How To Pick The Type of Infant Adoption That Is Right For You
How To Pick The Type of Infant Adoption That is Right For You
When I started my adoption journey, I was confused about what to do and where to go. I felt like I was spending hours upon hours on Google trying to find the answer to my questions. Way back in those days back in 2013/2014, when I began my adoption journey, there weren't many options. So I ended up paying an attorney to sit down with them and talk through the process. And at $500 an hour, let me tell you, that was not a cheap endeavor. But they were patient and answered every little question that I had. When I was going through the process, I was convinced there had to be a better way. Thus, I created this blog and all of the other resources to help you walk through the process of choosing the type of infant adoption that is right for you.
When you're just starting, it can feel really confusing. People use words that aren't straightforward and don't really mean anything outside the adoption sphere. So, quite honestly, even if I use a particular word to describe something in the adoption space, that doesn’t mean that another adoption professional is using the same word, which can ultimately create confusion.
Step One: Choosing Your Adoption Route
That's why we're going to walk through the process from start to finish of picking your adoption route. Other people might call it your method of matching. First off, are you using an agency, an attorney, or a consultant? Or are you self-matching? Those are the primary ways people match their adoption when it comes to private domestic adoption. I know it can be confusing to figure out which path is right for your family, which is why I'm going to walk you through it today.
There are four steps to the process of choosing which adoption path or method of matching is right for you. For the first step, I feel strongly that you need to get a baseline understanding of each of the different types of matching that do exist. I have videos and podcasts as resources for you to walk you through each one in more depth, but I will give you a high-level overview of what they are and a bit of how they work. I do suggest that you spend some time and go back and watch those other videos so that I can help you through the process.
Adoption Agency
The first option that is probably the most common and is definitely more expensive would be using an adoption agency. This is something that most people assume is the only way to adopt. There is a huge variety of different types of adoption agencies out there. There are adoption agencies that will match with you and walk you through the entire process from start to finish. There are adoption agencies that specialize specifically in finding birth parents. There are also adoption agencies that are very selective about the parents or the hopeful adoptive parents that they're matching with, which can help them match people a little bit faster. Finally, some adoption agencies will only process the paperwork for you and put the burden of all of the other steps of the adoption process on you to determine.
That is an adoption agency's options in a nutshell, but primarily when people say adoption agencies and when hopeful adoptive parents think of adoption agencies, they're thinking of full-service agencies. Full-service agencies help you with everything from home study to making your profile and matching with an expectant family, supporting the expectant family throughout the journey, and finalizing your adoption. That is what most people assume as a traditional adoption agency.
Attorneys
The next adoption route option is using attorneys. Attorneys can have a dual role in the adoption process. They can play the role of making your adoption legal, and in some states, some attorneys will act as facilitators. They also look for expectant parents to match with hopeful adoptive parents and then match the two together. As you know, each different type has its pros and cons. This adoption route tends to be less expensive than an adoption agency. However, it takes a little longer to match this route simply because adoption attorneys don't have the advertising or the marketing arm behind it as an adoption agency does.
So if I were thinking about a continuum of expenses here, I would put the adoption agency as the third most expensive of what we're going to review today. Then right behind that would be using an adoption attorney.
Adoption Consultant
Now let's go to the far end of the spectrum and talk about the most expensive option, using an adoption consultant. An adoption consultant’s job is to represent your family to multiple adoption agencies, meaning they will have a network of at least ten if not upwards of thirty smaller adoption agencies scattered around the US that they partner with. The adoption consultant will take your information and share it with the adoption agencies and say, we have this expectant family or this hopeful adoptive family, and we are looking for an expectant family that matches these criteria or that is looking for a hopeful adoptive family that matches these criteria. In this situation, they're looking for either casting a wider net for you by looking across the US.
Obviously, you have to pay the adoption consultant for their time, ranging from $1,500 to $10,000, and pay the adoption agency fees. Theoretically, an adoption consultant should match you faster because your profile is being shared with more adoption agencies, but that doesn't always necessarily happen. When I first started my adoption process, that was the case. An adoption consultant would match you faster. These days, that's not necessarily the case.
The marketing that each of these potential partners has behind them has a large role to play in that. I can make another blog post about specifically how you want to make sure that you're getting your profile shared and being seen by the right audience enough times because that does have an impact. But from an adoption consultant's perspective, theoretically, they should be matching you faster.
Self-Matching
Self-matching your adoption has become the more popular option because of social media. It is also the least expensive option. This is because there are ways where people on a more mass scale can communicate person to person. We can connect through social media and other forms of in-person connection as well in order to self-match for your adoption. You need to hear me say that you still have laws and processes that you must follow through the self-matching journey. You will require an adoption attorney to make your adoption legal. Using a home study professional and an adoption attorney would be the cheapest way to do a self-match adoption if you wanted to.
There are pros and cons to self-matching adoption. The con is that you have a lot of vetting that you need to do that traditionally an agency would be doing an agency would be making sure that this person does intend to match that they do have a viable pregnancy, that they have support along their journey, and that they are ultimately set up for the most successful outcome, whatever that might be. When going through a self-matching journey, you're doing all of the vetting yourself. There are resources and adoption partners or professionals that you can surround yourself with on an ala carte basis, which means that you pick and choose which services you need and when. This allows you to be in more control of the costs.
When you're working in a traditional agency model, they're going to say there's one lump sum fee for creating your profile, one lump sum fee for sharing your profile, and one lump sum fee for an attorney. But if you are self matching your adoption, you can go and find the appropriate professionals to help you and put together the budget that quite honestly works best for you, rather than paying a standard $10,000 flat fee to do X, Y, or Z. Again, there are several different options for self-matching adoptions that are on the lower end from a cost perspective.
Self-matching does still require a lot of effort from you. I would not be discouraged thinking that self-matching will take a lot more time because I do not see that to be the case. I have clients that I work with one to one, coaching them through the self-matching process, matching a whole lot faster than my clients working with agencies. At the time that I'm writing this blog, my self-matching clients are matching anywhere from six to nine months when we're working together on creating their profile, sharing their profile through paid advertising, and making sure that they have support for their expected family throughout the process. That process seems to be working well for them. I have clients working with adoption consultants that have been live for over a year in agencies that have been live well over the year marking closer to the two-year mark. I will say that it is going to vary dramatically. People are always going to be very curious about the time frame, and it depends on who sees your profile and when they see it.
Step Two: Vision Casting
Next, let's talk about step number two, vision casting. I know this may seem a little strange, but I'm a firm believer that if you don't have a plan of where you're headed and see what you want it to look like, you're not going to end up where you want to be. So I will challenge you to set a timer on your phone, start with 15 minutes and answer a list of questions. Think through what life is like for your family at the end of this adoption journey, and be specific when answering the following questions.
Are you in a dual couple household?
Are both parents working after the adoption is their maternity leave.
Does the child go to childcare?
How are you paying for your adoption?
Are you paying post your adoption, some sort of adoption loan you have to pay back, or another way?
I want you to walk through all of this in great detail. I did this myself by literally sitting down and writing out my answers on a piece of paper, and I even did this several times. I wrote out what a typical day was like, and then I took that and thought about how I could peel the layer of the onion backward and think about the next level. For example, on the first day, I went from the moment my feet hit the ground to when I got back in bed in the evening. All while thinking about what my day was like. Then the next thing I went through was what are the pressures and the things that are on me? What are our finances like, and what does our vacation time look like? I went through every single step and thought about it in great detail.
I have a free resource that will walk you through this, so don't feel like you're frantically having to write down all the things that I'm talking about in this blog. What I'm challenging you to do is to think through your life in great detail. Then, after you feel like you've written everything you can, whether that be the specific questions that I asked you in the guide or by brainstorming what's important to you, I'm going to challenge you to go through with a highlighter. I know it's strange, I'm old school like this, but go through the highlighter, highlight the most important things, and highlight the absolute non-negotiables.
For example, I wanted to have a 16-week maternity leave. I wanted to have so many weeks of vacation every year, where we did intentional time together. I also wanted to have small and big adventures. I highlighted all of these essential things to me, then thought about what I needed to do or change to enable this type of life. Then I would make a list of the most important things to me. Because I am married, I have a partner that I needed to bounce all of these things off of. It is totally normal for one person in this relationship to be driving this bus forward into adoption land and the other person to be more of a co-pilot, if you will. It's important that you check in together. So take a minute to check-in that these non-negotiables are the right and what your partner has in their mind as well.
In my free resource, I will walk you through the whole Getting Started process from start to finish. Each day you're going to get a new email that gives you links to videos to watch here on YouTube that are specifically curated in an order that will be helpful for you. Inside that guide, you have free worksheets and things and activities to do that will help you walk through this process from start to finish. So do take the time to sign up for the guide and take the time to do the vision casting because I want you to be able to bust through this wall and pick the right decision for your family.
Step Three: Align on What the Most Important Steps Are.
Next, we will go further into step number three to align on what the most important steps are. We're going to pull out our trusty highlighter, and we're going to highlight what the most important aspects are, and then we're going to align with our partner. We will ask our partner the questions about what is most important to you. For me, the most important thing after we finalized our adoption immediately was that I wanted to be able to come home and spend 16 weeks with our child. That meant that I needed to save money to be able to take off of work for maternity leave because my company wouldn't pay me because of it being an adoption. The other thing that was important to me was to have a connection and contact with our expected families or birth families. I wanted to pick a route that both my husband and I were comfortable with from a contact perspective back with our birth families to have a connection point for our children.
Step Four: Pick the Best Option
I then moved on to step number four, which is about picking the option that best aligns with what I wrote out in step three. Once I had my list of bullet points of what was most important to me, to my husband, and together, I took all of the different information, and I pulled that all together to determine the right adoption path for us.
There you have it—the four action steps to deciding what type of adoption path is right for your family. If you're stuck, make sure that you check out one of these resources, or feel free to reach out to me by signing up for some time to talk with me one-on-one or in my adoption coach Facebook group. There's no one size fits all for everybody. The one thing that I hope that you take away from this is that you deserve support on your adoption journey. Remember that anything's possible with the right plan and support, and I'm here with you every step of the way.
Hi, I Am Amanda
I am an adoption profile expert on a mission to help you create and share your family's story more affordably!
