Want To Adopt? Follow These Tips To Streamline the Process

Adoption is a fantastic way to keep your family growing while helping children who need loving homes find their families. At the same time, though, many prospective parents find themselves being told that wait lists are long and competitive. The fact is, this is due to a number of factors, but the most common ones are a limited network of connections. There are a lot of adoption agencies and services out there, and state placement programs on top of them. Finding a new member of your family quickly is largely a matter of finding the people who have the most connections, so they can get results quickly.

Make Multiple Contacts

One way of broadening the search is to work with a few different agencies with different focus areas. The state foster care placement system, religiously affiliated adoption services, and private search facilitators often have different connections and ways of finding candidates for adoption, so it helps to investigate all your options to increase the chances of finding a good fit early. Of course, that’s not the only way to do it.

Work With a Nationwide Network

When you work with a nationwide adoption agency, you’re accessing a network of individual offices and affiliated adoption professionals whose job is to help families like yours. They do the work of connecting to as many individual resources as possible, taking a lot of the research and footwork out of your hands while providing the same extended search you’d get if you consulted with a shotgun approach to agencies and services in every state. The fact that they already have the resources for such a broad search often speeds things up more than any extra research on your part, because they already know who and where to query.

Reconsider Your Adoption Criteria

If you’re still facing a long wait time after doing everything you can to broaden your search, consider what you’ve set up for criteria. Often the reason for a long wait is because of parameters that are hard to hit, like eye and hair color that bears a resemblance to other family members. Restricting yourself to infant adoption is another cause of longer waits. When you’re willing to expand your search to toddlers and older children, you have a larger pool of potential candidates to work with. Nothing can guarantee a fast adoption process, but taking steps to broaden the horizons of your search can help by putting you in touch with more options right away.