Letterbox always late

[Noimaginationforaun]

Trying to keep details to a minimum to avoid being recognised but we have letterbox set up for numerous times a year. LO has been with us a year.

The thing is, there is always a problem and it’s becoming really invasive of family life now. Letters are always late (and because we write numerous times a year, being delayed even by a month has an impact). We always end up with a phone call asking if we will accept the letters because there’s always contents in it that are questionable. I’m jealous of friends who just have one letterbox per year and never have any issues.

We don’t know what to do. Is this just what it will be like forever now? LO is still little and very unaware of any letterbox contact but what happens when they grow up? If they’re always late or we are always having to vet the contents?

Any advice on what we can possibly do would be greatly appreciated.

Has your adoption order been granted? If the answer is yes and this is not working for you then you can alter it. I would ring adoption U.K. to speak to someone about it so you can discuss the situation in depth and come up with a workable alternative. You can set clear boundaries in terms of sending/receiving letters and push it back on to your coordinator when it comes to dealing with content.

We have altered our contact agreements 3 times to take into account the specific circumstances we are in and it's looking like we might be altering it again this year. Those requests to alter have come from both us and various birth family members.

'Numerous' sounds too many. We do letterbox twice a year and have done for 15 years now.
We write first and then birth family replies. Our writing prompts them to reply.
We have dates set to avoid Christmas, birthdays & exam season.
We often hold on to replies for up to 2 weeks to get to a suitable time for our DC.

I would ask to reduce frequency of contact.
I would ask to write first.
I would ask that birth family be given more guidance.

Yes, adoption order has been granted! So it is possible to amend it?
We could manage twice a year I think. We always write first. We are given our month to write and I always send it within the first few days of our month. The next month, they are meant to reply but it’s never arrived within that month. Often much later, and with issues. They are planned around big events like Christmas and birthdays but with the lateness they keep hitting it. The last letter we got was a week before Christmas. It wasn’t even meant to be in December. If the next one is late, it is LO birthday.

I didn’t know if we were legally allowed to reduce letterbox or not! With it being agreed before the adoption.

It might be that the birth family are finding that writing 'numerous' times is too much. They too might actually be happier with fewer times?

Contact is between the adults, so if it arrives late you are at liberty to hold it over if you think that is in your child's best interests.

This is another thing we struggle with. Letters are always written to LO and there’s lots of ‘mummy loves you so much, mummy misses you, we miss you every day’ etc etc

@Noimaginationforaun

This is another thing we struggle with. Letters are always written to LO and there’s lots of ‘mummy loves you so much, mummy misses you, we miss you every day’ etc etc

I wouldn't accept that. 'We think of you often' is fine, but that is too emotive I think. Plus the 'mummy' bit is hard.

@Noimaginationforaun yes definitely possible to amend it. By coincidence I was on an adoption U.K. course on this subject earlier this year which is why I suggested to contact them. The most important advice I came away with is that contact arrangements should be reviewed and reflect the needs of all those involved so if it's not working then look at how to make it work. Secondly, write down your reasoning in a way for your child and ask if it can be put on their file so they can see clearly how, why and when it was changed should they decide as an adult to access their file.

You also have to remember that contact agreements are mutual. You commit to writing to birth parents, and vice-versa. Therefore, if I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t actually write back until I actually received a response to my previous letter. And if you never receive a response, you a have a right to stop writting to them altogether (as they haven’t fulfilled their part of the agreement). For example, after a couple of years of not receiving responses to my letters I stopped writing to birth parents. After some years of not sending letters, I finally received a letter from birth mum and I happily wrote back and re-initiated our yearly letter agreement.

In any case, now that the adoption order has been granted, I would contact the agency and let them know the the current set up is not working for you and your family, and that you can only commit to writing once a year. You have a right to move on with your life, and as an adoptive parent, there isn’t a legal obligation that you write to birth parents (unless there was a formal contact agreement approved by the court which is very rare). It is up to you to decide if you would like to write or not to birth parents, and to propose the set up in terms of frequency. Therefore I would go with yearly, as this will massively reduce the stress on you and your family, and will be more manageable.

I sort of disagree with JohnPA . For many families being organised to write is really really hard. I wouldn't cut contact with a birth parent just because they don't reply. However going yearly would be fine.

(That said we did stop writing to extended family. They didn't reply and our elder DC wanted to stop. We wrote one more letter saying let SS know if you want us to continue. They didn't so we stopped.)

We have a yearly agreement with extended family and they haven’t replied. We will write again this year though and see if we get a reply. We know our letter last year fell not long after the adoption order so we were aware it must have been a very difficult time for them.

With birth parents though, they do reply it’s just we are always making accommodations for them (lateness, content of letter) and it’s just getting too much. We want to have empathy and we have understood that it must be a very difficult time for them all but a year in we are thinking if we are meant to keep sacrificing our own stress to accommodate them. I feel like maybe we are being selfish because I’m a people pleaser but also the thought of our LO knowing when these letters arriving and them being so inconsistent and confusing in content really concerns us.

Taking on the advice, I think we’ll definitely ring adoption UK and speak to the coordinator.

To be honest the thing that would concern me is the content. If they are late, don’t arrive, does it really matter? Its not as if your child is aware and waiting for them.
I would tell the SW that you will not accept letters with the content you describe. Just send them straight back if they are not acceptable,
I think you need to step back a bit from the whole thing. I would insist that the frequency is reduced to once or twice a year.

When your child is old enough, and I mean in their teens, you can deal with the letters as part of life story work, until then they really don’t need to know.

As a birth parent I will say that whilst inappropriate content is not on, timing of letters is not always down to the birth parent being late

If contact is received on time it has at times still taken 6 plus weeks to reach me and then I need to respond- I don’t read the letter as soon as I get it as I like to be off work (weekend) when I do so that I have some time to process the emotions that come with the letter.

My last letter took nearly 8 months to reach my sons parents (which I dont believe is acceptable but was sent within 3 weeks of me receiving my letter at a time of year I had purposely avoided due to a number of emotional reasons)

It’s hard as a birth parent waiting a whole year for the next letter but honestly 1-2 times per year is all that is realistically workable in the mid to long term.

I have found that I have to repeatedly chase the local authority to ensure I get my letter and even then it’s often sat with them for a substantial period of time before it reaches me.

I would however address the content being inappropriate with the adoption agency and refuse anything that isn’t appropriate.