How An Adoption Coach Helps You Adopt A Baby Faster

Are you trying to adopt a baby but feeling confused by everything you've read or heard? I get it. 

I'm an adoption coach who has helped over 1,000 families bring home their children through adoption. I know the process can be very confusing and overwhelming. 

From firsthand experience, there are so many choices in the adoption process. Choosing the wrong one can literally cost you tens of thousands of dollars and years of heartache and turmoil on your adoption journey. So today, I'm going to talk you through a couple of areas of adoption that can be extra difficult and give you a few resources to help make it easier. 

The most common reason why adoption can feel overwhelming is because the language is all its own. It is so new and different and some things have the same meaning depending on who you're talking to. You can waste hours upon hours of your life in these Google marathons trying to figure out what things mean. 

When I first started, I was trying to understand what the different types of adoption are. Some of my clients share with me that they are very confused about the differences between private adoption, independent adoption, and self-matching adoption. What do they all mean? Because sometimes they all mean the same thing. And sometimes they don't. 

So let me take just a second to break those down for you. 

Private Adoption

Private adoption can sometimes also be called domestic adoption. This basically means a hopeful adoptive family and an expectant family are making an agreement together to adopt a baby. Typically, when people are saying private adoption or domestic adoption, they're talking about working with a third-party agency or an attorney to help facilitate that match. 

Self-Matching

When you are self-matching your adoption, or adopting independently, this means that a hopeful adoptive family and expectant family are matching together without the use of a third party, like an adoption agency or an adoption consultant. You will still need an adoption attorney in order to make your adoption final. 

Now, if the types of adoption are this confusing, and this hard to understand, how in the world are you meant to actually achieve adopting a baby? I know my friend, I get it. I was so very confused when I started my own journey. In fact, I would spend hours upon hours on Google just trying to find the answers, only to ultimately end up in confusion even more than when I started. It was so frustrating. 

Find a Supportive Community

So the first resource that I suggest that you find for yourself is a community. Having some place where you can go and ask questions and you can trust the answers you are getting is really important. Now there are great Facebook groups for this, like the My Adoption Coach Facebook group. But there are also some other Facebook groups that you might want to stay away from as well. Use your judgment and you will be able to easily discern for yourself which are the ones that are full of drama, which really aren't worth it, and those that are helpful to find along your adoption journey. Surrounding yourself with people throughout this journey to ask questions or to be your support system is going to be invaluable for you. 

An Adoption Coach Can Help

The next resource I suggest is an adoption coach. You may be wondering what an adoption coach does and how that can help you on your adoption journey. An adoption coach’s job is to teach you how to adopt and help you create an adoption profile that creates an emotional connection with expectant families. Then ultimately, for a select group of folks, answer all the questions you have as you go throughout the adoption journey. This can include helping you find an agency, an attorney, or a consultant, or helping you ask questions whenever you're matched with an expectant family so that you can determine whether or not that is the right match for your family. 

It is critical that you have an objective third party that isn't emotionally involved in the outcome of that specific opportunity to help you think through all the possible questions that you should be asking. I have walked alongside my clients in times of joy and wonder at the miracle of adoption, and through times of critical hard decisions that they need to think through. I find that my clients are often caught up in the emotions of the moment and need help thinking through the details and the nuances of the adoption opportunities in front of them in order to protect themselves emotionally and financially throughout the adoption process. 

If you have found this conversation valuable and want a peek into what it's like working with me one-on-one, then check out this conversation with Sarah and Mark. Sarah and Mark had pursued several different types of adoption and then ultimately decided that self-matching their adoption was going to be right for them. I walked with them through creating their profile and helping them share it and they ultimately brought home their baby boy in just five months.