Couple rejected from process getting a lot of Twitter traffic

[Rainallnight]

Has anyone else seen this? She is getting a lot of sympathy. I know the adoption process can be tough but I’m finding the uncritical sympathy a bit much.

twitter.com/shahvmira/status/1602571837535289344?s=46&t=3QlHyMhrWyQiQ-kY6RdfSQ

Maybe refusing to rehome your dogs mean you can’t put the needs of a child first?

And I don’t know what the writing thing is about. Maybe the social workers were unreasonable? Or maybe they had reasons to reject them from the process. Who knows.

But the comments - that anyone can have a birth child, that kids are desperate for a home so why should these people be rejected etc - are ignorant.

what do other people think?

She sounds like someone who's just hurting from getting some upsetting news. I think the adoption process can be quite brutal and understandably many hoops to jump through. I think when you're hurting and share that on social media it does invite a lot of different responses. She looks to have said she wishes she hadn't shared it there now. I have a lot of empathy for this.

I think it is really sad, but ultimately not helpful to share what I suspect is such a simplification.

You can imagine a SW not saying 'you'll need to rehome your dogs' but rather 'if you had a child placed and ultimately they were allergic / couldn't cope with your dogs, would you rehome them?' which is a very different scenario.

Similarly being a writer - does that mean they have uncertain income & finances, or maybe she had to disappear for weeks at a time on book tours? That is so different from not liking her 'being a writer'.

I wish them all the best however they go forward.

Yes, that’s exactly it, it’s a simplification. And I think what irks me is that all the well meaning replies have no idea about the needs of our kids.

Someone I know and like has replied ‘but I’m a writer with two dogs and I have a child’, but it’s such a different ballgame with our children.

I think her view of adoption is problematic too. How she sees it as "ethical". Sounds virtue signalling, and it probably raised concerns.

Yeah I wondered that too. She repeated it on the thread and it slightly made her sound like she thought she was doing them a favour.

Whatever happened, it’s very sad and she’s understandably bruised from it.

Yes I agree it's probably been very over simplified.
The dog thing comes up frequently. What people don't seem to get is that often the concern is the child's behaviour towards the animal, which may have to be removed for their safety.
I personally know of several incidents where a child hurt cats, one of which died as a result of its injury.
They may also have been concerned about her use of social media.
My fostering social worker recently said to me that she couldn't find any trace of me online. So it's obviously an additional check that they do now.

We had a social media check when we started the process 4 years ago so I can see them not being happy with how much she's on there.

Tbh I think its for the best she has been turned down because even after 6 months she doesn't understand how things are different with adoption. She does seem like she thinks she's doing them a favour.

You can imagine a SW not saying 'you'll need to rehome your dogs' but rather 'if you had a child placed and ultimately they were allergic / couldn't cope with your dogs, would you rehome them?'

This. It's a standard question when people have pets. The idea that they were refused 'because they were a writer' is laughable.

Ultimately I think the fact this woman chose to announce her being refused on twitter (which she uses primarily to generate publicity for her books) in such a misleading way strongly suggests the SW made the right decision.

Looking through her feed, she seems like a good person. I think Twitter’s probably a tough place to share news like this and it takes a while for it to sink in.

I hope she took the social workers message the wrong way, rather than the social worker delivering it that badly.

There's a lot of adopters in the system so some agencies can be picky about who they approve. Plus would you even WANT to be approved by an agency who thinks you'd be waiting years and years?

Ive seen a few rejection stories recently and it certainly shows how different all the various agencies, LAs and RAs act. Which is where I believe the system is unfair, if 1 person gets approved in 1 area with xyz and another with the same circumstances in another area gets rejected.

Which is where I believe the system is unfair, if 1 person gets approved in 1 area with xyz and another with the same circumstances in another area gets rejected.

Thing is, that's why different types of agencies exist. Some speicalise in harder to place kids and look nationally almost straight away, whereas some are just conveyer belts for LAs which don't have huge numbers of kids to place and can be picky. The consortia have probably broadened it out a bit but you'll never eliminate the geographic variation.

Additionally, I think there is a fairly high chance this woman is just unsuitable in some specific manner and the reasons she claims are just her way of not dealing with that. I remember meeting a couple who insisted they were rejected for being vegan and it was nothing like that - they gave the impression that raising a vegan was more important than their child's wellbeing.

The above doesn't mean she isn't a good person. Not everyone is suitable to adopt at the time they apply.

I did look her up on social media ( her book looks really good by the way) there were a couple ofthings that I would have wanted to discuss if I was an SW, including one about the dogs.
Im not anti dog, I grew up with dogs, I would quite like a dog. and of course pets are, in general, good for kids.
But the rehoming dog issue crops up a lot and the people who complain about it never seem to be thinking about the potential child.
This woman has three dogs, on top of everything you are asking a child to do when they move, you are asking them to cope with 3 dogs. The child may be fine with it, but they may not. Its not about whether or not the dogs are lovely and wouldnt hurt a flea, its about the child.

I have a deep sympathy for her, she's clearly hurting but I was approved as a single, disabled, dog/cat/horse owner who mostly writes for a living.
So the idea that her pets or career were the simple reasons for her rejection I'm sure is not the whole story. And I'm not sure starting a thread like that on Twitter is helpful to anyone...possibly the fact that she has reacted this way -perhaps predictably - was part of the LA's reasoning.....I don't know.