One factor making a child more likely to wait? Being a boy.

Most of us know that children with special needs and those who are older wait longer for families. Meanwhile, boys – for no reason other than their gender – wait longer too, in almost every country, even our own.

Prospective adoptive parents talk about the need for families for girls in China, because of their one-child policies combined with a preference for boys. In other countries, orphaned girls are at risk for becoming victims of child trafficking, sexual abuse, and forced slavery. I agree – girls matter. Girls in need of families should be adopted.

But boys in need of families should be too.

This time around, our preference was for a boy. We have two girls and one boy, and Robbie badly wants a brother. I wanted a brother for him too.

I knew of the preference for girls in adoption, based on stats I’ve read and the trend I’ve noticed in waiting child listings. It didn’t sink in fully until program after program, agency after agency, said, “Oh, if you want a boy, the process should move more quickly for you.” Right now, many more boys wait in China for families, despite the perception that Chinese girls are the ones who languish in orphanages.

Obviously, our path took a different turn, and we’re adopting a sibling group: two girls and one boy. We didn’t truly pick our children this time around, just like last time. God wove their stories into ours through a Facebook friend, just like He did with Zoe, and all we did was say yes. Nonetheless, this topic is a worthwhile one.

In an article on Adoptive Families,

“If it was just about parents getting a preference, it might not matter so much, but this really affects children,” Mary Ann Curran, director of social services at WACAP, says. “It makes the wait dramatically longer for boys. You see little boys waiting for homes who shouldn’t have to wait, and families cheating themselves out of getting a child sooner.”

In another article, this time in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune,

"When it comes to families, we just have more boys [waiting] than girls," said Rochon, senior country relations manager at the St. Paul agency. "We place more girls. It's just what families want."
How many more? In 2006, families expressing a gender preference chose girls over boys 391 to 166. In 2009, the split was 213 girls and 88 boys; in 2010, 121 and 38. Last year, it was 78 girls and 31 boys.

Some hypothesize that girls are easier to raise than boys: less violent, less active, more well-behaved. (Which begs the question: Have they met our girls?) Others point to more single women adopting than single men, many of them feeling that a girl would be easier to relate to or that a boy needs a father figure that they’re unable to provide.

Whatever the reason, boys wait.

Do you have to be rich to adopt?

Nope.

You do have to meet basic criteria. Most countries set a minimum income criteria and a minimum net worth bar, but those vary by country. Some countries - like Uganda - don't have set requirements, and then the criteria is set by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which states that your income must exceed 125% of the poverty threshold.

If you choose to adopt domestically through foster care, costs are minimal and, depending on the child, a monthly payments may be available for the family to help subsidize the costs involved with your new child's care; these payments continue until he or she turns 18. For friends of ours in Jacksonville, FL, who adopted their son through foster care, their adoption expenses only included travel costs to and from Tampa, where their son lived until he was legally placed with them.

I might as well put this out there, since NPR already did: we currently make $60,000 a year.

If I pick up freelance writing projects or speaking engagements, that usually goes to ministries we support (or – not gonna lie – the occasional purty area rug).

We’re comfortable with our income, in part because our only debt is our mortgage. Sure, with five of us and three on the way, we have to be creative at times to live within our means.

I detailed our adoption expenses last time in this post. This time the cost is a little higher, in part because of increased travel costs and the use of an agency this time around. We pay the agency to do some steps for us that we did on our own last time, and we’re very pleased with their ethics. Our agency is a non-profit (as I think every adoption agency should be).

Sure, fundraising isn’t fun. Well, it can be, but I haven’t found it to be terribly enjoyable. It’s a necessity, and it provides the opportunity for others to support adoption, as all of us in Christ as called to care for orphans in some way. We have been made rich in a different sense through adoption, as Zoe has certainly enriched our lives.

That’s the best kind of rich.

Adopting THREE siblings at once? You crazy?!?

Lee and I have always discussed sibling adoption as something we’d like to do, going back to our dating days.

Did we ever think it would be a sibling group of THREE after we already had three children, including one who only came home from Taiwan nine months ago?

No.

Nonetheless, we are ecstatic. Our hearts are bonded to these three precious ones much in the same way as we love Jocelyn and Robbie and Zoe. We can’t explain it fully, but this crazy plan to complete our family is so perfectly right for us.

It won’t be easy. We’ve weathered some hard things as a couple, and we expect this to be the hardest.

But?

Sibling groups wait and wait and wait for families, often having to be split up (which is what was going to happen to our three children in Uganda). In the case of our group, two children are younger than five, which is often the magic tragic age at which the odds of getting adopted drop. Even our six-year-old Ugandan princess is gorgeous, so perhaps her odds wouldn’t have dropped yet.

In other words, each child alone would have better odds of being adopted than the group.

That’s without factoring in the HIV+ status of one of them, which – while manageable and not risky for a family – is another dynamic leading to longer wait times to be adopted.

The odds are stacked against the adoption any sibling group, much less one with identified special needs.

Yes, sibling adoption will be hard for us.

Remaining orphans or being split up from your siblings after losing your parents?

That’s harder.

Isn’t asking for adoption donations just like asking people to pay your hospital bills after giving birth?

In a word: no.

In cases like our adoptions, our children are waiting. Zoe was waiting.

Primarily, they waited for someone who would love them no matter what. Zoe needed someone who would love her, no matter what her brain injuries would mean for her. (Oh, how we do love her!) Our three Ugandan darlings needed someone who would love them enough to look past the number of children, the diagnosis of HIV for one, and the difficult aspects of adoption in an impoverished country. (Oh, how we already love them!)

Before I say anything else: We are not saints. We are not heroes. We are not angels. We are not amazing.

When you pin any of those descriptors on us, it makes it harder. Because if I’m a saint or angel or hero, I can’t be a jerk or human or ‘fess up that sometimes this sucks. If you put us on a pedestal, then we’re too far off the ground to reach out when we need help. And we often need it.

You know what? All of us who adopt waiting kids – those who are older or have special needs – are ordinary people. And ordinary people rarely have $25,000-40,000 sitting around. (That first figure is the final cost for Zoe’s adoption; the second one is the estimated cost for this one.)

Praise God that between our savings and friends' donations we have $12,000 of our adoption costs covered, which leaves $28,000 left to go!

Grants are available. We’re applying for them.

We may take out a loan this time. That’s hard to admit, given that we’ve been thankful to only have a mortgage payment and nothing else in way of debt… but if you think of the long-term investment, adoption is worth adding a monthly payment to the mix (and my taking on extra freelance writing to pay for it).

Finding families who are willing to adopt waiting children in hard circumstances and afford it all on their own?

That’s rare.

Would it be better for our child who waited or our children who are waiting to keep waiting? Should they have had to play the adoption lottery, hoping that they would end up with the right combo of people who had the desire and the money? Furthermore, the Bible is clear: Christians are called to take on the cause of the orphans: some of us do that by adoption, others by caring for children until they can return to their birth families, and others by supporting all kinds of adoption, fostering, and orphan care.

In other words, fundraising allows other Christians to invest in adoption and thus heed the calling of scripture, even if they aren’t led to adopt. (Keep in mind that the early church was a community, not just a cohort of individually-sufficient people who shared the same God and holidays as the modern church can often be.)

When I gave birth to Jocelyn and Robbie in the hospital, we had a high-deductible health insurance plan. That meant we owed a big chunk of that deductible after their births, given that Jocelyn was a January baby and Robbie came in March, both early in the calendar year before we had accrued many costs toward our deductible.

What did we do? We saved in advance (as we’ve done for each adoption) and then if our savings hadn’t been enough each time, we could have arranged a payment plan. I know because the financial person brought us copies of that paperwork, assuming we’d need it due to such a high bill. (Thanks to our health savings account and Lee’s savvy money management, we were fine both times.)

You can’t get an adoption HSA, though. While our income is sufficient for living and giving to the church and other ministries and causes, we don’t have enough extra each month to come up with the grand total for this adoption or the last one.

We will willingly sacrifice where we can. We’ll continue to do that once our children are home, because really? We’ll have enough for everyone, but it’ll be tight and require a whole lot o’ creativity to live as a family of eight.

When we fundraise, we’re asking others to tangibly join us in saying that these kids matter.

Each dollar, each word of encouragement, each comment, each hug, each gift, each show of support in word or deed or donation… it speaks love to us.

Thank you.

Is it wise for you to adopt when your daughter receives government services for early intervention?

I blogged a few weeks ago about receiving income-based government services for Zoe’s therapy needs. Given that we can’t afford Zoe’s therapy without financial support via early intervention, is it wise to even consider adopting again? Can we really afford three more children?

Before I tackle those questions, let me explain a bit about how disability services work in the US. Take autism, for example. Medical insurance companies try to classify most treatments as “educational;” meanwhile, public schools say, “no, that’s not covered, talk to your insurance company.” As they go back and forth without getting a “yes” from anyone, parents are spread thin, fundraising at times for their children’s behavioral therapy.

These parents usually would have no financial problems if autism wasn’t part of their world. They would be as solid on that front as you are, if not more so.

The problem isn’t their money. The problem is the gaps in coverage and lack of options.

In many states, parents don’t have the option of buying an insurance plan that would cover their child’s therapy needs. Not even a higher cost plan. They just don’t exist.

For us, if we stay at three children or increase to six, we would need the exact same support for Zoe’s early intervention program. We have enough money to care for three more children, but that’s simply not enough to pay for the portion of Zoe’s therapy costs that fall outside of insurance coverage.

In other words, while our services are income-based, the focal point isn’t our income, in the way that food stamps, WIC, or other welfare programs are. The focal point is our child’s disability.

One of our children in Uganda has HIV. Because that’s a clearly medical need, the care for that child will be completed covered by our private insurance. Easy peasy.

Disability services aren’t treated the same way, largely because of quibbles between insurance companies and educational systems.

So can we really afford three more children in our family?

Yes.

(Our social worker and agency require that, actually. So does the US Citizenship & Immigration Services office. We wouldn’t be approved for adoption if we couldn’t. Money will be tight, but we have a budget and, thankfully, no debt other than our mortgage.)

Is it wise?

Once again, I say yes. Because, really, while early intervention is an income-based program, it’s not the same as some of the other programs out there that support a family’s ability to meet basic needs. Almost every family with a child who has a disability receives some level of government program for support, be it early intervention or special education or Medicaid.

If we were receiving other types of support and were unable to financially (and emotionally) care for three more children, our current adoption would be unwise.

That’s not the case, though.

Finally, is it wise to turn our back on these children when God, the source of all wisdom, “executes justice for the fatherless” (Deuteronomy 10:18) and directs His people to provide for orphans (Deuteronomy 24:19)? When He calls Himself the “Father of the fatherless” (Psalm 68:4-6) and promises to uphold them (Psalm 146:5-9)? When He defines unfaithfulness, in part, as “not bring[ing] justice to the fatherless” (Isaiah 1:23) and defines pure and undefiled religion as “visit[ing] orphans…in their affliction?” And when He reminds us that the concept of adoption isn’t an earthly one but a God-orchestrated one, that of His promise not to leave us as orphans (John 14:18) and of His adopting us as children of God through salvation (Romans 8:14-17, Galatians 4:4-7)?

When we’re called to teach God’s word to our “children, that the next generation might know them… so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God” (Psalm 78), our willingness to not just share scripture but to apply it shows them that our hope is in God and that we trust in His works, even when that application means adding three more children to our family via adoption.

We know God is guiding us in this. And? Early intervention will happen either way for our Zoe, whether we bring home our three Ugandan children or not.

So, yes, it’s wise. It might be the wisest thing we’ve ever done.

(And the craziest.)