What is the Current Wait Time?

Many have asked what is the current wait time and why is it taking so long. It is interesting to me that has of late I have had several conversations with people that have thought that China had completely stopped allowing children to be adopted internationally and that we would never be receiving our child. For the record, since we started our adoption journey, China has never stopped allowing their children to be adopted internationally. However, as we know...they have slowed things down to a snails pace. When we officially started this process back in September 2005 the wait time was 7-8 months after your dossier was logged in. Once our dossier was officially logged in March 2006 the wait time was 11-12 months. After that point things greatly changed and we watched the wait grow 1-2 months every single month. During that summer in 2006, we contemplated and prayed about whether or not to pursue an interim adoption with another country. But everyone thought that things would speed up and that China would never allow the wait to grow too much past one year. In the history of the program(to that point), the longest anyone has ever waited was 15 months and after getting to that point China brought the wait back down to 5-6 months. Needless to say, we didn't pursue another adoption that summer. The following summer in 2007, we again thought about pursuing an interim adoption. Once again, all authorities on the subject thought that things would approve and that the adoption would happen within the year. At this point, China also made a rule that they didn't want any other children (through pregnancy or other adoption) brought into the family within one year of the Chinese adoption. If we did we might need to put our dossier on hold. Once again not wanting to jeopardize the adoption, we did not pursue any other adoption. Suffice it to say this adoption has been with in a year of taking place for almost three years.

Our agency, AWAA recently posted to their blog regarding the wait time. They gave a pretty thorough list of reasons why. I think the only ones they missed were politics, saving "face" and the Olympics. Here is their post:

The current wait from LID to referral is 37-38 months at all agencies and increasing. This represents the wait time for families who just received a referral in April and who could potentially receive a referral next month. The wait time is calculated from the Log in Date when a dossier is sent to China, to the date that the referral is received. For families with LID dates after March 7, 2006, the wait time trend continues to increase half a month to a full month each month. No one can accurately predict how long the China wait time will become or when it may start to decrease due to a large number of unknown factors, such as the following:

• the number of infants that will be available for adoption and paper ready within the upcoming year

• the number of domestic adoptions that will occur within China this year

• the number of families from around the world who have login dates between the last referral LID and today

• the number of families who will withdraw from the China adoption process due to the increased wait time

• the number of families who will adopt special needs children and will no longer have their dossier waiting in the non-special needs line

• the number of families who will switch programs during their process and no longer adopt from China

Families are encouraged to calculate their wait time as a projected estimation, knowing there is no way to predict the actual wait time for each family. The wait time changes as it is based on the number of LID’s from around the world and the number of referrals that are paper-ready each month.