Are you a Single Person Looking to Adopt a Child?

The traditional view of adoption is that of a male and female couple who take a baby or child in their home. However, times are changing. Considering how many marriages end in divorce, and that a child may end up in a single parent home anyway, why shouldn't single people be able to skip the wedding vows and go straight to having a child through adoption?

In fact, approximately 25 percent of children in the United States are growing up in single-parent homes. Furthermore, approximately one-third of adoptions involve children adopted by single men and women in the United States. Most of the children living in single-parent homes were born to a man and woman couple -- or adopted by or born to a same-sex couple -- but some of them were adopted by 13,000 single women and 1,400 single men.

All that said, single people experience difficulties when they try to adopt. Most of these difficulties relate to continued biases regarding healthy and successful parenting. There's a persistent idea that being a parent is too much responsibility for one person to handle, and children are best cared for by a couple. However, many single parents point out how children can benefit from a receiving emotional consistency from having only one parent to deal with. There's also the very real fact that numerous marriages end in divorce, which can be a traumatic experience for kids, and result in them living in a single-parent household anyway.

If you're a single person, and you want to adopt a child into your home, there's no reason you shouldn't try to make it happen. There could be legal challenges to adoption for a single parent. However, it's important to remember that every child deserves a loving parent, and every person who's ready and willing to be a good parent deserves a loving child.

Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway, "Adopting as a Single Parent," accessed June 06, 2018