How to self-match your adoption

Self-Matching Your Adoption

So you want to self-match your adoption? 

I’m an adoption coach who has helped over 1,000 families bring home their babies in the United States through private adoption. Like my clients, Mark and Sarah, who adopted their son in just five months. Or Kinsey and Matt, who adopted their daughter in just a month. On average, when my clients follow my step-by-step process to self-match their adoption, they adopt for anywhere between $10,000 -$31,000, which is a huge savings over adopting with an agency whose typical cost is around $70,000. 

Before we talk about how you can adopt more affordably, let’s focus on what the definition of self-matching really is. 

Self-matching adoption is when a hopeful adoptive family and an expectant family meet and match on their own and then leverage an adoption attorney to finalize their adoption or to make it legal. 

Now that may seem really overwhelming. How in the world would I actually come across someone who is pregnant and actually self-match my adoption that way? But there is a specific process that you can follow. I break it down into three phases for my clients. 

Phase 1: Prepared Family Phase

In the prepared family phase, the first step is doing the legal research and understanding the adoption laws in your state to make sure it’s legal for you to self-match in your state.

The second step in the prepared family phase is becoming financially ready to adopt. This sounds pretty daunting, right? I don’t know if I have this money in my savings account and how am I going to get there? But there is a process that you can go through to really understand the exact cost, the journey, the pay, and each step in the adoption process. Then you can determine if you need to fundraise, apply for grants, or have garage sales, in order to help you pay for your adoption. 

The last step in this phase is really focused on making sure that you pass your home study. Passing your home study is one of those critical steps in the adoption process. It is the do not pass go of the adoption process when you are matching your adoption in any way. But especially if you are self-matching, you want to make sure that you are ready, legally, to adopt a child. 

Phase 2: Family Connection Phase

Once you’ve matched with someone, the next phase is the family connection phase. In this phase, you are focused on creating and sharing your adoption profile so, ultimately, you can match your adoption. 

Now this may sound really simple on the surface, but this has a huge impact on your ability to achieve your goals of adopting through self-matching. When it comes to creating your adoption profile, it is really important that you make an emotional connection with the stories and the content that you’re sharing in your profile. It is also important that you are sharing that profile in a way that is easy for someone to engage with and get to know you. 

I’ve spent a lot of time really focusing on how to get this right for myself and for my clients. I have adopted two children through private adoption here in the United States. What I learned going through that process was that our profile made all the difference. What made the difference in our profile was really sharing the story of our life in a specific way that helped the birth mother understand us more easily. 

Since that time, I’ve spent over 3,000 hours talking with expectant and birth families to understand what they are looking for inside the profile from the words to the pictures, what to say and not to say, and how they are going to come across potential profiles. Are they finding the profiles on Facebook or Instagram? Google ads? Are they hearing about it from a friend? When they find out about someone who’s looking to adopt a baby, then what do they do next? Where do they go? What are they reading? What are they watching? What makes them ultimately decide to click on that profile and give someone a phone call, email, or DM?

What I’ve learned through this process is that it is really, really important that you’re intentional with the information you share about your family and intentional with the way you share it so that it makes it easier for someone else to read it. 

Now there are other companies out there that will give you a content calendar that says this is what you should post this month in order to self-match your adoption, and what I can tell you is that that is dead wrong, my friend. That is not going to help you make an emotional connection with expectant families. In fact, I’ve had a few clients recently come to me and say they’ve been following “so and so’s” system and doing exactly what they say, but it’s really not hitting the mark and they’ve not gotten anyone to reach out. When I look at their profile, it’s because they’re not making an emotional connection or sharing the content in a way that makes it easier for someone to really want to engage and get to know them on a deeper level.

So it really does matter what you’re sharing and how you’re sharing it in order to really meet your ultimate goal when you’re self-matching your adoption, which is to adopt more affordably.

I know all of this may seem really overwhelming, but there is an exact formula that you should be following in order to self-match your adoption. If you want to learn more about this, you can head over to myadoptioncoach.com/formula and I’ll walk you through the entire process there.

Phase 3: Forever Family Phase

In the forever family phase, you’re doing just that. Becoming a forever family. You’re navigating the hospital time and waiting for the baby to be born. Then you’re working through all of the legal steps to get to the finalization goal of your adoption!

If you found this helpful, I know that you’ll love watching Sarah and Mark's adoption story! They self-matched their adoption in just five months!