What Your Homestudy Can Do For You

By Lisa Lovett, MSW

During the years I have been with Wide Horizons For Children, I have met many wonderful people who are on their way to becoming adoptive parents. The best part of my job is getting to know all of these people and then sharing in their joy when a child or children come home to them. This is truly a great privilege. I have also heard from a number of families that they came close to never pursuing adoption because of their discomfort with the homestudy. The idea that a total stranger would need to question them about the practical and intimate matters in their life and then make a judgment on their fitness as a potential parent was so distressing to them that they almost changed their mind about adopting. I would like to try in this brief article to remove the homestudy as a blockade and introduce it as a tool. The homestudy, when done well, is not primarily an instrument to determine who should or shouldn't be parents. Adoptive parents, like biological parents, come in all shapes and sizes. They live in the city or on farms. They have lots of money saved for retirement or they live one day at a time. They plan to raise their children just as I am raising mine or they have ideas that seem strange and foreign to me. They want to emulate their childhood or they had a childhood they are vowing not to repeat with their children. They are single, married, divorced, young, old, professional and working class, parents for the first time or parents of many other children. All of these people can be wonderful parents to a child.

So if the primary function of the homestudy is not to decide who is fit to parent, is the homestudy simply a bureaucratic step needed to satisfy a requirement? I don't think so. In my experience, a homestudy fulfills at least five very important functions.

The homestudy is an introduction of you.
Imagine writing a biography of someone you have spent a total of six to eight hours with, and imagine further that the people reading the biography will have a great influence on your subject's life. This is where my job gets really difficult! I do ask my clients many personal questions, questions about their families, their careers, their most difficult moments and their hopes for the future. Not all of this information will make it into the homestudy, but it all contributes to my understanding of who they are as people. After I have this understanding, I use it to write a homestudy, which will introduce them to the INS, the officials in another country, other social workers and sometimes even a birthparent. Generally speaking, even if we cover some tough questions in our interview process, a homestudy is an overwhelmingly positive document that says, in essence, "look what wonderful parents these people will be."

The homestudy process helps a child find the right family.
At Wide Horizons, we see our mission as finding families for children. We know a lot about the children we place through years of doing this work, and we know what they need in a permanent home. The children, like our adoptive families, are not all the same. Nor is the adoption process the same in each of the 13 countries where we work. During the homestudy process, I help a family decide what program is best for them and understand the likely needs of the child they are planning to adopt. I help my clients weigh and balance many factors, including the expediency of the process, the age of the child when coming home, race and cultural differences, amount of background information, reliability of medical data, cost, the availability of sibling groups and how many trips in an airplane. The more informed the family is when they make a decision about a particular program or a particular child, the better the chances that this will be the right family for that child.

The homestudy process builds a rapport between the social worker and the family that may help the family at other points in their adoption process.
While you are likely to interact with a number of WHFC staff during your adoption, every family has one person who is responsible for helping them through the whole adoption process from beginning to end - their social worker. One of my objectives while doing the homestudy is to know my clients well enough to know what support they might need when the going gets rough. To this end, I may talk about how they have handled other stressful times in their lives. I may find out that one client tends to be a worrier but is generally comfortable after talking everything through, or that another client copes by riding their bike, spending time in the country, or reading every book on a particular subject. This information is very useful if INS loses their first set of fingerprints or the country they are adopting from is taking three months longer to assign referrals than they originally thought. There is nothing magical I can do to make these problems go away, but I am the person who should understand what coping strategy is useful to my particular client.

The homestudy process helps prepare you for questions your child may have five, ten or fifteen years from now.
Imagine being asked to solve a very important mystery. Your reward for success is not money or fame, but the ability to provide comfort and reassurance to someone you dearly love. But there is a problem. You encountered the clues you need to solve the mystery ten years ago, before you knew they were important. Try as you may, you can only dimly recall some of them; others you may have missed entirely.

At some point in your child's life, they are likely to become curious about their early history. They may long to know what their birth mother looked like or whether she cried when she said good-bye to them. They may be curious about what they were like as a little baby or want a newborn picture for a project for school. Or they may want to see a picture of the orphanage they lived in or the church where they were found before being brought to the orphanage. Your best opportunity for being able to answer these questions comes very early in your lives as adoptive parents. If you travel to Guatemala, you may have an opportunity to meet your child's birthmother, perhaps to ask her what she wants her birth child to know of her life. In China, you may be able to take a picture of the square where your child was found or ask the caregiver some questions about her first eight months. These opportunities may never come again. During your homestudy, you will attend a pre-adoptive class where you will talk with other pre-adoptive parents about preparing for your child's questions as they grow older. You will learn how to gather critical pieces of information or, in the absence of information about your child in particular, what else might be important (pictures of the country they came from, relationships with children from the same orphanage). No parent will ever be able to answer all of their child's questions, but Wide Horizons and other adoptive parents can help you determine what may be important later on.

The homestudy process puts you in touch with other families who are pursuing adoption.
This perhaps is the most important function of all. Throughout my process with a family, I always offer them the names and phone numbers of other adoptive families. Because Wide Horizons is a large agency with a long history, we can often match families with other, very similar families. We also, through our pre-adoptive classes, bring families together who are at the same point in their adoption process. In this setting, they can trade resources, share fears and congratulate each other when their child has come home. But the real magic of this connection comes later, when their children have long adjusted to their life in this country. They will be able to introduce them to each other and to other families who look like theirs.

If homestudies were optional, would every client need one? Probably not. I have certainly met with clients who are far better read than I in the subject of adoption, clients who have an impeccable support system of people who understand the process of adoption, and clients who have strong connections with many other adoptive families. But most families I have worked with have benefited from at least some of what the homestudy process has to offer. One last thing before I close. If you are finishing up your homestudy now, waiting for your child to be referred, preparing to travel to pick him or her up, or reading this article quickly as your child takes a nap, you may soon be the expert to whom we refer families just starting on the adoption journey.

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