Life story book - editing? It is so bad

[EN127]

Hi everyone. We adopted a little boy who has been with us for a year. He was placed with foster family age 2/3 days. He is now around age 2. We are in England.

I received from his social worker, a copy of his life story, which is two documents in PowerPoint. My husband and I are both educated intelligent people. As part of our work, we follow psychology journals, and both have experience in input in relation to child psychology. We also have a medical background, so understand the importance of a child, knowing where they come from.

However, the contents of the life story book are not only pretty much a copy and paste job done by the social worker who was moving jobs shortly after, but some of the content is awful.

There is a full page on what drugs are, and a full page what alcohol is, and a full page on what abuse is. At the appropriate time I will address these with my child, I do not need a PowerPoint presentation prepared by a social worker to do this. There was no abuse involved in his life so I have no idea why it’s there.

There are also numerous photographs provided by birth mum, which are clearly not suitable to be in the book,but appear to all have just been plonked into this PowerPoint presentation.

I’m tempted to just keep the relevant photographs, and information somewhere for him if he wants it and do all of the life story explaining myself.

We met birth mum, but even the section about her is a copy and paste of the notes the social worker made on her telephone to that meeting. It’s so insensitive to present this to my son.

we are kind people who know what is best for our child, and I really would not be happy presenting this to my child, even when he is an adult.

And I’m not sure many people I know would be happy Passing this on to their child Either knowing the emotional impact is likely to have.

Has anyone else had a life story this bad? Or edited theirs?

many thanks

Not edited. We got given an appalling pile of crap. It was insulting to the children.

Completely ignored, filed away, and made our own. Much better. Our agency did lessons, for want of a term, on how to do them, following some evidence based model where you start with now, then go back to birth onwards, with age appropriate explanations, then back to now.

Works well for us.

That is quite common. Social workers are extremely stretched and writing life story books is low on their list. Many adopters rewrite their children's life story books. Joy Rees's "Life Story Books for Adopted Children" is a very good resource. Mixbook.com offers templates with nice designs that can be printed in hardboard.

Personally, I think it was good for me to write the books, because I had to really dive into their story and think about how to tell it to them. It prepared me for our conversations and made me more aware of small details.

We adopted an 8yo and 2yo so there was a lot of info and it was pretty good, aimed at age 8-12.
So for our younger one we made a new book with a picture and a couple of sentences.

Only one page had more info and no pictures and that was describing why they went into care in the simplest of terms.

I think there is nothing wrong with rewriting, but keep the original somewhere.

I also ignored ours and made our own. Ours was more like a potted history of the place birth mum comes from - details about its origins, transport and industry. It was useless. Just do what’s best for your LO.

I forgot the weird details about the town! Like knowing it has a historic building would be something a child needs to know about their origins.

Just re-write. Yes, keep the original. If you used a VA, you might be able to get a class on re-writing like I did.

My daughters was awful - 70 pages just printed on A4 paper and stuck in an old folder that had clearly been used for something else before hers. She was 2.5 when we had it and it wasn't age appropriate at all. It was also obvious that it was a copy & paste job as there were quite a few errors and her SW admitted she didn't have time to put it together so it was made by a student intern.

I made my own in the end that is much more suitable for her age - I've done 2 books, one is basically photos which we use now and another one with more background info in for when she's a bit older.

Hello all it is EN127 - I don’t know why it won’t let me change this username!

anyhow - thank you all so much for your practical and supportive advice. X

I am a social worker who completes life story work. To do it properly it takes at least 40 hours before I share it with adopters and ask for the changes they want. Prior to this I will have had a few sessions talking through what they need for their children and agreeing what it looks like and have asked for photos/ input from day one. Adopters are the people sharing it with their children and it needs to be right! To be honest, this is usually in my own time because as an area social worker the case is often closed before this is completed. I have worked I some teams where it has just been given to a student......

Just to ask really? My understanding when I complete life story work is that I start very much in the present. So who the young person is, who they live with, what is important etc and then child appropriate information about their birth circumstance then bring it back to the present so it is grounded it consistency, security and the people around the childre who make them feel loved. Is this people's experience of their children's life story work?

Yeah our sons was terrible, it had the names of three different children in and clearly information about those children as they had copy and pasted from the wrong child, it also had a photo of another childs birth mum. It was genuinely impressive how awful it was, it takes a lot of effort to make something so bad. Our daughter still hasn’t received one, so an 18 month wait so far.

My child didn’t get one either. After several years, I made my own and gave it to the social worker to give to my child. It did take a long time to do but not nearly 40 hours. A couple of hours in a few sittings maybe. But I suppose I know my child’s story incredibly well and didn’t need to look anything up really. The guidance I used (and I can’t remember where now) was start at present, establish what adoption is, look back, include info on legal process, present day, look to the future. The guidance is a more-write the first one with the child in years to come exploring aspects of the story.

Ours was also unuseably appalling. We’re doing our own.

I would say the books I have created took 40 hours. It all depends on the child's level of understanding, how much information you have, how complex the story is and how fancy you want it.

Our Lifestory is excellent. They asked for recent images, checked dates and spellings of names and photos of those who are important. The issues of abuse and neglect were approached with tact and were fitting to show a young child. We've been reading it off and on for three years (he is six now) and still likes to dip into it.

TBH, it must've taken ages to make as each page is laminated and in a huge folder with child friendly images on it. I guess it varies according to resources available, but the lady who completed it was evidently pretty handy at them!

He loves looking at his baby pictures 😄