August 24, 2016

The Best Photos For Your Adoption Profile

More and more these days, adoption companies are using their social media feeds to share information about prospective adoptive families. This is wonderful. Individuals looking to adopt have more exposure than ever before, and hopefully, that means more access to finding children to love. And for those millions of children out there waiting for homes, this ideally gets them into a supportive, loving, safe home that much faster.

To that end, it’s really important to think about the photos you’re choosing to include in your profile or submitting to an adoption agency for use on social media, because they’re your birth mother’s absolute first impression of you. There’s no taking that back.

The world of selfies has definitely casualized things. Now, rather than having more professional photos of ourselves, our phones and hard drives are filled with photos we’ve taken ourselves. This is lovely, but we really encourage you to take a step back from the “fast photo” world and to consider how you want to present yourself to your birth mother. To be frank, selfies can look hurried, rushed, poorly shot, badly angled or composed, and even careless. It’s hard to get a full picture of who’s in the photo and the surrounding, and often, they just look really unprofessional.

This is not to say that you can’t include a few selfies you love in your profile. You also want to show your fun, whimsical, spontaneous side. But these types of images should not comprise your entire profile, nor should they be the image you lead with.

So what does work? Full-body photos, for instance, are excellent. A birth mother is choosing the people who will parent her child for the rest of their lives, and her instinct for that decision in this process begins with a photo. Give her something to really look at! Choose photos that showcase scenery, that give her a sense of the world you live in, where you’ve traveled, what your home is like, the sorts of places and spaces in which you hang out and experience the world. Photos that include some atmosphere, are thoughtfully posed and composed, and give context to your lives are important. It’s very hard to capture that in a selfie.

This is a giant decision for both of you, and it warrants proper thought and attention. If you’re ever curious about whether or not a photo is appropriate for your profile, reach out to your adoption agency! They want to help in any way they can, and they are experts in the best way to develop an adoption profile.

Pictures speak a thousand words…choose yours thoughtfully.