Any chance we can adopt?

[Mamita79]

My husband and I have been married for 2 1/2 years. We have 4 children from his previoous marriage. I would like to have 1 or 2 more children and have always wanted to adopt, but there are a few things I thnk will stand in our way. 1) My husband is not a documented citizen, 2) we have very low-income though that should be improving soon 3) Ihave mental illness, though I take meds and am completely stable, 4) I am overweight- and I have heard that this can be a real problem, of all things! And then I see ALLLLLLL these poor children waiting to be adopted and I don't understand why I shouldn't be able to.

I have a degree in Early Childhood Ed, I am starting a family child care center in my home, and I have been working with kids for the last 20 years! (And I'm only 30!)

[Amatullah0]

[RedOakMomma]

Is your husband here legally? If so, then international adoption *might* be an option. A lot will depend on the individual program (countries have their own qualifications) and family characteristics like # of children, income, age, length of marriage, history of depression, and yes...weight. International adoption, I believe all of them, requrie FBI approval. So legal citizenship, or at least legal residency, is an issue.

Each country has their own qualifications, and you may or may not qualify. For example, we qualified to adopt through South Korea (weight is often a factor, but it depends on the agency), but because of income we were not able to adopt from China. Likewise, earlier in our marriage, we were disqualified from adopting from a few countries because of the length of our marriage or our age. You really need to sort through the programs that interest you and see if you're a fit.

Some programs will waive some of their qualifications depending on the program. I know of a few larger families who were able to adopt kids because they got waivers to adopt older kids or kids with special needs.

For domestic adoption or adoption through foster care, I'm not sure what the qualifications are, especially re: legal residency and family size. I'm sure someone else will be able to help out with that.

[Mamita79]

Nope, he is not a legal citizen

[JBaxter]

Not being a legal citizen and not being in the country legally are 2 different things. It may raise questions when you get your daycare license also. When we got our foster care license we had to provide identification and finger prints of everyone in the household.

[someonenamedleah]

I can't speak for international adoption, or all domestic adoption, but in our case our homestudy worker needed proof of DH's legal residency... NOT citizenship. Basically she wanted to know that he had a green card. Financially, we needed to show that we had enough money to live on, without having a lot of debt that we can't pay off. We both had to have an FBI clearance, and a physical exam. We had a private, domestic adoption.