You may have noticed that we don’t have too many toddler or pre-school aged children from Taiwan featured on the blog. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t younger children available for adoption from Taiwan – in fact, there are!  Children under the age of 5 are typically referred directly to families waiting in the program. There are both children with medical needs, as well as medically healthy children under the age of 5 who are referred to waiting families. We recently had a 10 month old little girl with minor needs referred to a family in our program

Families become eligible for a direct referral once their home study report is completed and submitted as part of a preliminary package to our partner agencies in Taiwan. Our partner agencies review the family’s preliminary package and then issue Pre-Approval to work with the family. The family is then added to their wait list of Pre-Approved families. When a child becomes eligible for international adoption, our partner agencies select a family from the wait list who they feel would be the best match for the child. We are then given the child’s full profile for the family to review and decide if they agree to the match. We always get to meet with children referred to our families during our Superkids trips – so these families still get the extra Superkids information and photos of their child!

If you know that you’d like to adopt from Taiwan, and you are hoping to match to a child under the age of 5 it’s extremely beneficial to start the adoption process! For more information on the process of adopting from Taiwan and on direct referrals, please feel free to reach out to Taiwan Program Caseworker Mary Chapman at  mary.chapman@gladney.org.