Profiles: How to Establish Trust

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 the placing mother can trust the adoptive parents.

As a hopeful adoptive couple, how can you put together a profile that helps a placing mother trust you? Since you are a complete stranger, how can you communicate through a scrapbook, letter, or website that you are trustworthy?

Patricia Dischler offers these words of advice for hopeful adoptive parents:

The way [placing mothers establish trust] is to look for personal connections. It’s difficult to trust a stranger. Finding common ground and beginning to build connections is the best way to move past this and begin to build trust in each other. This means that simple things like the fact that you both love dogs, skiing, reading or sports, may become the things that birthmothers take the most notice in. [Reprinted with permission.]

I have numerous friends who are adoptive mothers, and many of us were told that it was a simple tidbit about our lives that caught the attention of a placing mother. For example, when I reworked our profile, I included a couple of pictures of my husband and me walking our dogs (a beagle and a Dalmatian). When we met my son’s then-placing mother, she told us that she had a basset hound, so she was really excited to see that we had a beagle. A friend told me that her son’s birthmother chose her because of the pictures of the couple with the family dog. In the pictures, it was evident how much they loved their dog, and this helped the placing mother to believe that people who could love a dog that much could also love her birthchild wholeheartedly.

I see matching with a placing mother kind of like going on a blind date. You just never know what is going to make a relationship click. If you try to be whatever you think the other person wants you to be, the relationship is not going to work. You need to be yourself. You need to show the placing mother who you are, and who you are shines through the details. Details were sorely lacking in my first profile, and that profile was never selected. It was when we revealed who we were in our second profile that we were matched.

*For more information on Patricia Dischler or her books, check out her website.

Related Topics:

• Being Empowered
• Choosing Adoptive Parents
• Adoptive Parent Profile Series

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