Advice from Experts If You Haven't Gotten an Adoption Match - Weekend Wisdom

Please pardon any errors this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
Welcome, everyone to weekend wisdom by creating a family creating a family is the National Support and Training nonprofit for foster adoptive and kinship families. This segment is part of the creating a family podcast. Each Sunday morning, we drop a short segment answering a question that you receive, you can submit your own question to info at creating a family.org. And if you think of it, we can wisdom in the subject line and it will get to me today, the question we want to talk about is, if you have applied to adopt an infant, and you're not getting selected, What's the best advice for what you should do at that point, and we're going to be talking with three experts on this. We will be talking with Courtney lock, she is the owner of faithful adoption consultants, a consulting service that seeks to walk adoptive families through the adoption process from beginning to end. She's also the mom to eight kids, six of whom were adopted, but also be asking this question to Erin quit. She is the founder and CEO of pear tree, the organization dedicated to helping families navigate private adoption and the healthiest way possible. And she is the mom of two through adoption. And our last expert we'll be asking this too, is Carly Wagner. She is a program supervisor for infant adoption and birth parent pregnancy services at Children's Home and Lutheran Social Services in Minnesota. All right, so panel of experts, what is your best advice if someone has applied to adopt an infant, but it's not getting selected in the timeframe that others are getting selected? Courtney, let's start with you.

Courtney Lott  1:41  
I would say if you're able to open your preferences to open your preferences, open your budget if you're able to open your budget, and improve your profile, if it doesn't reflect you Well,

Dawn Davenport  1:55  
when you say open your preferences, what do you mean,

Courtney Lott  1:58  
open to ethnicity, gender exposures, things like that

Dawn Davenport  2:03  
prenatal substance exposure is okay. Yeah, right. Okay. Aaron, what is your best advice for someone who feels like they're not getting selected by birth parents? Sure. Yeah.

Erin Quick  2:13  
So I would say first thing to do is evaluate your profile and your outreach strategy. So in terms of evaluating your profile, the advice we always give is to make sure you're being more afraid of being the same than you are being different so that you're really amplifying your difference. What makes you you What do you believe about parenting that makes you different than some of the other profiles and amplify that throughout making sure that you're talking to an expectant or birth mom, not to your friends and family. And then evaluate your outreach strategy. There are a lot of free and low cost ways to get the word out on your own. And then of course, there's a plethora of paid ways to increase your outreach strategy as well.

Dawn Davenport  2:51  
Okay, excellent. And Carly, what would your advice be?

Karlee Wagner  2:56  
Pardon me and Aaron touched on a lot of the good ones but I would just add I mean, as I don't know if this is helpful, but I would say it can be super discouraging. So I get that but also reminding yourself that it does take time and what can you be doing to make yourself feel okay in that and so if that is helpful to do outreach, if it is helpful to do like updating your profile, do that if it's helpful to just not think about it do that too. And really important, I think to remind yourself that so many adoptive families going through the process say in the moment it is so difficult, but at the end when you're holding a baby when you're a parent it all feels worth it and so just remind yourself of that end goal is really important.

Dawn Davenport  3:36  
Thank you so much, Carly Wagner, Aaron quick and Courtney lot for your wisdom and your advice. And thanks to everyone out there for listening to this week's we can wisdom. If you liked it, please tell a friend to subscribe to the creating a family.org podcast. Do you know that we have 12 free courses that can help you be the best parent to your kid possible? Thanks to our partners, the jockey being Family Foundation, you can go to Bitly slash JB F support and choose from our library of 12 Horses many of them will dovetail really nicely with the show this podcasts go to Bitly slash J B F support that's bi T dot L y flash J B F support

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