Why would a family use a facilitator or a referral agency? Not every family is “the perfect family,” that a birthmother is going to choose to adopt her child from a pile of profiles. Typically, a birthmother is looking for a family with parents less than 40, who have 0 to 1 child. When your family doesn’t fit into that mold, it becomes more difficult to match. When you are already an older parent, you really cannot wait a year or more to adopt.

Not all facilitators are out to make a lot of money. There are many that charge $2000 for a match or less. When you consider the hundreds of phone calls, emails, applications, and homestudies these agencies field every month, I don’t think they are making very much money. Most of the reputable facilitators and referral agencies require prospective families to forward several copies of their homestudy to their agency. When a potential match arises, the agency sends one of the family’s homestudies to be considered.

When the birthmother chooses the family to adopt her child, the match fee is due to the referral agency. Most facilitators and referral agencies don’t care how many other agencies you are registered with. They might send out your homestudy 10 or 20 times, pay the postage, and never make a dime from you if you match through someone else.

One of my daughters was more than happy to pay a facilitator a fee. She also registered with numerous referral agencies. They all sent her study out several times and called her each time to make sure it was ok to send it. She knew that if she tried advertising she would deal with spam and scams. Several high profile adoption agencies wouldn’t allow her family to register because they didn’t think they could find a match within a year. She and her husband were already in their early forties, and already had nine children.

Most birthmothers didn’t look past the nine children to see that most had been adopted as older children from foster care. In addition, they were gender specific. They had never gotten to keep a baby girl through foster care. Yes, they had several daughters. The youngest was six at her adoption and the oldest was 15 when adopted. However, the fact that they had daughters prevented them from being gender specific in most international adoptions as well.

Therefore, they only registered with referral agencies and facilitators who charged $2000 or less for their services. They also only registered with agencies that allowed multiple registrations. They matched with their birthmother three months later in May, and their daughter was born in July. She was an agency choice adoption; the birthmother did not want to choose. The squeaky wheel gets greased, and my daughter was squeaky. She finally was able to adopt her baby girl and she is everything she every hoped for in a daughter and more.

• Definition of Adoption Terms
• American Adoption Statistics Summary
• Older Parent Adoption
• How to Tell if Your Child Has Impulse Control Problems
• How to Help an Older Child Stop Bedwetting?
• How to Prescribe Behavior to Prevent Child Meltdown.
• Room in Your Home and Heart for Foster Children

Photo Credit: FM