November is National Adoption Awareness Month. To commemorate the event, adoption specialists are reminding potential adoptive parents there are several things to consider before thinking of adopting or putting a baby up for adoption.

According to Beth Richardson, adoption specialist with Catholic Social Services, a family needs to decide which kind of program they want to use to adopt a child. The different types are: foster care, open, closed and international adoption.

With foster care, Richardson said, it is important for the foster family to know children in this program are not meant to stay with the foster family forever.

"Foster care is about fostering a child while the family is trying to get their stuff together," she said.

However, she said, more children are available for adoption through this method and are available as newborns on up to 18 years.

With open adoption, it is important that the adopting family knows it means there might be some contact between the child and birth parents and there is no guarantee that a family will be able to adopt a child domestically since most children in the program are newborn or very, very young.

With international adoption, families should consider which countries they want to adopt from and what the difficulties might be to travel for that child.

Each program - except for foster care - has a fee associated with it, which should also be a consideration.

Foster care is done through the Department of Children and Family Services and is paid for by the state, but domestic adoption can cost anywhere between $7,000 up to $15,000. International adoption can range anywhere from $5,000 on up to $50,000 depending on the country. That doesn't include cost of traveling to the country, Richardson said.

All of this, she said, also takes time. For foster care, it takes more than six months to become licensed. Domestic adoption averages a year before a child is available. International adoption depends on many factors but can often-times be done more quickly than domestic adoption, Richardson said.

After that, it takes up to six months before the child can formally be adopted by the family.

"(Families) really need to figure out what program they want to get into," she said.

kristen.cates@thesouthern.com

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