On my post, Adoption Profiles: Can Your Pet Help You Adopt Faster?, Jenna, our birth-first mother blogger, left the following comment:

I think waiting adoptive families should show their pets. It would help an expectant mother who has allergies or a family history of allergies make an appropriate decision!

I never thought about this issue, but Jenna is absolutely correct. The risk... more

When my husband and I were going through the home study process, we received mixed advice about whether or not to include information about our dogs in our profile. On the one hand, we did not want an expecting mother to reject us as adoptive parents solely because we had dogs, but on the other hand, our dogs were a part of our family.

When we put our first profile together, we chose to leave the dogs out. We never lied about having pets: We simply did not... 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

When I put together my first adoptive parent profile, I made the mistake of seeing our connection with the placing mother as more of a “business arrangement.” She had a baby who needed a home, and I had a home that needed a baby. I would show the placing mother that our home was ready for a baby, and that would be all that was needed for her to match with us. I was baffled when a year passed with no interest shown by any placing mother.

What I failed to see was that this relationship was not... more

In my post, Adoptive Parent Profiles: What to Communicate, I quoted Patricia Dischler*, author of Because I Loved You: A Birthmother’s View Of Open Adoption, as saying that placing mothers know that hopeful adoptive parents are emotionally and financially ready to raise a child.... more

In my last post, Adoptive Parent Profiles: What to Communicate, I quoted Patricia Dischler*, author of Because I Loved You: A Birthmother’s View Of Open Adoption, as saying that placing mothers know that hopeful adoptive parents are emotionally and financially ready to raise a child. The big question is whether or not... more