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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 mother to get a feel for who you are as a person, you need to share interesting tidbits about your life that make you the person you are.
These are the kinds of details that we included in our profile as captions under various photographs:
My Husband’s Childhood Pictures
- Brad and his older brother Chuck loved to play on the swing in their backyard.
- By the age of two, Brad’s favorite toy was his little red wagon.
- Brad started school and discovered that he loved drawing and math.
My Childhood Pictures
- Faith was named after her great-grandmother.
- Faith was all smiles because her parents were taking her for ice cream after having this picture taken.
- As she got older, Faith liked to wear clothes with lots of flowers—the style at the time!
Our Life
- We just love the beach.
- Brad just had to check out the water in the tank at Sea World. (He is sticking his hand in the tank hoping to touch a dolphin.)
- We love our fenced-in backyard, complete with swings, a slide, and a sandbox.
These are the kinds of details that tell a placing mother a little bit about who you are. If I was putting another profile together today, I would also include that I love to read, watch romantic-comedies, and go for walks in a nearby park. I would talk about my husband’s love of basketball and that his favorite movie is “The Shining.” These are details about our lives that help a placing mother get to know who we are as people.
I would imagine that, as a placing mother looks through several profiles, they can all run together. All of them probably show a smiling couple in a nice house with nice jobs. It is the details that separate one couple from another.
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