Can I Use My Home Study for a Different Type of Adoption? - Weekend Wisdom

Question: Can I use my home study for a different type of adoption?

This question arises in the following types of situations. Someone is applying to adopt an infant domestically and gets a home study from a domestic adoption agency. They then decide that they want to adopt from foster care and ask if they can use their domestic home study for foster care adoption. Or, they have applied to adopt internationally and want to know if they can use their international home study for a domestic adoption or an adoption from foster care. Or getting a home study from a foster care agency and wanting to use that for domestic infant or international adoption.

Resources:

• Types of Adoption
• Adoption Agencies
• Adoption Attorneys

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome to Weekend Wisdom by Creating a Family. Weekend Wisdom is our opportunity to answer your questions. They keep it short, five, maybe ten minutes,
and we welcome you to send your questions into us. You can send them to info @creatingafamily .org. This week's question came to us via an adoption agency self because they get this question so often.
And the question is, can I use my home study for a different type of adoption? Or in their case, they were asking for adoptive parents. So can adoptive parents use home study for a different type of adoption?
And this question arises in the following type of situations that let's say someone is applying to adopt an infant domestically and gets a home study from a domestic adoption agency. Then they decide that they want to adopt from foster care and ask if they can use their domestic home study for foster care adoption,
or they may have applied to adopt internationally and want to know if they can use their international home study for a domestic infant adoption or an adoption from foster care, or getting a home study from a foster care agency and wanting to use that for domestic infant or for international adoption.
The TLDR answer is it may be possible, but it is unlikely that it will work. The problem you're going to run into is that there may be different requirements, or there are usually different requirements,
for each type of adoption. And these requirements come from the state governments, that comes from the agency themselves, and in the case of international adoption, the U .S.
government and the government of the placing country all have their own requirements that a home study must include. So, For example, and this is kind of a weird one, but there is a specific training that is required for adopting from foster care and adopting internationally,
and those trainings are different. And not only are they different, but they are not the same ones that are required for domestic infant adoption. In fact, some states don't require any training for domestic infant adoption.
There are specific requirements for the home and the bedrooms that are required for foster care adoption, that are not required for domestic infant and for international adoption.
So some agencies would be willing to update the home study that they have prepared to incorporate these differences. Now, for a fee, I will add, but others, especially public child welfare agencies,
usually are not willing, or they don't know what all the other requirements are and so they can't prepare the home study for you. And if you're asking a new agency to use your old home study,
let's say you've had one, and you're asking the agency if they will accept the old one, they will still need to do some work on their own to verify the documents. They may have to do a home visit on their own.
They will most likely have to do background checks on their own and other things such as that. And if you're trying to use your home study in another state, that adds another level of complications because state laws differ on what has to be included.
For example, and this one's kind of a weird one, but one state might require that the home study include records on pet vaccinations. And if the home study was prepared in a different state that doesn't have that requirement,
then the agency in the new state would have to do the additional work to get that documentation in place. And there's also the issue of expiration. Home studies are only good for a certain length of time before they expire.
And it depends on how much time you have left on your home study as to whether it's even worth trying to use it for a different type of adoption, because it will possibly expire before the adoption is complete.
So that is a long way to going back to saying, well, theoretically, it may be possible. In practice, it gets complicated to try to use One home study that was prepared for one type of adoption,
for a different type of adoption. Hope that answers the question. And before you leave, let me remind everyone that we have a Facebook support group.
It's a closed group on Facebook. And you can find it at facebook .com /groups /creatingafamily. Thank you for listening to this week's Week in And if you liked it,
please tell a friend to subscribe to TheCreatingAFamily .org podcast. I will see you next week.