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I know this has been covered many times before, but I thought I’d write about the one thing adoptive families fear most. For a lot of us, it’s even more frightening than the prospect of a long wait. It’s the Home Study.
Oh, no! You have to spend at least a week cleaning your house. You have to have endless interviews. Every person you’ve ever met in your entire life will also be subjected to endless interviews. Your life will, basically, be under a magnifying glass, just to see if you and your family make a suitable candidate for raising a child. All this comes, for a good many of us, after a struggle with infertility. When you have been faced with that total loss of control, you geet to basically beg someone else for the right to have a child in your home. Come to think of it, it really is the single scariest part of an infant adoption.
Right?
Not always. Not really. More than anything, the home study is designed to measure how prepared you are to be a parent. After all, by this time your family has undergone filling out your profile and completed a criminal background check; if you have already passed that, you are suitable to be adoptive parents. I can assure you, when a social worker finally visits your home, they won’t be wearing white gloves and running their fingers along the baseboards. Our social worker certainly didn’t. I think she spent a grand total of 10 minutes out of her 2 hour visit actually looking at the house. A social worker wants to see if you live in a safe environment for a child; fire extinguishers, baby gates, secure locks on windows and cabinets, etc.
The actual home study process can vary from state to state and sometimes from agency to agency. Generally, though, they all have the same things in common:
- Filling out an autobiography, which is not the same as the one that was used in a prospective parent’s profile;
- the prospective parents going through a series of interviews, both individually and as a couple;
- and, finally, at least one home visit.
All of it is designed with one goal in mind: to make certain that you, the prospective adoptive family, are ready to be parents. At least in our case, it forced us to think about how we would want to raise our child (in the case of one of us, in a completely different manner than the way they were raised) and how we would communicate as a couple with a little one in the house.
In our case, we went through couples therapy for 4 weeks before our home study was complete and accepted by our agency. Our social worker decided that we needed more communications skills as a couple than we possessed at the time. That was probably the most useful thing we did during our entire pre-adoptive experience. I know we use the information we learned during that time much more often than anything we learned during our adoption classes.
If anybody would like to share their home study experiences, or have any questions about it, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
