The Making the Commitment to Adoption

Curriculum Purpose and Objectives:

To assist prospective adoptive parents in understanding the process through which they must go to adopt.
To examine the needs of the children awaiting adoption.
To help participants better understand their own strengths, needs and challenges they may encounter as an adoptive family.
To develop competencies deemed necessary to adopt:
- Know how adoptive families are different
- Understand the importance of separation, loss, and grief in adoption
- Understand attachment and its importance in adoption
- Understand the need to anticipate challenges and be able to identify strategies for managing challenges as an adoptive family
- Understand that adoption means making a life long commitment to a child
- To assist participants in understanding the purpose of the family preparation and assessment summary or homestudy, what it will include, and how it may be used.
- To assist prospective adoptive parents in developing, strategies for working with agency staff so that they can make an informed decision about adoption and the adoption of a specific child or specific children.
- To define key roles that various child welfare staff, attorneys, judges and other systems, such as the courts, mental health and health, play in the adoption process.

Posted August 6th, 2007