bedrooms

[bulletwithbutterflywings]

Is it true that you must have a spare bedroom to be considered to adopt?
We live in a 2 bedroom house with no hope of anything bigger for a few years yet and have a DS, so if we were to be successful our new child would have to share with him.
I think my heart might break if this is true :(

Yes you're right you must have a spare bedroom. I don't think an agency will agree to assess you if not. The needs of adopted children are such that it is considered too big an ask of not only of the adopted child but also of your DS to have to share a room. Are there any options to change the house you have - partition rooms, convert a dining room etc? I hope there is a way around this for you.

Yes you do need a spare room room to adopt. Sadly nearly all adopted children really need their own room, because of their additional needs/issues. Sharing would be be extremely unlikely to work out, so agencies won't take people on unless they have the spare room ready for the child.

As banana said, do you have enough rooms/space to convert or create another room?

If not, an extra few years and a bigger age gap between your son and his new sibling may actually be be far more of a help than a problem. I have a big age gap between mine and its worked out great that way, and big age gaps between the new child and the siblings often seem to work out far better than smaller ones (again because of the extra needs the vast majority of adopted have)

We don't have any space to expand, we live in a 2 up 2 down type house :(
DS is 4 so there would have been a reasonable age gap anyway (assuming the process took a couple of years).
Wow this really is upsetting. :(

Sorry, thank you for replying.

I did actually get approved to adopt while living in a two bed flat with a 4yo birth child.

But I think I was almost unique - never heard of this happening elsewhere. And actually, we did move to a bigger place (in a cheaper area) literally five weeks before getting matched.

Looking back, I am intensely relieved and am quite amazed that we got approved in those conditions. Note that we were approved to adopt a very young child (0-2) and that they insisted we could only adopt a child of the same sex as our birth child. But generally, I think it is a very bad idea for a newly adopted child not to have their own room - for their sake and for your birth child.

I'm really sorry this is such bad news for you, but I wonder why it seems so devastating. Can you really not move somewhere bigger - say, a 3 bed flat instead of a 2 bed house?

3 bedroom flats cost as much as two bedroom houses around here. We would have got a 3 bed if we could but it wasn't an option financially. It's very unlikely to be an option for a good few years - we live in a shared ownership house we can't just sell this house and buy a bigger house in a less nice area - for example a 3 bed flat or house might cost £250000, our 50% share in a 2 bed house is £100000 (not actual figures!)
I'm devastated because this effectively means we can't have any more children.

Could you not move to another area entirely.

Not really Savoy If we moved far enough away to have a bigger house DPs commuting costs and time would be ridiculous.
We sacrificed space for a better family life, we didn't realise at the time we would be sacrificing having a larger family too.

Oh dear. There must be a way.

My only experience of anything like this is when my mum was fostering and my sister and I were adults living away from home and we we went to stay with my mum for the weekend and my sister and I 'had' to share a room (for a whole weekend) and the social worker came round to talk to us about how it made us feel. Like we had been displaced. We had our own houses! But she didn't seem to care about that!

bullet, I know how you feel - we would have started the adoption process much sooner if there wasn't a "bedroom rule", as we had to wait until we got a three bedroom place (we also have a birth child). The irony is that DS and DD actually share a room, so we still have a spare...

But the circumstances where this is feasible or desirable are so few and far between that I understand why the rule is there.

Sorry.

Hopefully in time you will be able to get another bedroom - I second what Lilka said about a big age gap: there's 4.5 years between our two children, and it works brilliantly for us (even though we had been thinking of the "standard" 2 year gap).