We’ve heard every version of this.
We’re too old. We’re too young. We already have kids. We don’t have kids. We’re not religious enough. We live in the wrong city. We don’t make enough money. We’re a same-sex couple. We’re a different race from the birth mother.
Every waiting family, at some point in the process, lands on the thing they’re convinced is working against them. The specific feature of their family that they believe will make an expecting mother scroll right past their profile.
Emily and Kellen worried about their three biological kids.
They already had a full house, two girls and a boy, when they began the adoption process. They genuinely wondered whether an expecting mother would look at their profile and think: Why would I add to that? They are not the typical picture of a family-in-waiting.
Lila’s birth mother saw their profile and thought: That’s exactly what I want for my daughter.
She had biological siblings. She wanted Lila to grow up with siblings. The thing Emily and Kellen were most anxious about was the thing that made the match.
Here’s what 28 years of matches have taught us.
Expecting mothers are not all looking for the same thing. There is no universal template of an ideal adoptive family that resonates with every birth mother considering placement. What one mother is drawn to, another might feel neutral about. That’s not a flaw in the process. That’s exactly how matching is supposed to work.
What expecting mothers almost universally respond to is something harder to fake: authenticity.
A profile that reads like the actual people who wrote it, with their real home and their real relationships and their real values, is almost always more compelling than a polished, curated, try-to-appeal-to-everyone version of a family. Expecting mothers are perceptive. They can feel the difference.
The goal of your profile is not to appeal to everyone.
This is counterintuitive but important. You do not want to sand down every interesting edge of your family in hopes of becoming palatable to the widest possible audience. That’s how you end up with a profile that nobody connects with because it doesn’t feel like real people.
What you want is a profile that feels unmistakably, specifically, like you. Your actual Sunday mornings. Your actual sense of humor. Your actual neighborhood, your actual traditions, and your actual way of moving through the world together.
An expecting mother reading your profile is not filling out a checklist. She is imagining her child growing up in your home. She’s looking for something she might not be able to put into words, a feeling of rightness, and she’ll know it when she sees it.
‘As soon as I saw your profile,’ Lila’s birth mother told Emily and Kellen, ‘I just knew.’
What this means for the thing you’re worried about.
Whatever your thing is, the detail you’re convinced is the obstacle, chances are good that somewhere out there is an expecting mother for whom that detail is the draw.
The family that’s ‘too old’ might be exactly the stability a birth mother is looking for. The family that already has kids might be exactly the sibling situation she wants for her child. The same-sex couple might be exactly what she chooses because her own family has a meaningful connection to the LGBTQ+ community.
You don’t find that match by hiding who you are. You find it by being exactly who you are, clearly and warmly, and trusting the process to connect you with the mother whose child is meant to be yours.
Read Emily and Kellen’s Full Story
Every family has a story. Yours is still being written. Learn about the different pathways to adoption and which one is right for you- Take our Adoption Avenues Quiz.
