The Wait

The Wait is what China AP's refer to as the length of time from when your dossier is registered by the CCAA to when you are referred your child.  The wait is one of the most important factors for many families when choosing a country to adopt from for obvious reasons.  No one wants to wait several years to start or add to their family and the wait times from country-to-country vary quite a bit.  The most frustrating thing has been that agencies can really only tell you how long their adoptive parents are currently waiting, as things can change quickly and often in any country with IA programs.

The families now receiving the referrals of their children were logged in late March of 2006 and have been waiting 40 months.  That is nearly 3 1/2 years, which may not seem too terribly long but when these families were logged in the wait was 8-12 months so for them it has been an eternity.  The program has slowed down considerably and the wait steadily grown longer and longer.  For example, the wait was 31 months when we first met with our agency and grew to 40 months just in the 11 months since then.  We were told about the current wait, but also that they hoped for the process to speed up soon.

We know other families currently waiting to adopt girls from China, so we knew about the "slowdown" and the increasing wait.  We had already decided China was the program for us and were confident adopting a child with minor medical needs was the right path for us, so weren't too worried about it.  What we didn't know was the huge backlog of families waiting to adopt a healthy child from China. 

Back in 2005 the program was moving very quickly and was reliable so China was flooded with applications.  Then, in late 2006, China announced new parent requirements to be implemented as of May 1, 2007, in attempt to allow only the "best families" to adopt their children.  Some of the changes were income and asset requirement, minimum and maximum ages, length of marriage, BMI maximum and number of children currently in the home.  They also decided to exclude single women from adopting.  This led to another flood of applicants getting their dossier in before the new rules took effect.  Many of these families who have been waiting in the Non-special Needs program are switching to the Special Needs program in the hopes of finding their child sooner.

There are many theories as to why the wait to be matched with a "healthy" child has steadily increased over the past three years.  The CCAA has said in no uncertain terms that due to the thriving economy and the slowly evolving view of the value of daughters, the number of abandonments are down and there are not as many children available for adoption.  China also became a party of the Hague Convention on International Adoption, which requires countries to make every effort to find adoptive families domestically before children can become available for international adoption.  According to the Chinese authorities, the domestic adoption program is thriving which mean less children available for those of us in other countries around the world.  Fewer children available than familes waiting = longer wait.  Plain and simple.