[shy_bear]

We have been officially waiting for several weeks now. We are looking for a 1-4 year old or sib set in that age range or a 10-12 yr old girl. I called the adoption exchange in our area to do some foot work and there are NO 10-12 year old girls!!!! All you read is how no one wants school age kids, everybody wants babies. Well, we want older and there are none!!

[Boulderbabe]

Where are you?

The Adoption Exchange is usually where kids who are really hard to place are listed. (If they were easy to place, they would have been placed locally). So they don't necessarily have all of the available kids listed.

What does your local DSS say?

[ALI143]

We applied for 0-13 year olds and only got offered under 3 year olds . I'm glad because my dd is the best thing in the whole world, but where were all the older kids I'll never know?

[shy_bear]

We are in CO. We are going through the largest county in the state. The rep at the adoption exchange did a search of all legally free kiddos in our age range, 10-12, in the county and came up with 0. We went to the support group and the adoptive placement workers could not think of anyone either. I find it confusing.

[mallory4]

We encountered the same frustration when we set out to adopt a black or biracial boy 5 or under. Even though we were willing to accept a lot in terms of drug/alcohol exposure, past history, behavioral issues, etc. our search kept coming up empty.

We have all heard how African American boys are the least likely to be adopted, and we live in a city that is about half African-American, so we were wondering what the heck was the deal?

According to our adoption worker, there is a reason for the "shortage": most counties won't ask for (and in our state some even have a policy against) TPR for a child who does not have an adoptive home lined up, except in the case of the parent having attempted to kill the child or having killed another child, in which case TPR is pretty much automatic.

That means if we are limiting our search to kids who are already TPR'd we are going to find only those rare kids who were TPR'd despite the preference not to AND whose foster families do not want to adopt them, or kids with several severe disabilities which made it impossible for their bioparents to care for them, and also make it harder to find adoptive homes for.

There are kids of all ages who are headed to TPR, and their individual workers know that and are looking for adoptive homes, but even other workers
at the same agency won't necessarily know it--the first referral we got was for a little boy who our worker just happened to overhear a phone conversation about while visiting another branch of the agency! If she hadn't overheard the conversation, she would never have known this little boy was headed to adoption and needed a home.

It seems amazingly inefficient to me that they don't have a central bulletin board or anything like it to post who they have ready for TPR and in need of an adoptive placement, but they don't--it is all word of mouth!

She said that in six years of doing adoptions for our large agency, which covers 2 huge counties--about 6 million people--she had only worked on one adoption that was the result of people adopting a child who was already TPR'd and found through the state listings of available kids. All the rest came about by her asking around her agency and others in neighboring counties, to find kids who were waiting to have an adoptive home before they got TPR'd.

So, we took her advice and opened up to the idea of foster to adopt so we could get placement of a child who was going to be TPR'd but wasn't yet. I don't know if I can recommend it, but fost/adopt did work for us. We waited only a couple of months and were matched with our son, who was 14 months old at the time. His TPR was granted about 7 months later, and we are in the process of finalizing now.

[kikibrando]

We recently received an adoptive placement of 9-year-old twin girls from Delaware. We asked our social worker to send our homestudy in November. We spent the next five months working hard to prove we were capable of parenting the twins. At the end of the day, I am so glad I was persistent.

There's many different photo listings, my favorite is Mare.org (Michigan Adoption Resource Exchange) which as links to all the different states.

You should have no problem finding a child in the age range you are seeking. Good luck!

[sgtfirstwife]

I don't know if I am quilified to answer this or not, but I will chime in with my two cents.

We are in Northern CA and will be getting certified next week . One of the things that we learn is if we said TPR only, then we would have a long wait. However since we were open to any ethnic background, emergency placements and temp placements, our chances would be better for getting a pemanent placement. We have been told our wait should be very short.

. So even though we know some of the kids may only be temps, we at least feel we have put ourselves in a good position for a permanent placement.

I do know that from living in another state, some are a lot more difficult to place from. As a matter of fact we were told in the last state we lived in, that the only children they have were ones that had been sexually abused and older. So they did not want to place with us for fear of putting our daughter at risk. We gave up and tried again when we moved here. This time deciding we would go with a private agency. I don't know if that will make a difference or not, we shall see!

So here is hoping for a quick placement, for all those who are waiting


DH My Hubby Bubby
DD The princess
Waiting for number two and three

[5starday]

If it hadn't been for our foster licensing worker being the same FLW for our little A's emergency receiving home parents, we would probably have never gotten her as a placement.

In fact, little A was in the emergency receiving home for 4 months with no visits from her case manager! After we found out about little A, it took nearly 2 weeks of leaving messages for the CM to even get her to realize that we wanted her transferred to our home. She agreed to transfer her, but never even went to take her for the transfer! I did it!

It was amazing that had our FLW not thought of our family as a good placement, who knows how long little A would have been waiting and waiting for a permanent placement home!

[aMarylandfamily]

Search Engine for NWAE (North West Adoption Exchange and Boys & Girls Assoc. of Oregon) as well as the other states ... there are alot of children awaiting placement in this age range ... many times though they are coupled with a sibling and if they do an individual search you do get 0 ... many kids are also in TPR status and therefore don't come up on available lists ... don't give up ... SWAN of Pennsylvania is another good one ...

[TexasJingles]

Are you licensed through an agency or the state or the county? I know each state is different, and I've read some of your other posts, so I know that you have a different system than ours.

Here, although I'm licensed through my agency, it's still a license from the state. Our placement worker was able to search the whole state, while we searched the nation through various photolistings (I like adoptUSkids.org best, but not all states list on it).

When I found a listing that I liked, I just gave our placement worker the state and any numbers, or even the webpage where I found it and she took care of contacting the kids worker, or faxing our homestudy out to them.

In the end, we ended up fostering to adopt a sib set that had already had TPR's but were under appeal. They were in 2 different foster homes about 5 hours away (different county). That's about as close as you can get to a sure thing.

Even if we had gone through the county, which is called CPS here, we'd still be able to get listings throughout the state. Seems such a waste if we'd been limited to our own county (even though it's the largest in population). Sounds as if CO might need some adoption reform.

Praying for you!

[shy_bear]

We are limited to the county we signed on with for 6 months unless we pay for the homestudy and my hubby doesn' t want to do that. We are not even looking for a child who is fully TPR'D we are willing to do legal risk. We don't think we are bing too picky in our wants so I am suppose to get back in touch with the adoption exchange recruiter this week and she is going to do some more looking into other things she said, not sure what that means, but we will go with it!!

[shy_bear]

Talked with the adoption recruiter yesterday. She told us the county we went with is actively looking for families for school aged boys. 85% of the kids that need homes in the county fit into that category. I wish we would have been told this upfront!!! It is the exact opposite of what we are wanting.

[llambro]

Try this website: adoptus.org They list most states and have links to some private agencies that handle foster/adopt cases. Most of their kids are over the age of 6 and up to 17 yrs old. Once you are homestudied, you submit an approval form to adoptus and when approved you can get direct access to the childs caseworker and agency. Most homestudies need to be sent from your agency, not from you.....a frustrating detail. But the literally have thousands of kids that are mostly free or TPR'd. Hope this helps!!