thinking about adoption

[Scroccia]

Does anybody have any advice on how to get started with adopting a child/baby?

[KristinaM]

you should check out adoption uk which is a parent run support organisation

BAAF also have basic information on adopting

spent some time reading these websites and discuss it with your partner ( if you have one)

then you should write to all the adoption agencies ( voluntary and local authority) who cover your area and see if any of them are willing to assess you for the type of child you are looking for. once you have met them all and been to information meetings, you then have to chose one agency to go through the home study process

I assume you live in the UK. if you dont you need to contact the relevant authortities for where you live

[KristinaM]

oh i have seen that you are currently pg with your first baby. in that case you should do the first 3 things above. then wait until your baby is 2 and then contact the agencies . they will then tell you how long to wait before they will consider assess you

you cannot adopt a child older than any children already in the family

oh and welcome to mumsnet

[sallyx7]

don't adopt. i adopted 4 children in 2003 i was told that none of the children had special needs this was a lie. 8 years on after what has been a continual and protracted battle to get post adoption support to meet my children's needs I have got nowhere!!!! my husband died suddenly last year and i am now trying to parent 4 children, 2 of whom have adhd and extremely challenging behaviour. social workers and their managers will lie to you and they will cover their tracks so well you won't be able to prove this. adoption is a way of getting children offloaded onto naive potential parents without the local authority having to provide any meaningfull finacial or theraputic support. foster carers on the flip side get training they get 24/7 support they get respite and they get paid.

[cory]

That is a bit of a negative post, sally. I understand that life must be very difficult for you, but surely that could just as equally have happened with biological children- they can also have concealed SN and noone offers you a look in a crystal ball when you conceive.

Noone told me when I gave birth to my dcs that 7 years down the line they would become disabled. My adopted brother was a far healthier child.
When you decide to become a parent, you accept that this may mean dealing with special needs, mental health issues, behavioural problems; if you can't, then that is an argument against parenthood, not just against adoption.

[Kewcumber]

some local authorities are better than others are providing help and support. Ours seems (compared to many) to be very good.

To adopt four together was a huge undertaking and even without any specific special needs, adoption generates it own additional needs. Its quite hard to get approval to adopt four together for exactly this reason. A friedn of mine was approved for 4 about 4 years ago and apparently was only 1 of about 4 couples in the country approved for a sibling group of up to four at the time. They went on to adopt a sibling group of two and she has said she was so glad they hadn't gone ahead with a group of four. As it is the adoption of one of the siblings has disrupted due to his behavioural problems. The information they got in advance was pretty good though I don;t think anyone was trying to cover anything up - its just at the point of the placement it really wasn't that obvious what effects their early abuse left on the children. Support from teh LA they adopted through wasn't great but wasn't non-existant either.

It is true that you can have children with additional needs regardless of how they come into your family however it is significantly more common in adopted children (in fact problem in any child who have have a poor start in life) but this is generally well covered on the preparation course (at least it was on mine) - to the degree that we were all kind of expecting our childrne to have some degree of attachment, ADHD etc problems. The reason that many social workers are reluctant to approve multiple placements at one time is exactly for the reason that the risk of additional needs and therapeutic parenting (is that the term?) is much higher in adoption and it helps no-one if the parent doesn't have the experience/skill/time etc to deal with this. A disrupted adoption is worse than no adoption initally in many social workers opinions so IME they are EXTREMELY reluctant to approve people for larger sibling groups.

I guess the problme is that whilst it might be covered on teh prep course, it hard to imagin the difficulties of dealing with multiple children with extra needs particularly in your position where you ar eleft on your own to deal with it.

I'm really sorry that things have turned out this way for you, but most people will not be in the position of parenting four adopted children alone and many people can successfully deal with one child at a time even if they came with additional challenges. Some poeple will aslo find their local authorities are more supportive than yours sounds.

I'd recommend looking through teh SN boards as they may be able to provide you with some good advice on how to extort help out of your LA, I'm sure you know that they are obliged to provide post adoption support but I have no idea personally how you try to enforce that - Adoption UK may be helpful.