?'s for those who have adopted or who have gone through all the 'tests'

Bertiebugg · 07-14-2005, 01:36 AM

What are they looking for?

What exactly is a home study? What kind of questions do they ask?

When looking in your background... what kind of stuff will they frown on? DH has some tickets, he was arrested once for a failure to appear on a traffic violation that he never received the notice on. We have pretty bad credit. I have credit card debt. I'm worry they wont let us adopt because we are fat. I dont know what to think I'm just worried now that I've gotten so excited over all of this, and the next thing they are going to tell us is that we dont qualify to adopt. That they think we will be unfit parents. We were young, and didnt know better, and are working our way out slowly very slowly.

I read online that we have to write a parental plan, and a letter about ourselves saying why we would be good parents and why we want children, and possibly a religous statement if go through a church.

I'm not sure of any of this. Help calm my nerves please.

Tolania · 07-14-2005, 01:54 AM

Good questions, I want to know, too. My husband and I aren't actively seeking to adopt, but may within the next few years and I fear what they may not like. My husband has really bad credit (but it is getting better, paid almost everything off). I was once sent to a hospital for 5 days for depression/attempted suicide -- but this was almost 10 years ago. We are both in our 30's, but how much will what we did in our early 20's affect our chances?

~Traci~ · 07-14-2005, 02:09 AM

I don't know if you're adopting domestic, international (which country?), or through DCFS but here's what we needed to do for our China adoption.

DH had speeding tix about 10 years ago that turned in to warrants. He was then stopped again, arrested immediately, bonded out & paid the fines. We've had a huge issue w/ this and have had to do a bunch of running around about it. From what I understand if it was a warrant then it automatically turns in to a misdemeanor (haven't gotten confirmation about this b/c an FBI check on him came back completely clear already).

Here's what we've had to do about the ticket:
Get felony & misdemeanor letters from the county courts (we've had to do this for both of us)
Get felony & misdemeanor letter from the county he was arrested in
Get the arrest record
DH had to write a letter about what happened, he was sorry, he learned his lesson, he'll never do it again, and that he's a citizen in good standing.
Get the court case (this one isn't possible for us b/c it never went to court and the original warrants were issued in a town 4 hours away from us and there's no way we're driving there to get a piece of paper-no other way to get it)
We had to go today to get the receipt from what he paid. On it had where the warrants came from, what the warrants were for, how much each was, & the total paid.

Now mind you, this was from 10 years ago and we had to go through all this. I have no idea what would have happened if it was from recently.

For the homestudy (which we're having on Tuesday so I'll be able to give you more info from that). Ours is going to be 3 hours long (it should be 4 but she said we can get ours done in 3 hours--China required 4 1 hour visits but our HS agency does all the visits in one day at our home). The SW comes in and talks to both of us, talks to each of us individually and looks at our house. From what I understand and have heard, they're just making sure your good people, aren't axe murders, won't abuse your child, aren't in an abusing relationship, etc. They want to make sure the nursery has a window and isn't in a closet, just that you have a place for your child. I've heard they don't look at any safety things (thankfully b/c we have no outlet plugs yet as well as no stair gates).

From what I know, there is only 1 country that has a weight requirement and that's Korea. We had to get physicals and on the physicals it specifically asked if we were healthy. My dr wrote that I was overweight but working on it. No one has questioned us yet about our weight (I could lose about 75 lbs & DH about the same).

We don't have horrible credit but we don't have the greatest credit and we've never had issues. It's different w/ the different types of adoption but w/ China you have to make atleast $10,000 per person in your home per year including the adopted child. So for us, we have to make at least $30,000. Now we did have to fill out a finiacial document stating how much our car loans were, house loans, how much we make, how much is in our checking/savings accts, life insurance, etc.

We didn't have to write autobiographies (some agencies require this) but we have 9 questions to answer like how we deal w/ stress, how we will incorporate our child's heritage in to our lives, etc. It all depends on your agency. We had to write a religious statement as well. We're still searching for a church but still didn't have a problem w/ the agency (the HS agency we're using requires this).

HTH's, let me know if you have any questions!
And Good Luck!
Traci