Recently, somebody I know asked me if I would talk to somebody they knew about adopting an older child from Russia, a child this person had found on an adoption photolisting site.

I hesitated.

Not because I don't like talking about adoption. I love talking about adoption from Russia and I will talk with anyone about it anytime. Heck, I write the equivalent of a book about it every month on this Web site.

Not because the person was considering an older child. The younger of my two sons was nearly five when he came home from Sakhalin Island, and I'll tell anyone who asks that adopting an older child is every bit as wonderful as adopting a toddler.

It was the photolisting part that bothered me. I don't like them.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but it can open you up to trouble in adoption. Simply put, you can fall for a cute face that is the wrong match for your family. A child whose medical or family history may present challenges that you are not prepared to handle. A good agency, as I have written before, should ask you to provide lots of information about the child you are looking to adopt and lots of information about you, and then work to make the best possible match of the two. A good agency also gets to know the children in the region it serves. I cannot tell you how many kids ran up to my agency's coordinator in Sakhalin, addressed her by name and talked to her about their lives. And she knew them.

I also, frankly, don't see how foreign photolisting sites square with Russia's increased desire to protect the privacy of the children in its care. If I use the Ministry of Education's own databank, I can look for children by age, gender, eye and hair color, or region. But the information I get isn't much more than a one-word answer to those points. There's no medical history, except the quixotic listing for "Nature". Bless This Child, one of the American agencies that has been approved as a non-governmental organization in Russia and is now waiting for new accreditation, has this note on its Web site:

We do not recommend reviewing the Central Data Bank in search of potential children to adopt. The website is in Russian because it is only available to Russian citizens. Please also note that we cannot choose children from the Data Bank and we have no way of confirming any information of children on this list.

Which brings me to my next point. Too many of agencies listed as the contact points for the children on the foreign photolistings do not appear on the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as having either NGO status or accreditation. In case you've missed my earlier rants, you don’t want to be heading into Russia now with an adoption facilitator that lacks these credentials.

And finally, there's this: I don’t think I would have picked either of my kids based on the first photos I saw of them. One was, as I affectionately tell him, "a scrawny little chicken" dressed in girl's pajamas. The other had most of his front teeth missing. But my agency had gotten to know both these kids, and knew they were the perfect kids for me.

And they are.