Adoption Benefits = Family Friendly

Are you thinking of expanding your family through adoption?

If so, check out the adoption benefits at your company or at any company you are considering as a future employer. Do this early on, even before you start tackling the mountains of adoption paperwork, so you can lobby for change if your company doesn’t smile on adoptive families.

Adoption-friendly workplaces treat adoptive mothers the same as women who give birth, by allowing paid maternity leave to bond with the new family member. Some companies at least allow partially paid leave or make it easy for employees to use accrued vacation and sick time to bond with their adopted child. An adoption-what’s-that-never-heard-of-it workplace - and unfortunately there are a lot of them out there - does not recognize mothers who bring an adopted child into the family as mothers at all, offering no paid leave or unpaid leave beyond FMLA.

Some adoption-friendly workplaces are even friendlier. They award grants to employees who adopt, because they like the idea of children finding homes and want to encourage adoption as a wonderful way to build a family. They realize adoption can be expensive - $15,000 to $25,000 on average for a private domestic adoption. International adoption may cost more, up to $40,000. The cost of adopting from the foster care system is minimal, but adoption-friendlier companies may still offer employees grants to offset the cost of adding a new child to the family.

The friendliest of adoption-friendly workplaces host adoption events, where employees can learn about adoption from various attorneys and agencies. They go out of their way to promote adoption, and encourage management to recognize adoptive parents as the real parents that they are. (For example, a manager should not ask an employee who is excited about adopting his first child if he thinks he’ll have his own kids some day. As adoptive parents, our adopted children are our own kids! And please don’t say we’re “pulling an Angelina.” All of us, including the actress, adopt for our own personal reasons.)

If your workplace is less than hospitable to adoptive families, ask for benefits. At my former company, no benefits existed until an adoptive mom wrote a letter to the head honcho. He responded that he was mortified and completely unaware of the bias against adoptive moms. He got a new policy in place, and my colleague was the first adoptive mom at our company to get six weeks of paid leave. A year later, I got six weeks of paid leave when I adopted my daughter. And, by then, our parent company had added an adoption grant of $3,000. I was the first at my company to receive it.

I appreciated the money. But I also just appreciated the recognition that adoptive families are worthy of support from our employers.

For information about adoption-friendly workplaces, as well as lists of companies with excellent track records, check out the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Adoption-Friendly Workplace Program.