Does this scenario sound familiar? The description on the website says that Josiah has been in foster care for five years. Now he is 11 years old. He's overcome hardships in his past, and he's ready to be adopted. You've filled in the form on the website and done everything else you can think of to let his social workers know that you want to adopt Josiah. But nobody calls you back.

There are a number of reasons why a family might not hear back from a worker.

• The family does not have a current homestudy or family profile (approval to adopt) completed in the state where they live. In most cases, a child's worker cannot work with a family until the family is approved. If you make an inquiry before you have a homestudy, even if you mention a specific child, you will be sent the general adoption information that you requested, but you probably will not hear directly from a child's worker. The solution to this problem is to get your homestudy completed, preferably by an agency that will work actively to help you locate a child, and will be willing to submit your study for children in other counties or states.
  
  
• The family does have a current homestudy, but the child's worker never receives it. The usual procedure, when a child's worker hears about an interested family, is for that worker to contact the family's worker and ask for a copy of the study. The process can break down quickly if the family's worker doesn't send the study. If you suspect this may have happened, get in touch with your social worker and/or the social worker's supervisor and ask if your study has been sent. It is also possible that the child's worker can tell, from the information you provided with your inquiry, that this child and your family would not be a good match. He or she may not continue any further with your request, so once again it's a good idea to contact your social worker. Ask your worker to follow-up on your inquiry.
  
  
• The child is not ready for adoption or a family has been found. Children can have set-backs such as a hospitalization or changes in their cases such as the decision to add an additional sibling to a group. In an ideal world, these children would immediately be removed from the Internet, and the National Adoption Center makes every effort to keep its websites up to date. But children's workers have many cases, and decisions sometimes take a long time to become final. Often, social workers (and judges) do not want a child removed from a website until they are absolutely certain an adoption will take place. They may be reluctant to contact and discourage potential families, in case those families are later needed.
  
  
• The worker may prefer (or have time for) contact only with other social workers, trusting them to communicate with the families they represent. This is a good reason to stay in contact with your social worker, checking in every couple of weeks, and asking if there are ways you can help to keep the process moving.
  
  
• Several different organizations may be working to find a family for a child. Your initial contact may be sent to an adoption exchange, which might forward it to a provider agency that must send it on to the county or state agency responsible for the child's case. The responsible agency might be a large bureaucracy. Adoption units may be understaffed, caseloads can be huge, and your inquiry must make its way through email, voice mail, committee meetings, and several layers of supervisory hierarchy to reach the top of the pile on the right person's desk. In these cases, there may not be much a family can do except to make sure that everyone knows that you are still interested. In this age of technology, you are as likely to be contacted by email as by phone or U.S. mail, so make sure you can be reached in all three ways. And, no matter how perfect a match Josiah may seem to be for your family, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Keep inquiring about other children too. Being able to consider many different types of children will increase your chance of moving to the top of the list.

This article originally appeared in NACzine: The National Adoption Center Internet Magazine, Issue 28, August-September 2004.