Homestudy Tips

The homestudy is a great first step for all couples considering adoption. You will need this, as this will be apart of your dossier, which is the final set of notarized, apostilled paperwork that will be submitted to the Ukrainian government. For some, you will need to do this first to see if you will even be elgible to adopt. Not everyone passes a homestudy- usually because of not being able to pass a background check. I would reccommend to get your homestudy completed first and out of the way if you are comtemplating adoption, then once it's complete you can determine where to adopt from, then to start your dossier. You can always have your homestudy updated to make the dates current. Also, maybe you will want to consider being a foster family instead of committing to an actual adoption- you will still need to have a homestudy for this as well!

Please do yourself a favor and contact several agents/agencies and find out the price differences. Find out how long it takes for them to write the report when you have given them all of the necessary information, and also find out how backlogged they are- or how many other homestudys they have ahead of yours. And call their office several times to see if they answer the phone, how their customer service is. I am stressing these points because my agent was not only more expensive than other agencies, he was very backlogged (and didn't tell me) and I waited and waited for over 3 months to get my final report, and when I called to inquire they never called back, I wouldn't get any emails back. So I would wait a week or two and try again. This went on like I said for 3 months. I finally got an email response back if I cc'd my adoption agency in the emails to put the agent on the spot indicating we were waiting on him, and our adoption would be delayed if we couldn't get our report soon.

When we travelled to the Ukraine our judge was upset at our homestudy because of how generic the information in our homestudy was. We filled out pages and pages of autobriography questions about our upbringing, our values, our family situation, our work history, etc. to find none of it being included and being replaced with generic run-on sentences that resembled "James Brown describes his parent's relationship growing up as good. He describes his father as active, compassionate, hardworking, easygoing, happy, loving, understanding, supportive, and warm..."

There is a section that was supposed to say why we chose to adopt, and a big part of that was because our son with Down syndrome gave us appreciation of that particular genetic disorder and we were seeking to add to our family through adoption so we could give him a brother with the same kind of disorder, thus we chose our child through the Reece's Rainbow webpage. Well, the agent changed everything to "They have chosen to adopt from Ukraine because they have developed an appreciation for the coutry's rich culture and heritage." The judge was confused and said she the homestudy didn't tell her anything about us- it didn't even mention my son with Down syndrome. So her question to us was "Why would you want to adopt a child with Down syndrome?" It made no sense to her, as we were her first international adoption case.

We brought our tablet into the court room loaded with pictures of our son, and she saw how beautiful and happy he was. Now she could see why we wanted to adopt and add to our "special" family. It was ashame that we had an inadequate homestudy. My facilitator mentioned that they had to act as if we didn't even have a homestudy as far as questioning goes because of how badly written it was. She said she was surprised we were even able to adopt given the situation.

I hope others will be able to learn from our mistake and see how important your homestudy is. Please do your homework and research a couple agencies and agent out there to see who will do the best for your and your family.