Volunteering to demonstrate connection with children

[SMM16]

It’s been suggested that my husband and I will need to engage in some volunteering to ‘demonstrate our ability to connect with children’ despite us already having our own child. It’s not been confirmed by a SW yet as we are at the very beginning of the process but I’m intrigued to know whether anyone else has NOT volunteered but been approved at panel or NOT volunteered and then not approved because of it.

In my experience, people struggle to understand how different it is to be an adoptive parent to being a birth parent. It is very difficult to imagine before actually doing it.