new member to our family. Maybe fostering would be too painful and also, it would mean we had little say in what child was placed with us. I think that ideally, I'd like to be able to be a little selective in choosing an adoptive child. We're not expecting some "perfect child", but we'd prefer to avoid the extra challenges that a severely abused or mentally handicapped child would bring. I know that is selfish, but to be a good parent, I've got to be honest with myself. And apparently, about 50% of the foster children placed by this state agency can never return to their natural parents. So we could well end up adopting a foster child who was placed with us. But I'd like to have more say in choosing the child than you can with fostering.

Any thoughts on this issue, or people who can tell me about their experiences?

Thanks