How To Pass A Home Study

In this blog post, we're going to talk about how to make your home study a piece of cake or (as one of my clients recently told me) so stinking easy. I'm going to share with you the steps to follow to make your home study process so much easier.

Steps to Pass an Adoption Home Study

Getting Started

When do you actually need to start a home study? This is a question I get a lot. I would suggest that you don't start a home study until you've chosen the adoption method that you're going to use and your adoption partner.

When you adopt with an adoption agency, adoption attorney, or an adoption consultant, they will have a specific list of partners they want you to work with. For this reason, you should wait and figure out who you're going to work with on your adoption first and then figure out the home study provider.

4 Steps to Get an Approved Home Study

Step 1: Find an Adoption Partner

The first step is to find an adoption partner and adoption agency. Then find your home study partner. I wouldn’t overcomplicate this step. I would just ask for their process, fees, and timeline.

If you're self-matching, this is an important step to get an attorney on board with this first step, before you get home study approved. You don't have to pay the attorney the full fee, most of them will kind of require an upfront retainer. Then they're going to share the home study process with you because they want to make sure your home study is legally approved which means they’ll get paid faster. Before you commit to an adoption partner, I would make sure you choose the right one that will be a good fit for you and your family from a home study perspective. There are licensed social workers who are great counselors, but I would strongly suggest you find a counselor to help you with the emotional part of your adoption journey separate from the social worker.

When you reach out to your adoption partner for that initial conversation, you want to get an understanding of the process of their timeline and their cost. The typical process is going to be three parts.

Step 2: Mountain of paperwork.

You are going to need to provide a ton of documentation. Some of the paperwork you’ll be asked to submit:

Your previous year’s tax returns
Proof of homeownership
Going to doctor’s visits to make sure you’re healthy enough to raise a child
Multiple background checks (including a criminal background check)
Getting fingerprinted

Your home study partner should give you a list of everything that you need to complete the corresponding documents and where they need to go. This is really where it pays off to have a type-A person checking over your shoulder to make sure it’s all right. If it’s not right, that will cause a delay and a longer wait time for the home study to get approved and might even cause you to need to do appeals and follow-ups.

Step 3: Getting Your Home Ready for the Inspection

During a home inspection, the social workers come into your house to make sure that it's safe, that a child's not going to accidentally fall into the pool or stick their finger in a light socket, or you know drink bleach or you know any of those other horrible things. Everything needs to be behind lock and key with childproof locks. They will also make sure you have baby gates and other safety equipment in your home.

Most of my clients freak out at this stage and think they have to clean their house for days. I know when I went through my journey, I used it as an opportunity to like purge like there was no tomorrow. It was also a great time to get rid of my husband's furniture that I didn't love that was still in our house. But please don't tell him that, okay, just a little secret. It was a great excuse to kind of go through and do some deep cleaning and purging to set us up to bring the child home. They're looking for basic cleanliness and safety.

If you need a checklist to help you feel a little bit more prepared, head on over to the My Adoption Coach Facebook Group. In the guide section of the group, I have a home study checklist for you that will walk you through just some common things that they're going to look through. This is a home study checklist I built based on my adoption journeys. I've updated it based upon so what some of my clients have been through in the past few months or so. So that will be super helpful for you.

Step 4: Interview

The next step in the overall journey of becoming home study approved is the interview. The interview is an area where a lot of folks get a little tripped up and get a little concerned, especially in the realm of “Am I going to say the wrong thing?”.

This is where I work a lot with my one-to-one clients on preparing for the interview. I do have a full list of questions over in the How to Adopt Course that I offer that walks you through it step by step.

The questions are really basic. They might ask you some of the questions below:

How do you intend to talk with his child and with others about their adoption?
How do you intend to parent?
What are your parenting styles?
What are your corrective behavior styles?

Those are just a few kinds of topic areas to get you started. Depending upon if you had an infertility journey, they may ask you some questions just to ensure that you've actually dealt with the grief from your infertility journey and that you don't kind of carry that over into the adoption journey.

Hopefully, those are a few areas to get you started.

I know that when we went through our adoption journey, that my husband needed to do a little bit extra prep because he's just not one that feels super comfortable talking about messy emotional things with basically a complete stranger. So he and I did a little practice, and we talked about some areas and some things that we thought we might get questions on.

Then I turned those questions around and would ask him and he would ask me and we'll kind of go back and forth to make sure he's comfortable with that.

I'm super extroverted, but that's not his jam at all.

If you're more in his camp (introverted), I would highly suggest that you do some prep work. You can get a list of questions inside the How to Adopt Course because that's really what's going to help you.

In this part of the adoption journey, it's really important that you are finding the right adoption partner for you, and you're clearly understanding their overall process, their timeline, and their cost.

Once you've done that, and you dove into the process, there are three main areas, that you're going to be focused on, the first is going to be overcoming mountain paperwork, going through the process step by step to get the paperwork completed. The next is going to be all around making sure that your home is ready for the home study visit and that's focused around the safety aspects. I have a free guide for you over in the My Adoption Coach Facebook Group that I would highly suggest that you grab and walk through because that's going to help you. The third step is to be prepared for the interview itself. From an interview perspective, it's just about making sure that you guys are on the same page together, because that is what's really important here is that you and your partner have aligned values have aligned perspectives as a relates to parenting this child in the long term.

II would love to know from you what would make your home study easier. The guide over in the Facebook group will help you, but I would love it if you would drop a comment below to tell me what would help you in your home study preparations.