Build your own team using The Adoption Roadmap Academy℠
Having the right team in place is crucial in your adoption journey. This journey is truly one of the most difficult paths you will walk down in life, and it just isn’t an option to try to do it all on your own.
Want to watch Becca cover this herself? Check out the video below!
This team is made up of:
- Your home study agency, which must be in the state you reside in, and your assigned social worker. You will be getting really close and personal with your social worker. They’ll ask you personal questions about your life, your habits, your marriage, etc. It’s the kind of stuff you might not even tell your closest friends. Ultimately, this means you will want to work with a social worker and a home study agency that you feel good about and can trust.
- Your adoption placement agency (or agencies). This will be the agency that presents your profile to expectant mothers and where you will be eventually matched with an expectant mother. Using multiple placement agencies is one of my favorite strategies for bringing home your baby quicker. I will discuss this method, or RG Adoption Consulting’s multi-agency-approach, in another video.
- An attorney to finalize the adoption and make it legal.
- A counselor/coach/therapist that specializes in adoption. This person is so valuable to your team, because things WILL come up and you will want a licensed professional in place that knows your story and the complexities of adoption in general. It is never a matter of “if” you will need a counselor and ALWAYS a matter of when you are going to need somebody to talk to.
- An OB/GYN or pediatrician or child specialist that can guide you through adoption situations you are presented with. This medical professional is essential to your team, especially when you want someone to talk through things such as, the effects of different exposures throughout pregnancy or a history of mental illness in the birth parents’ families. It is essential to have medical opinion on certain situations, and by putting a doctor on your team, you are able to better navigate the adoption journey.
- An adoption consultant (vs. a facilitator). I might be a little bias here as a consultant, but adoption consultants are there to guide you through every step of the journey, help you choose agencies to work with, work on your adoption profile with you, vet potential situations you are considering, and solely work with hopeful adoptive parents. On the other hand, adoption facilitators are not legal in a lot of states (check your state laws). Facilitators work with both hopeful adoptive parents and birth mothers to match them together.
Who else needs to be on my team? Well, your friends and family should be some of your biggest supporters throughout this process. When should you tell them you’re adopting? Who should you tell? Check out the rest of this video and get a little more insight into these questions. Your adoption team is very important for this journey, so make sure you have some valuable players.