By Emma 
Adopting an infant or a child is a huge life change and a wonderful way to share your love and resources with someone who needs guidance and protection.
To make sure that you’re ready, it’s important that you make the emotional, physical, and monetary adjustments to your life and home for a child who needs care.
Table of Contents
1) Time
Do you have the flexibility of time in your life to properly support and care for a child?
No matter the source of your infertility or inability to biologically reproduce, your schedule will likely be heavily impacted, and perhaps completely upended, when you adopt a child.
You and your partner may want to take a leave of absence or find a way to work from home as your child adjusts to their new surroundings.
No matter the age of the child you adopt, your space, voice, and scent will be completely different for them, and it will take time for them to learn to rely on you.
2) Resources
Adoption isn’t cheap and it will take representation and time. Make sure that you’re working with a legitimate adoption agency or representative.
There are many vulnerable children in the world, and human trafficking facts can be horrifying. If you’re working toward an overseas adoption, take care to be sure that the entities you’re working with our legal and reputable.
You may not know the quality of prenatal care available to the birth mother of your baby. If you’re adopting an older child, you may not know what conditions they lived in or what additional support they will need.
Make sure that your child has full insurance coverage under your plan from the date of adoption, and try to line up a pediatrician with good connections to other forms of support if needed.
3) Flexibility
Your family may not be growing in the traditional way, but that can be an amazing thing! Make sure to study up on ways to support your child’s understanding of their history.
Their story won’t look like that of their friends or schoolmates. Your story and path to parenthood will likely look different than that of other parents in your PTA.
If the birth parents of your adopted baby are interested in open adoption, do your best to build a positive relationship with this couple.
Regardless of their relationship with one another, they have a bond and you have a connection to it. Your child may eventually want a relationship with his or her biological family, so stay flexible.
4) Plan for Expansion
Are you adding a child to an existing group of children, or will your adopted child be your first child? The decision to adopt a child to join your biological children will take cooperation from everyone.
If you have older children and are adopting an infant, do your best to schedule lots of quantity time when the new baby can interact with their new, older siblings.
The infant will be processing a lot of new information, and this can cause distress. If the older child is around, the baby will adapt more quickly to their presence.
5) Fostering Could Increase Your Parental Experience
If you have struggled with infertility and have your heart set on an infant, you may be in for a long wait, especially if you don’t have the resources for international adoption.
As a foster parent, you may not be able to adopt an infant, but you would be able to adopt more quickly than from a traditional adoption agency.
By becoming a foster parent, you would have all of the background checks and other challenges out of the way. Fostering a young child means that you could provide them support early on during the crucial formative years.
Your fostering skills could help you prepare for any variables in the adoption of an infant in the future, and you could make a huge difference in the life of a child with an unsure future.
Becoming a parent is challenging and life-changing, no matter the path you take to parenthood.
Whether your child comes to you via international adoption or from a local fostering agency, the resources and parenting skills you bring to the relationship could change the world for the better.
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