Now that we are on the brink of getting certified, I am getting a lot of questions about the matching process! So here it is to the best of my knowledge:
Step 0: Get certified
You can't look at any potential matches whatsoever until you are fully and officially certified. This is why we are looking forward to Monday when we can sign off on our final paperwork and start looking at kiddos!
Step 1: Looking for matches or waiting for matches
You can be as passive or proactive as you want during the matching process. Some parents choose to sit back and wait for their social worker to find matches for them. Others will be in the office every month looking at new cases that have come in and identifying which ones they want their social worker to pursue.
Step 2: Reaching out
For any kids we might be interested in, our social worker will reach out to the kids' social worker to express interest and send our homestudy (that 15-20 page document they wrote about us). At this time, our social worker may also call us if a case comes up that she thinks might fit our profile. We can say no to any potential match. For example if we wanted kids of a particular age, ethnicity, level of special needs, etc, those parameters are all enumerated in our homestudy, and we will use our parameters to guide our search.
Step 3: Disclosure Meeting
Once a child social worker comes back to our social worker and says they think we might be a match, we set up a disclosure meeting. This meeting includes us, our social worker, the kids' social worker, the kids' lawyer, and the kids' therapist(s) or other professionals working with them. This meeting lasts several hours and during this time we hear everything they know about the kids, everything they know the kids have been exposed to (abuse, neglect, domestic violence, etc), any behaviors they have seen, and where the kids are in the legal process. We can also ask any questions we may have.
Step 4: Baby, Think It Over
After the disclosure meeting, we will meet privately with our social worker and determine whether there are any red flags from her perspective (obvious ones would be intentional harm to animals or fire starting*, but our social worker will also know the more subtle things to ask about). Then we sleep on it and think it over and decide whether to move forward or not. If not, we start over. If we move forward, that means we are committing ourselves to the kids. They don't want us to meet the kids if we aren't committed. (Imagine if a pregnant person gave birth and then said "well, i don't really like her, so let's give this one away and try again.")
Step 5: Meet the kids
Our social worker and the kids' social worker will work with the kids' current foster parents to set up a time for us to come to their house and meet the kids. We will bring the book we made with photos of our house so that they have something to imagine and it's not just a scary, mysterious place. We will also bring a gift for each kid to break the ice. We will be introduced as "friends" of the current foster parents.
Step 6: Transition
We will set up a time to come back and take them out to a park, then another time we will have them over to our house for dinner, then have them over for a sleepover, then for a weekend. This allows us to build up trust with them, to show them that we follow up on our promises, and to ease them into our family and our home.
Step 7: Moving in
When the kids' social worker thinks the kids are ready for it, we will set a move-in date with the court. This will also become the first day of our parental leave from work. Our social worker will visit once a week for the first month and then every other week to see how we are doing, see how the kids are, ask if we need support or paperwork, and help us keep track of any requirements we have (taking them to the doctor/dentist within 30 days of placement, getting authorization paperwork for access to special education services, etc).
Step Alternative 5-7: Rushing it
The transition described above often spans 2-4 months and is very beneficial to both the kids and parents. Anytime it is possible to do that transition slowly, it is done in this way. However, about 25% of the time, that transition must be rushed. Usually this is because the kids need to be moved as soon as possible to a new home, like if the current foster family suddenly has to move out of state to care for a sick parent, for example. If the kids are going to be moved suddenly to a new home, they would rather it be the kids' future adoptive home so as to minimize the number of transitions. For this reason, it is possible that we would get a phone call asking if we are interested in becoming a parent in two days, set up an immediate disclosure meeting, and get an immediate move-in date. This is why we don't know if we will have any lead time on when we are going to be parents. One set of adoptive parents we met got a call about a kid with a move in date five days later. They managed to get the kid's foster mom to bring him over to their house once before he moved in so that it was less of a shock. More likely once we get matched we will have some sort of transition, as well as some sort of idea of when they might move in with us.
* Note: Kids who have done intentional harm to animals or started fires absolutely deserve loving homes and families. Nevertheless, every family has to decide what they can or cannot commit to before any kid comes into the picture. It is incredibly harmful for a kid, especially one with developmental trauma, to bounce in and out of a home because the parents didn't know what they were signing up for. A single parent household or a household with two working parents may not be the best family for a medically fragile kid or a kid with extreme behavior challenges, for example.
