Greengrow thanks for coming back and explaining why you felt it may be an 'awful thing to go have to submit yourself to '. Of course others may feel this way too, those who adopt and those who do not but I feel that possibly for those of us who have adopted when you understand why social workers need to know all about you, you feel differently. To me the process is not totally invasive and the reason social workers want to know you are financially secure, in reasonable health and that if you are in a relationship it is stable is because they know the children in the looked after system have already had a bad start to life. To have other set backs, like to suffer because of upheaval, marriage break up etc or ill health of parents would be even harder than for the average child.
This is not to say adopters do not get ill, or their marriages do not break up, sadly they do. But to say that the social workers have done all they can to make sure the family/couple or single who receives this child is a safe pair of hands to have a child in.
When we made our wills we had to decide where dd would go in the very unlikely event that both dh and I died before her! (Yes, not a nice thing to even think about). For me it was a no-brainer, I had my sister in mind all along, she is lovely, kind, and has kids, knows what to do, and loves our dd etc etc. Had my sister not been an option we would have had to think very hard hard about who to entrust our beloved daughter to in the (hopefully very unlikely event) of our deaths. Likewise social workers are putting children in their care into families. What an awesome and formidable task! Who would want to do that without full knowledge of the family/couple/individual in question?
For us in our county the adoption process (after initial enquiries and open days) begins with preparation, not to adopt, but to know if you want/are ready/feel able to adopt. That intimal training is so child-centrered that by the time you come through those three and half days you know a lot about what you may be 'dealing with' and I think that helps to put our own minor discomforts about talking about our lives, our pasts and doing the 'homework' into perspective.
I say this simply to explain that this training is there to put off those who are not ready and to galvanise those who are so all that follows, like the social worker visits, are really in a context of what is best for the child/ren.
Our child's social worker visited today. He was very happy. He said he could see a difference in our son. Any mild annoyance at needing to be back for the meeting from our day out melted away as I saw a big smile on his face and he said how relaxed our son looks.
I just wanted to explain because although adoption is not for everyone the process one goes through is to prepare for the task of being approved, and matched and then most of all of raising the child - not simply to satisfy social services. For this reason I do think it helps to see it as a whole.