Adoption

[Lancome]

I didn't know where to post this, but can anyone tell me if it's possible to Un- adopt a child. Give up all parental responsibilities?

[Spero]

This is the case I referred to earlier, where the parents threw away their daughter's dance trophies.

It is such a sad, sad case, even more so because it seems to mirror the bad experiences of many adoptive parents. The adoptive parents are not blamed for what they did as they were at the end of their emotional rope - but it is horrible to see how their daughter reacted to this.
www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/4148.html

[thefamilyvonstrop]

That's an awful read spero. Truly sad.
In terms of the OP, I think most of the adopters would agree with you that there is something odd about the phrasing and the reasons given for wanting to "un-adopt" - being a lovely, non troll hunting poster , I've tried to respond with the assumption that there is more going on than we are being told. But as you said earlier, I think it's sometimes better to discuss the bigger issue rather than the specific scenario because it's such a serious topic with huge repercussions for families and society as a total.
I just find all the "you can't give birth children back so suck it up" type comments so grating. Like adopters don't "really" understand or get the lifelong bond between parent and child. Like I wouldn't cut off my arm with a rusty spoon for my adopted child. Yet I have to bend into a pretzel to understand birth mums decisions and lifechoices that led to a baby being neglected and abused.

[3point14159265359]

That is hideous reading, but interesting (in the context of this thread) that even though the relationship had entirely broken down they were contesting the application for the care order which appears to have been the LA/DD's choice, not the parents' choice.

(I think - it's hard reading for a lay person with holiday brain...)

[Devora]

That case makes grim reading. It is my worst nightmare.

[thefamilyvonstrop]

It's interesting that they identified K should be placed in an adoptive family where she wouldn't have to compete for attention, then placed her with a family with two existing high achieving birth children.
Also, the early descriptions seem to indicate attachment issues - not particularly attached to birth mum, described as "sly and devious" (manipulative?), pushing boundaries/rejecting discipline and not initiating affection.

[Ohyesiknowwhatyoumean]

thanks for posting that Spero it makes very sad reading. Sadly the way the LA behaved doesn't surprise me, nor does the lack of disclosure of the child's history and the lack of early therapeutic intervention.

We know what needs to be done to give kids like this the best chance to succeed in life but do we invest the money and resources needed? no, we let adoptive parents take the strain until it all goes pear shaped and then blame them. .

[tokoloshe2015]

Sadly I know all too many adoptive parents with similar experiences - asking for help over and over again and not getting it, being lied to, and then blamed for the damage done to their child with the birth family

[3point14159265359]

Has an LA ever been sued for a case like this? Ie where there's a possibility everything wasn't disclosed pre-placement and where PAS has been so very clearly lacking?

[dibly]

Oh that case is so sad, sadly I know far too many adoptive parents who have faced similar battles with social services. Things need to change radically.

[tokoloshe2015]

With funding cuts I suspect things will get worse rather than better.

[3point14159265359]

That's why I'm wondering about them being sued toko as that seems to be the only way lessons are ever learned.

[Spero]

There was a case quite a few years ago that established that a LA could be sued for failing to reveal full details about a child before placement - the child went on to sexually abuse one of the other children in the family and the parents had never been told of the full extent of his trauma and that it involved sexual abuse.

With regard to suing a LA for not providing therapy, it is only a matter of time. I have heard a lot of rumblings of a lot of very distressed and fed up adoptive parents who are worried that their children are going to end up dead/in prison.

BUT the only obvious route for damages is under the Human Rights Act 1998 for breach of an ECHR right. Damages are deliberately kept low for breach of ECHR rights as they are not meant to be punitive. You might also have difficulties proving causation. But I am sure that pretty soon there will have to be some consideration of this in the courts as it seems to be a pretty common issue across many LAs.

[Spero]

If this op is for real, her friend might want to consider particularly para 60 of the judgment in the K case I posted below:

PC also expressed concern about a message posted by the mother on K's Facebook page on 17th May 2011 in which she wrote,
'Just wondering how you are doing? Hope you are well and happy.
I realise that you don't want to be part of our family any more – so am thinking about your 2010 Christmas presents which have been kept here for you so far, as I thought things might have been better resolved by now.
Let me know what you are feeling, as I would like to redistribute them to others if you don't want them, i.e. are no longer in our family. We can then formalise this legally and get your name changed etc., and say our goodbyes.
(Ex) Mum xx'
PC says that K 'was extremely distressed' by this message and required a visit to the GP as her psoriasis returned as, too, did her incontinence.

[Jakana]

In the USA this sort of thing is quite common actually. Kids walking away, parents ''un-adopting.'' Sad really.

[Italiangreyhound]

In the USA there is a truly appalling thing called 're-homing' where people who have adopted 'offer' their children to other families unofficially. It is the stuff of nightmares.

As an adoptive parent who had a truly wonderful inexpedience with my local authority adoption services, I am so sad others have not had the amazing support we have been able to access. It is really appalling so many people adopt and are left floundering without access to the right support. Often, I feel, for want of money in the local authority, only for the damage done to everyone to vastly outweigh any costs in terms in money and more to the point human suffering.

We can all do something about this by demanding our MPs make adoption support a priority. It is just as important as the screening process adoptive parents go through before being allowed to adopt.

[Italiangreyhound]

Lancome my advice to your friend is to get some counselling herself, from someone who understands about adoption and to aim to have some family counselling with her ex and her son. She needs to find a way to move on, to allow her son to live in the best place for him. He is almost (less then 4 years away) from becoming an adult, so in less than four years he would be able to decide for himself where he goes.

There may be much more that you are not telling us and more still your friend has not told you.

I have no vitriol for your friend, or anger at how she feels the need to express herself to you, one adult to another. But I sincerely hope she will get counselling before she broaches any of this with her son. He has suffered rejection and does not need more. I am sure in her heart she knows this.

As others have said, she cannot unadopt him. Even if she could this would not, I think, provide the closure she may feel she needs. She needs to find a way to deal with the issues and she needs professional help that should be available free from her local authority if she is the UK (as far as I am aware) although she may need to pay to access it and I feel it is essential for everyone that she does so - much cheaper than boarding school anyway.

Lastly, we all make mistakes. I am mum to a daughter by birth and a son by adoption. I make loads of mistakes with both my kids. I love them both intensely but we are all human. The thing to do is to find help when we mess up, ideally before we mess up too big!

And, Devora, I don't know you very well but I do a little - and feel you are someone who does the best she can, and work amazingly hard, and you were a total inspiration to me (along with Kew and others) before and after we adopted.

[Italiangreyhound]

Spero I have read a fair bit of the report you liked to. All very tragic.

It is quite a hard to understand report, the adoptive parents are painted very well by some in part of the report, very badly by others in part of it. The accusations of sexual abuse are terrible, which were not pursued sound terrible for all. For me that outweighs any medals or trophies thrown away in a moment of madness. Surely a well meaning staff member at the centre where K lived could have got those replaced if they had wanted to help.

Yes, agree the Facebook message is appalling.

What stands out for me is that the parents again and again asked for respite which was not offered until it had been asked for many times and then the child chose to return to their care voluntarily, I presume.

To some degree the adoptive parents seem to be 'blamed' for a good deal of what happened, to some degree, where as the seeds for all this was laid in K's experiences within the birth family and social services failure to understand what this would mean for K.

Tragic.

[Italiangreyhound]

linked to not liked!

[Spero]

Yes, it is horribly tragic and I agree with the expert in that case who said that his 'heart goes out' to the parents - they were at the very end of their coping skills and they reacted in ways that were profoundly destructive. But they were effectively lied to about their daughter and her degree of trauma, they weren't given any help when they needed it. The help that did come seemed too little, too late.

But I think the throwing away of the trophies is a very key point. It may seem minor in the grand scheme of things but for the child I think this represented a very profound rejection by her parents; her achievements were considered worthless and thrown away. I also think it is interesting that her parents took the same line with her Christmas presents.

The point I am trying to make, and why I was so struck by this op was that to reject a child who has already experienced serious trauma is a very cruel thing to do. I appreciate it doesn't (always) come from a motivation to hurt that child, but rather as an expression of the rejector's pain. But it will strike at the core of that child's being and compound whatever hurt has already been done.

As many, many threads on this site shows, people carry the scars of that their whole lives.

But how can I blame adoptive parents who were essentially tricked into taking on a child when they knew about only the tip of an enormous iceberg of trauma? And then weren't supported to deal with that?

So of course I don't 'blame' them. But the op's friend really needs to understand why her response is so worrying.

But as op hasn't come back, maybe this was just plotting for a novel. I hope so.

[Italiangreyhound]

Very good points Spero.

[Italiangreyhound]

With my adopted ds I have had a lot of support from my local authority, attachment work, several courses, some short and some long.

It saddens me so much that people do not get the support to parent their children successfully. The cost of such help can be high but the cost of specialist residential is, I am sure, even higher! Is it probably 10, 50 or even 100 times that of the help they seek?

The cost to society of young people who cannot function normally must be even more!

I do wonder why we don't talk in terms of cost financial, sometimes, because it is all some people (politicians) can understand. We always talk in terms of emotional etc but that is so hard to quantify.

Many couples who have an adoption breakdown might (I expect) also experience either a mental or marriage breakdown too. That is also, impossible to quantify.

[Duckdeamon]

[Devora]

Thanks for your lovely words, Italian

I too think the trophies, presents and that awful email were really significant rejections of the child. The judge didn't want to make a care order as he felt it very important that the child had 'a way back' to her parents. The parents' actions in writing that email, and getting rid of the trophies, were hand grenades onto that path back.

We don't know enough about what went on in the years leading to this family breakdown. But it seems likely that the parents were at least adequate as adopters at the point of matching. Even without the concealment of the child's history, it is very possible that there would have been a different outcome if the child had received earlier therapeutic intervention, and if the parents had been given help when they asked for it. We don't know, though, if the parents were not up to the task, and that is revealed through their actions at the end, or if they had been reduced to some truly awful behaviours because they were burnt out and themselves traumatised.

Tonight, as I wrestled a hysterical, vituperative and physically violent child into bed (a 2 hour marathon), I thought about this case and about how sometimes my parenting would look shocking to outsiders, and shocking to me at the start of my adoption journey. Sometimes, often, I truly don't know how to handle situations. Physical violence is a very shocking thing to deal with from a child, and despite repeatedly asking for help with this specifically nobody seems inclined to help. And my child is 6: these parents were dealing with physical aggression from a teenager. The judge says that social workers criticised the parents for how they handled this, but refused to advise them on how they should. Appalling.

[Kacie123]

Horribly sad reading.

It's this sort of thing which makes me very annoyed with people who have told us to "just adopt", as though anyone can and should take on kids who need a lot of love and care. You're potentially dealing with any number of issues and my biggest worry is that we could easily make someone's already rubbish life even worse because of this sort of mismatch and lack of professional support...

[Italiangreyhound]

Devora thank you and I am so sorry it is tough at the moment, I had to look up 'vituperative' - luckily I did not know what it meant!

Please be kind to yourself. As parents, birth or otherwise, we all do things we would have imagined we would not do! Sometimes my dd seems to reduce me to my own mum! Saying and doing all the things I felt I would not do as a parent! Well, not quite but almost. I have had such great support from Mumsnet and my local country council with regard to adoption and limited support with dd. But luckily I have friends whose kids are on the autistic spectrum or have Asperges and although my dd has not been diagnosed with these she has tendencies and the skills others talk about in relation to this are helpful for me in my helping her.

I did not read every single word of the case Spero linked to. But I read a fair bit. I think the parents were normal average parents and adopters who got hit with an explosion they could not handle. I have no idea how I would ever cope with that. A teenage girl can easily be as strong as a middle aged woman, it must have been physically and emotionally draining to deal with, especially when the child hurt herself by banging her head on the floor.