WAY OUT PARENTING: HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR ADOPTION HOME STUDY

Once their letters of reference are secured and their home study paperwork is complete, straight and gay would-be adoptive parents face one of the most stressful events of their adoption home study—the dreaded visit or series of visits by a social worker to their home. This is a high-stakes event. This social worker has the power to advance your dreams or stop them dead. Don’t be placated by anyone who tells you, “Relax. Just be yourself.” When has that ever worked for anyone? Here are some suggestions.

Attire


By the time your social worker arrives at your doors, she has poured over your home study application and developed her positive or negative preconceptions of you. The instant you answer the door, your attire either reinforces or neutralizes these positive and negative preconceptions—so dress with care.

Staging Your Home or Apartment


Savvy real estate investors do this all the time in order to flip properties at the highest possible selling price. With the help of an interior designer and some rented antiques and fine art, they turn a roach-infested dump into an Architectural Digest cover—and start a bidding war.

Obviously, this is not the kind of staging that will impress a social worker. She’ll be looking for the room where the baby will sleep, the Barney, Elmo, and Baby Einstein DVDs, the baby-proofed cabinets with safety latches even an adult can’t open, and the medicine chest filled with anti-bacterial soap, Band Aids, bacitracin, baby sunscreen, zinc oxide, and baby Tylenol. Beyond these basics, each prospective parent group has some specific staging tasks to accomplish.

Regardless of your income bracket, your home undoubtedly looks magnificent. What you need to do is anti-staging. This involves removing select pieces of fine art and antiques from walls and shelves and placing them into a storage unit so that your home doesn’t look too perfect (too gay) to be welcoming to a small child. Tuck away your artsy coffee table books. Take down the nude male oil painting that has looked down on you seductively for the last ten years. Trash the adult videos (it’s time for Disney DVDs anyway).

How to Be Appropriately Cordial

Everyone appreciates a cup of freshly brewed coffee or tea. You should offer one to your social worker as soon as she arrives. And when you bring out the tray with cream and sugar, you should feel free to serve tea biscuits or biscotti as well. But do not get carried away and bring out a full brunch buffet purchased at Whole Foods, Zabar’s or any other expensive food boutique. Remember, this is not a social call. It’s a social worker call.

What to Say


While she looks around suspiciously at your apartment or home, the social worker is contemplating what invasive questions to ask in order to evaluate each applicant’s worthiness to parent. There is no predicting what she will ask. Be prepared for anything.

Here are the questions straight applicants fear their social worker will ask:
• Do you really want a child or are you trying to save your marriage?
• What is the kinkiest sex you have ever had in your life?
• Come on, how much do you really drink at night? Your liquor cabinet is bigger than your entire kitchen.
• Where’s the pornography stashed?
• How much is a child really worth to you? Would you sell your soul just for my approval?

Here are the questions gay applicants fear their social worker will ask:
• We know you’ve had kinky sex. Spill the beans.
• How crazy do you get when a piece of that expensive china you have on display gets broken?
• Where are the drugs? We know they’re here!
• Are you a secret recruiter for the Gay Agenda? What is the Gay Agenda, anyway? I need to actually see what the manifesto says.
• Are you willing to adopt a Vulcan, Cardassian, or Borg baby since gays never get the human children?

Of course, no one really enjoys being probed and analyzed—except perhaps a bonafide narcissist. Everyone bristles at personal questions, and they respond to them in many way. Some confess willingly their deepest secrets and damning flaws. Others evade, emote, intellectualize, analyze, gossip, defend, and even lie (which is never a good idea).

Here are the questions you’re more likely to hear. Be prepared to answer them with boring responses. Do not under any circumstances get creative. This is not a time to sound like a deep conflicted poet on the verge of suicide. You are, however, allowed to get choked up inside, especially since this is going to be the start of the emotional rollercoaster called parenting.

• Why do you think you will make a good parent?
• What are your thoughts on corporal punishment?
• Are you and your partner both committed to this?
• How would you feel about raising a child with a special need?
• How would you feel about raising a child from a different racial background than you?
• Do you have a supportive family network?
•
They already got the goods


Remember that by the time you get to this interview, the social worker already knows your income, gender identity, marital status, infertility struggles, and more. Now all she’s trying to do is figure out if a small, defenseless child would be safe in your custody. At worst, she enjoys would-be parents’ discomfort a little too much—like many civil servants who toil in the impersonal landscape of bureaucracy—and takes pleasure in the fact that she is the gatekeeper to someone else’s future.

At best, she’s a committed child advocate who can be your advocate as well. So wind down and be kind. This person may grant you the opportunity of a lifetime. He or she is a god to you for the time being. Always respect the gods.

© 2009 by Carrie Smith and Cynthia Swain. All rights reserved.