From How to Prepare for a Home Study:

7. Brace yourself for lack of privacy.

Once you start your home study, you can kiss your privacy goodbye. Everything about your life, your marriage, your childhood, your finances, and anything else you might have kept confidential is open for scrutiny. This is a very big pill to swallow, but this is something that you will need to face if you want to become a parent through adoption.

Your first reaction to reading this might be one of anger or disbelief. You might balk at the unfairness. What got me through those feelings was remembering that there is a greater good – the safety of a child.

I know several adults who were adopted into abusive households as children. That is never okay, and we need to do whatever it takes to make sure that adoptive homes are safe for children. This is why you will be fingerprinted, undergo a criminal background check, and endure various levels of scrutiny before you will be approved to adopt.

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Have you been married before? If so, the social worker will be talking with you about what went wrong in your prior marriage(s). Have you been to marriage counseling? If so, the social worker will need to know why and what the outcome was.

The social worker is not inquiring into these areas of your life to be nosy: She needs to make sure that you can offer a child a stable home. The child has already experienced one loss by being placed into a home away from his biological parents. The social worker does not want to set up the child for another loss if the marriage is not stable.

Have you been in therapy before? If so, the social worker will need to know why, and she will probably ask for verification from your therapist that the issues discussed in therapy will not affect your ability to parent.

When I adopted my son, I worried that any therapy would prevent us from adopting. My father passed away suddenly when I was 16, and I saw a grief counselor when I went to college. The social worker assured me that seeking out therapy is a good thing to social workers: It means that I made an effort to meet my own emotional needs.

So, don’t worry about therapy being viewed as a sign of weakness. The social worker just needs to know that you are emotionally stable and that nothing in therapy points toward your being a threat to a child (such as going to therapy to help you stop abusing children).

There is no getting around the lack of privacy in the home study process. This is something that you will need to accept and work through as best you can. You don’t have to like it: You just need to remember that this is a necessary step toward becoming a parent through adoption.

Related Topics:

• Homestudy Paperwork: References and Fingerprints



• Homestudy Paperwork: Medical, Financial, Biographical, and more