How do you know when a profile is 'the one'?

[snowleopard33]

Me and my partner are currently in the middle of the matching process and have been looking through lots of profiles on Linkmaker, and we're finding it really difficult to know when a profile is 'the one'. We're being asked if we want to progress towards making a match that we both feel positively about, but there are other profiles we've seen that we felt much more strongly about (which haven't worked out for various reasons).

Is it enough if a child/children seem like they would be a good match on paper but we don't feel a massive pull towards them? Just wondering if anybody had any experiences of anything similar! Any advice would be much appreciated.

We only ruled out profiles that didn't fit well with us - otherwise I was pretty open to accepting whatever children came up for us. Our sw sent us the profile of the children we adopted because she thought they were a good match for us and we had no good reason not to proceed, so we went ahead. We have had an easier journey (though it's all relative) than people we know who tried to find the "perfect" match. Some of them took on very young children whose needs weren't properly understood for example.

Good luck with your search.

In my experience you don't know, I felt more of a pull with my firsts profile than my second but I would say just follow your matching criteria at this stage and see how you feel once your speaking with the family finding social worker at the linking stage.

It is entirely normal not to get an excited "pull" feeling about a profile so don't panic over that.

Linkmaker wasn't around in my day and I think, fantastic though it is, it does make the matching process harder because you see so many profiles.

My strategy was about being clear what I could not manage - whether that was complicated contact, lots of hospital appointments... and then looking at each profile individually for whether there was anything I felt I couldn't manage. A sort of, 'if it doesn't feel wrong, it could be right' approach.

For me, the connection came later - and for one of my children, not until they had been home for about 6 months.

I think it is partly personality driven, but I think those that feel a strong connection with a child before they know much about them could be in danger of not asking all the questions they should, or glossing over potential issues - and then finding themselves dealing with far more than they expected.

It is highly individual. We were only willing to progress with children with whom we felt some chemistry and ended up with a very good match. It has not protected us from severe problems, but I'd say we are still a good match.

@snowleopard33 I don't have any wise advise as my husband and I are in the same part of the process as you . We are also finding it really challenging and both feel we have to feel so connection to something about them to want to pursue the match. But I guess we are more heart than head people ( will probably be easier if you can just be very logical ).

Similar to others who have posted, we just went with, do they meet our criteria, do we think we could meet their needs, if yes, then we proceeded. I'm in two minds though, on the one hand, if they end up as your child/ren then you will love them and find it impossible to imagine anything different. On the other, this is the rest of your lives that you're talking about, so you need to go with whatever feels right for you, not what you feel you 'should' do.

Our - highly experienced - social worker gave us lots of profiles to look at (this was before linkmaker). She clearly believed that adopters should feel a connection with their prospective children. I know from others that social workers withheld photos until very late in the process. Our social worker was the complete opposite. There are different approaches and you have to decide what is right for you.

Keep in mind that the profiles on LM are written by SWs not the child. I am not trying to be dismissive, but it's likely that what you feel a pull to, might have nothing to do with the child at this stage. Because we adopted from a LA agency, we only saw profiles from the children available locally and they were in many cases written by the same SW and were quite similar.

So as others have said, we focused on finding the children that met our criteria and more importantly tried to understand their needs and whether we can support them. Because there were two profiles that were very similar in some aspects we got additional information about their needs before we decided which one to proceed with. It's a very difficult task, because it does feel like you are discriminating against children, but we had to be honest with ourselves.

The real personality of the child only started to become more clear to us once we spoke to the foster carer and we had our bump in meeting. And this was the stage "we knew" we made the right choice ... and I can happily say it's been the best decision we've ever made.