Is it better to go through a local or national adoption agency?

Contact your local department of childrens services. There are children, even babies that are available for adoption through foster care.

Definitely foster care is the only way to go…

Wow you’re the first person I’ve heard of lately whose doing domestic adoption. The international adoption thing is becoming way too popular.

Local child protective services, since that’s where the kids who truly need caring for are languishing.

My aparents have had to watch as their kid goes through all of the agony and trauma that comes with being adopted. They have had absolutely no help in dealing with any of this – as all good parents do, they winged it. It’s testament to their brilliance that I’m even remotely sane (hush you lot at the back! :p) and a functioning member of society.

Adoption screws kids up. It’s not a fact that the adoption mongers like seeing said in public, but it’s true. Not every kid, obviously – some on here are happy to’ve been adopted, but a surprisingly high percentage of us grow up deeply screwed up.

I was abandoned to adoption at seven months old. I honestly and truly wish that I’d been aborted instead of abandoned to adoption, so please be prepared for the fact that any kid you adopt could grow up (I’m 37, so definitely and legally a “grown up” in pretty much everywhere) to be as screwed up as me.

I didn’t have a bad adoption – my afamily are the best I could ever have chosen… but if I’d been able to choose, and I’d known then what I know now, I’d've chosen to be aborted before birth instead, ’cause at least that way the lifetime of agony I’ve gone through would’ve been over in minutes, instead of the decades that I’ve been suffering for now.

I’ve been in reunion with my bfam for a while now, and even that’s proving to be completely agonising.

Taken from Nancy Verrier’s book, Coming Home to Self: http://www.nancyverrier.com/self_book.php

For the adoptee every day is a challenge of trying to figure out how to be, although he probably doesn’t understand the difficulty this presents for him. It has been true his whole life and, therefore, feels normal. However, it takes a great deal of energy and concentration. And it never feels quite right. He never quite fits. Therefore he feels as if /he/ is never quite right.
(pg 50)

Abandonment and neglect are reported to be the two most devastating experiences that children endure – even more devastating then sexual or physical abuse. That’s why some neglected children do naughty things to get attention. Even though the attention is hurtful – being yelled at, hit, or otherwise harmed – it is better than neglect. /Anything/ is better than abandonment. Abandonment is a child’s greatest fear. For adoptees, it is also reality, embedded in their implicit and unintegrated memory.
(pg 102)

It is sometimes difficult to spot grief in children. After all, it isn’t as if the child sits in a puddle of tears his entire childhood. As one adoptee said, “Of course I played, laughed, sang. Do people think that if you’re not sitting in a corner with your head on your knees, you are not sad? I had happy times, but the sadness was always there, even when I was having fun.”
(pg 117)

Please read back through a few months worth of resolved questions in here http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=2115500138 and then go read through all of the books and links listed at http://7rin-on-adoption.dreamwidth.org/tag/recommended+reading

Comprehend that lot, and you’ll be about ready to adopt.