China Special Needs Program

[AllyRae]

Has anyone gone through the process of adopting through the China Special Needs program?  DH and I are strongly considering applying sometime early next year, and we'd love to hear people's experiences with the program. :) 

(And Steph...don't tell anyone in the family yet.  It's not a sure thing. LOL!)

[laura-belle]

We haven't done it yet, but are planning to file next summer (after I turn 30).

[Spock]

We adopted our son through the sn program in March 2009 when he was 21 months old.  The process is pretty straightforward and we didn't have any problems on the China end of things.  Our home study social worker sucked but that's another story.  ;-)

After you choose a China special needs agency, you are matched with a child either by the agency or by viewing the list of waiting kids and requesting a file.  Once you decide you would like to adopt a particular child, you send a letter of intent and your dossier.  Once China has all that you will get a letter of acceptance and then travel approval.  I think it's after you get travel approval that you need to file your I-800 with CIS to be allowed to bring the child into the country.  We were a pre-Hague family so our process was a little different so I may be a little off about some of the CIS timeline.  Once you get your approval from CIS and a consulate appointment in Guangzhou you will travel to meet your child.  You'll be in the country about 2 weeks.  The first week is spent in the capitol of the province your child is from to complete the Chinese adoption paperwork and the second week is spent in Guangzhou to complete the American paperwork.  If both parents travel, your child will become a US citizen upon arrival in the US.  If only one parent travels, you will need to do some additional steps which I'm unfamiliar with.

Let me know if you have any other questions.  We are so thrilled to have our son in our family.  He's a totally awesome kid!

[AllyRae]

Thank you so much!!!  I want to learn everything I can because obviously this is a whole different experience than adopting from Vietnam (it was not a special needs program, and I adopted an infant...however, she did end up being a special needs child, with multiple food allergies, Reactive Attachment Disorder, selective mutism, and burnt vocal cords).  Right now, we are researching the heck out of Cleft Lip & Palate...I feel really drawn to this particular special need with the China program.  Our local Children's hospital has a *fantastic* CL&P clinic that coordinates everything...the surgery, orthodonics, psychological care, etc. 

Are there special concerns with adopting a toddler verses an infant?  Obviously it's not the same experience (Jocelyn was not walking/talking/responding to her name/etc. since she was only 4 months old...supposedly.  Her ped thinks she was actually a few months older than that).  But in China, it looks like the baby will be around 18 months+ when she comes home (although we want to preserve birth order, so the new baby would have to be born after January 2009, since our youngest was born in January 2009).  I don't think I want to deal with artificial twinning, although maybe that's not a big deal?

[Spock]

Originally Posted by AllyRae 

Thank you so much!!!  I want to learn everything I can because obviously this is a whole different experience than adopting from Vietnam (it was not a special needs program, and I adopted an infant...however, she did end up being a special needs child, with multiple food allergies, Reactive Attachment Disorder, selective mutism, and burnt vocal cords).  Right now, we are researching the heck out of Cleft Lip & Palate...I feel really drawn to this particular special need with the China program.  Our local Children's hospital has a *fantastic* CL&P clinic that coordinates everything...the surgery, orthodonics, psychological care, etc. 

Are there special concerns with adopting a toddler verses an infant?  Obviously it's not the same experience (Jocelyn was not walking/talking/responding to her name/etc. since she was only 4 months old...supposedly.  Her ped thinks she was actually a few months older than that).  But in China, it looks like the baby will be around 18 months+ when she comes home (although we want to preserve birth order, so the new baby would have to be born after January 2009, since our youngest was born in January 2009).  I don't think I want to deal with artificial twinning, although maybe that's not a big deal?

Our son's special need is cl/cp so if you have any questions about that, I'd be happy to answer those too.  I'd say that the biggest issue with cl/cp is speech rather than the surgeries.  While there are multiple surgeries and they are a big deal at the time, the biggest day-to-day issue is speech.  Expect to have years of speech therapy which may or may not be covered by insurance.  Ds gets services through the schools so we only have to pay during the summer.

As for special concerns with adopting a toddler versus an infant, so much of the child's adjustment depends on how they have been treated in the orphanage or foster family up to that point and the child's personality that it's hard to make blanket statements.  As you've experienced, there is no guarantee that an infant will have an easy adjustment.  Our son was in a pretty good orphanage and seems to have had his needs met pretty consistently before we met him.  I think that's one of the reasons he's had an "easy" adjustment.  Of course, it was traumatic for him and he grieved and still grieves but he has attached to us well and has had about as good a transition as possible.  I'd recommend reading Toddler Adoption : the Weaver's Craft to get an idea of what to expect.  

I'd avoid artificial twinning if you can as well as adopting out of birth order.  Those were 2 things we were absolutely not open to because I think it makes things much more difficult on all the children in the family.  The new child is going to need more attention just as a new child born into a family would and that's more difficult when you already have another child the same age or younger.  Some social workers won't even approve a family to adopt out of birth order or artificial twinning.

There are lots of waiting kids with cl/cp in China, especially boys.  If you are open to a boy you should have no problem being matched with a child younger than your youngest.  Our son was 9 months old when we started the process to adopt him but thanks to delays caused by our crappy social worker it was a year before we traveled to meet him.  If you have a competent social worker, it probably won't take that long to travel once you are matched.

Edited by Spock - 1/31/11 at 4:00pm

[AllyRae]

THANK YOU!!!

I don't think I can name the agency we are considering on here (I'm not sure if that's considered advertising?), but we're considering one of the largest agencies, so the process is a wee slower (there are lots of people in the program at this agency I think). 

I don't think artificial twinning should be a problem, since our youngest will be around 3 if it takes at least 12 months start to finish (she turns 2 in a month), but we'll just be sure to specify that we'd rather not have a referral who was born at the beginning of 2009. 

Do you know why there are so many CL&P children in China?  I'd assume it's not a drug/alcohol exposure thing, right?  Is it a genetic thing thing?  (I've heard more than one theory about what contributes to CL&P, but I'm not sure which one's more accurate.  I just know in Vietnam, the chances of an adopted child being drug/alcohol exposed is really really low, which is one reason we were drawn to that program).

We're totally not strangers to speech therapy...my oldest son was in speech therapy for 3 years due to his autism, and my 3 year old was in speech for over a year, before it was finally diagnosed as selective mutism (so speech therapy was pointless because she was just fighting it).  Is that something that starts right away, or do you wait until they've been exposed to more English?  Or do I find a speech therapist that knows Chinese as well?  (We will eventually keep up with Chinese language lessons...right now my Vietnamese-born DD is taking Vietnamese lessons).  Our insurance is usually pretty good about speech therapy...at least they were with autism, which they tend to drag their feet about. 

What about feeding?  Is there a special bottle I would have to get?  (Or are the babies using cups at that age in China?)

How does the surgery work with the attachment/bonding process?  I think one of my daughter's big issues is that within the first week of meeting her, she was hospitalized for 3 days, near death with severe dehydration (at one point, she fell asleep for 24 hours in the hospital and they couldn't wake her up...she was motionless for 24 hours when she was first admitted and they began to hydrate her)...that was a huge hit to the attachment process...days of being jabbed with needles and having failed/blown IVs, etc.)  Do they usually recommend holding off on the surgery for awhile, or get it over with right away?

[Spock]

There are so many kids with cl/cp since Asians are something like 5 times more likely to be affected by it.  There is definitely a genetic component.  I also wonder if the pollution in China has something to do with it since I read something about birth defects being on the rise in China.  The kids with cl/cp are also more likely to be abandoned and less likely to adopted domestically both because of a stigma attached to the sn and because of lack of access to medical services.  FAS/FAE isn't much of an issue in China from what I've seen.

I contacted our state's early intervention services about 4 months after we came home and they evaluated him and he got services through them for a couple of months and then they referred him to the schools for more intensive services.  So, he'd been home about 8 months when he started therapy at the school.  He learned English really quickly since he was still pretty young when he came home so we didn't need to find a Chinese speech therapist.  He's been in speech therapy for almost a year now and there are still sounds that he can't make at all but he's making great progress!

There are special cleft bottles but only orphanages that are involved with a charity like Love without Boundaries use them, as far as I know, since they aren't available in China and have to be imported.  When we met our son, we were given his bottle which was just a regular hard plastic bottle but with a bigger hole cut in the nipple and ds sort of chomped on it to get the formula out.  He was physically healthy when we met him which is a credit to the care he received in the orphanage since cleft-affected kids are often underweight since it takes so much more effort to feed them and the caregivers often aren't able to devote the extra time to them. 

I brought some sippy cups with soft spouts with us and he was able to use those just fine.  This one was the one that worked the best. 

Ds's lip was repaired in China when he was 9 months old and his palate was repaired after he'd been home about 6 months.  We would have done it sooner but that was the first opening his surgeon had.  By that point we were pretty well-bonded so I don't think it really had all that much affect on our relationship.  I've heard other parents say that surgery soon after they came home actually helped with the bonding process because they were able to take care of their child and "prove" to the child that they would be there for them.  Doing the surgery at an earlier age has benefits in terms of speech development but you'd have to judge how your child is doing and decide when to do the surgery.  There is a Yahoo group for parents who have adopted cleft-affected kids so that might be a good source for a variety of experiences.

We're having a snow day today so I should be on a lot if you have anymore questions!  :)

[AllyRae]

That was all very helpful, thank you!!!! 

We are kind of at a stand still though.  We were going to put our application in today for the China special needs program, and then we found out that Vietnam accepted the Hague Convention today (!!!  WOO!).  Since we already have a Vietnam-born daughter, we have always wanted to go back for a sibling, but were afraid they would never be open for adoptions again.  So now, we're waiting to find out if/when Vietnam might open back up to adoptions.  If it will be in 2011, we'll put our application into Vietnam.  If it's looking like it still might be a couple years, we'll put our application into China. 

See, just when you think you get everything figured out....  Either way, we decided that our next little one is coming home via adoption again!