 What are our main goals?
Our primary goal is to find
Jewish homes for Jewish children. We have worked on over 1,000 cases over
the past eleven years, and charge no fees for any of our services, which include
helping a birth family parent a child, locating resources for help with personal
problems or coping with a child's limitations, helping an adoptive family find
resources for adoption or parenting, helping biological and adoptive triad
members in getting a search started.
What kind of children are referred to us?
Our statistics show that of
the children referred to us, fewer than 15% are "healthy" infants.
The remaining 85-90% include:
infants and children who are developmentally disabled
infants and children with moderate to severe physical
disabilities
infants exposed to drugs or alcohol in utero
children with a family history of mental or emotional
illness
children with severe emotional disturbances, and
victims of abuse or neglect
FOR THOSE OF YOU WITH QUALMS ABOUT ADOPTION:
Everything I needed to know about adoption, I learned from marriage
(or, Take my mother-in-law...please!)
“My wife/husband isn’t sure s/he can love
someone else’s child as much as his/her own.” This is a call we have received
numerous times. It isn’t surprising that people contemplating starting or
enlarging their family without the use of personal biology are often unsure of
whether they can parent an adopted child as they would a child born to them.
Long ago we figured out that the best response was
“Does s/he love you, even though s/he’s not genetically related to you?”.
Turned out that most spouses were perfectly comfortable with that (also,
fortunately, it turned out that most husbands and wives weren’t genetically
related!). In that case, we added, why couldn’t one also love a child who
was not genetically related?!
While the inability to produce a genetic offspring, to maintain the family gene
pool, is a painful experience, it is important to separate the child-producing
experience from the child-raising experience. These are really two
separate events, and if we can’t derive the pleasure of the first, why deny
ourselves the pleasures (and challenges) of the second?
After a
while of working with this analogy, it really seemed to us that adoption was
like marriage in lots of other ways, too:
• You can love someone you are not related to genetically
• You need to start with a commitment for “forever”. There is no
guarantee that things will always work out, but you have to start with that
commitment.
• Love doesn’t conquer everything, but it helps ( you may need support,
counseling, etc, too)
• The process may require some adjustment - just as in a marriage, you may have
to get used the quirks of another person, so too in adoption
• Age may not be very important, certainly is not the most important aspect of
the relationship
• The marriage is more important than the wedding; likewise, parenting the
child is more important than how you got him/her (that is, adoption is also a
great experience, and usually requires fewer stitches)
• The relationship of biological and adoptive families is really like that of
in-laws. By adopting someone else’s child, you now become part of their
extended family.
• Marriage totally changes your life in ways you can’t begin to understand
until you’ve been there; so, too, does adoption.
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