How to order Pre-adoption Potpourri

To order a copy, fill in this form and send with your cheque to: Box 1353, Southampton, Ont. N0H 2L0 Canada.

A bouquet of questions and answers

This Pre-adoption Potpourri deals with pre-adoption issues in a question-and-answer format. If it's not covered here, you'll find it under post-adoption issues, in our sister publication, Post-adoption Helper (see No. 11, which is titled, appropriately enough, Post-adoption Potpourri).

Some of the questions deal with individual provinces, and necessarily so, since adoption laws vary across the country. If I've spent extra time on questions concerning Ontario, it's because a goodly number of Adoption Helper readers come from there.

My sources were a variety of government booklets, the FAQs at government web sites and private sites (such as the adoption councils and provincial adoptive family associations), past editions of Adoption Helper, and last but not least, an email list, Canadians-adopting. (I recommend you join it if you have Internet access.) Costs are in Canadian dollars.

What's an email list? For those without computers, it's like the bulletin board in your supermarket, except that in place of notices of snow shovels for sale, there are requests for the name of a good social worker, or ideas on good countries to adopt from. Imagine that as soon as you pin up your request on the board, someone else pins up a reply. Fine ... except you'd have to hang around the supermarket all day to see all the answers. Not a great idea, unless it all happens electronically, by email. Which it does, on an "email list", or "mailing list".

Now if you should happen to take the best answers and print them in one spot (say, Adoption Helper) then everyone could read them, not just email aficionados. A great idea (in my opinion)--and that's what I've done here.

I've presented the comments from Canadians-adopting email list in the margins.

There are two ways to look at them: on the one hand, they speak of one individual's experience, in their particular circumstances, and since these may differ from yours, you take the comment with a grain of salt. (At times, people's comments contradict each other.)

On the other hand, individual experiences reflect the real world -- they tell what in fact happens, not what the agency brochures say will happen. These can be a valuable help in decision-making.

I've edited the marginal comments freely, added bold face, and protected the writer's identity by using only initials and the province of residence, if I could figure out where it was.

I haven't asked the authors' permission to reproduce their comments, since there is no information here which would identify them, and since an email list is an exchange of messages in public, rather than private email.

Not content with all that, at the end I've added "Voices of Single Parents", wherein singles vent their frustration at the barriers they face.