Hi everyone
We changed our son's name when he came to us. We did this partly for tracing reasons and partly because our other kids have names from one culture and he had a name from another making him "stand out" (someone joked "guess which one is adopted") - like having two adults and two kids with French names and a third child with a Welsh name).
We did the first letterbox contact before we met his birth mum and we avoided using a name for him. When she met us she specifically asked whether we would change his name. She was dived on by the social workers and told there were some questions she wasn't allowed to ask. She has some minor learning disability so may not have taken their reaction as confirmation that his name was changed.
We're approaching the second letterbox and I'm wondering whether we need to let her know his name has been changed (but not what to). I don't know if it's fair to allow her to continue thinking of him in his old name and I'd feel weird calling him that in a letter. I can probably avoid any name but it makes for some tricky sentence structures!
Also photos. Our letterbox agreement says no pictures. She owns loads of pictures of him up to the point we adopted him and she asked if we would send pictures with letterbox.
When we worry about pictures making a child traceable how exactly would that work? I know people can find duplicate images using Google but I don't put his image online so no duplicates exist. Facial recognition software will indoubtedly get better but she already has photos of him so I suppose this would already be a risk.
Basically I'm asking whether, if we send photos, are we increasing the risk of tracing?
That was a longer post than I intended! Thanks for reading - I'll be interested to read your thoughts.