Spankers Need Not Apply

I wrote earlier about the difficulty in finding a trustworthy agency to do our homestudy. Since then we've received the list of adoption agencies that the local Crisis Pregnancy Center uses for referring birthmothers.

Today I contacted two of those agencies. Both look down on any form of "physical discipline". Both think that spanking could be okay if it's a last resort, done with only an open hand (no wooden sticks, etc), and rare (one said 8 times in a childhood).

I understand that these policies are intended to protect the children, who in the case of young children have often been abused by their birth parents. But the policies leave no room for biblical discipline in the adoptive family. And of more concern to me right now, paying a social worker to come to my house for a homestudy and find that we "abuse" our children, is a tremendously risky proposal.

We deeply want to care for and raise another child, especially one who would otherwise be without a loving, Christian family. But we seem blocked by the very folks whose job is to find loving Christian families for needy children.