From How to Prepare for a Home Study:

4. Consider your childcare arrangements.

During the home study, your social worker will ask you about childcare. I thought this would be a short conversation for us because I planned to quit my job and be a stay-at-home mom. While this did abbreviate the amount of time devoted to this topic, we still talked about babysitters and the importance of doing... more

From How to Prepare for a Home Study:

3. Research options for disciplining children.

During our home study, our social worker spent a lot of time talking with us about parenting issues. One of the most difficult to discuss was how we planned to discipline our child. Most of my friends had not given this topic much thought during their pregnancies or in the early weeks of parenting their infants,... more

From How to Prepare for a Home Study:

2. Think about adoption-related issues.

In the home study, the social worker will likely ask about your feelings on a number of adoption-related issues. If you can think about these issues ahead of time, then you can be prepared to talk intelligently about them.

When I went through my own home study, I had a lot of “hmmm…I never thought about that... more

From How to Prepare for a Home Study:

1. Learn all you can about the type of adoption you are seeking.

While a home study helps to educate you about the adoption process, it is a good idea to research the type of adoption you are seeking before you begin your home study. Each type of adoption has different issues to consider.

Older Child Adoption (Foster Care and... more

When I first shared my story about adopting my son, I said in Completing the Home Study that I could devote 3 months to blogging about home studies without running out of material. I stand by that statement. There is so much to discuss because the home study can be such a stressful part of the adoption process for hopeful adoptive parents.

Don’t worry: I am not kicking off a 3-month discussion of home studies today. Instead, I plan... more

Throughout this series, I have talked about the importance of opening yourself up to the placing mother through your profile. The words we use are only a small part of the message that we communicate.

So much of how we feel about placing mothers and our comfort level with the adoption process are woven into the profiles that we create. The more comfortable you feel about adoption and the placing mother’s role, the... more

Your profile should include a letter written to the placing mother. Different agencies call these letters different things. When we adopted my son, we were told to address the letter to “Dear Birthmother.” This terminology is not accurate because a pregnant woman is not a birthmother – she has not placed her baby into an adoptive home and terminated her legal rights.

See the following posts for more on this important distinction:

In Adoptive Parent Profiles: Sharing Your Life, I talked about how sharing details about your life can be an important step toward establishing trust with a placing mother. What kinds of details should you share? Of course, there are the obvious things, such as your name, profession, and general information about your extended family, but that information does not really tell the placing mother who you are. For a placing... more

When I put together my first adoptive parent profile, the subjects I focused on were our jobs, our house, and basic security-driven issues. When my friends redesigned my profile for me, they went a completely different direction. Here are the types of information they included:

Our Childhoods

It never would have occurred to me to include childhood pictures of my husband and me, but starting off with pictures of our childhood really set a wonderful tone for our profile.... more

As I mentioned when I introduced this series in Adoptive Parent Profile Series, my first attempt at an adoptive parent profile scrapbook was not good. I was very guarded, which communicated that I was not willing to open up my life to a placing mother. Placing mothers reacted to this by matching with other hopeful adoptive couples who were presumably more emotionally open.

I do not know if most placing mothers would... more