More Contact with Birth Families

[Arran2024]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3vl5w3zy2eo

I think I contributed to this - I definitely commented on proposals around contact as part of a research study recently. I said then that I thought they were being naive and I'm sticking to it!

As someone who did agree to direct contact with family and bent over backwards to facilitate it, I have very mixed views about this.
My son was 8 at adoption with pre existing relationships which were largely positive. I could see the benefit to him in trying to continue.
I struggle with children who are adopted as babies and have very little or no memory of birth family.
Absolutely all children should have the information available to them and be supported in making their own decisions about contact when they are able to.
The circumstances in which adopted children are removed from birth family is also for me a relevant factor.
My son's dad was no danger to him. He just wasn't capable of looking after him.
I think there is a huge difference between a parent who loses their child, usually the mother, because of their own mental health or other issues who then gets their life on track and those who do wilful harm to their children and commit crimes against then.
I just don't think you can have a one size fits all approach. Decisions should be made on a case by case basis according to the specific circumstances of the child- and with their best interests at the heart.

Agree it should be case by case. It's a different landscape now with social media where children can make the contact themselves as teens and then it can very quickly get inappropriate and intrusive if the birth family make it so. Maybe having a longer term relationship built in a safe space could help mitigate that risk.

I can see this putting off adopters though. More face to face contact may make them feel like less of a parent/family and more like a convenient caretaker.

I can honestly say I never felt like a convenient caretaker or less of a real family.
I'm now a foster carer and it's a very different beast than adoption.
As a foster carer I've had to take a child to monthly meetings with a parent which I considered highly damaging to him, plus multiple contacts with siblings.
My current child does not have contact but as he is section 20, parent has to be informed/consulted about everything, even haircuts. I cannot take this child any where without permission.
As an adopter there is a clear legal boundary and none of this 'interference' in our day to day lives

The best people to manage this, and to understand the risks and benefits, and who usually have the children's interests most central are... The adopters.

Contact should be made much much easier for adopters, with obligations on local authorities to greater support birth parents and adoptive families with contact, and FUNDING that. Like practical things like getting birth parents a pre booked taxi etc.

But ultimately, it needs to remain in the power of adopters.

It's interesting in that article that letterbox stopped only when the child requested it, and contact restarted when the child, now adult, requested it. That sounds like the correct procedure?

Plus "adoption is a life sentence with no appeals?" There are of course multiple chances offered to birth families to appeal etc.

For us to consider direct contact, the children would have to want to (they don't), birth parents would need a lot of support and funding to attend, and we would need funding and support to attend. These are all barriers that don't come from us as adopters!

Plus add in a dynamic of children who have been permanently harmed by the choices of their birth parents. It's very complex, and needs to be well resourced and bespoke for each family, from local government. And we all know what LA resources are like.

Oh, and there's no question that I'm my kids' real parent. Direct contact wouldn't change that!

But I can see the reporting is like that- the long lost families idea of reunification.

I think direct contact might actually counter that damaging idea from birth family, that a child is "adopted out" and will return at 18. Birth family would be faced far more with the reality that their child is a full and belonging part of a totally different family.

As adopters, we understand that our children had a first family. I think if anyone sees us as caretakers, then it's some birth families, who see Davina MacCall in their future, which isn't usually the case.

Like all the fathers whose exes stop them seeing the kids, I think there will be lots of birth parents stopped from having contact. With the truth of the situation probably being quite different to their story!

It could be beneficial that direct contact isn't automatically ruled out in most cases like it has been, but I'd like to think adopted parents would have a leading role in the decision-making (once they have been the parents for a while). For very young children it could be very confusing and it obviously depends on the nature of the birth parents too and where they are at in their lives.

Social media has definitely made things tricky for adopted teens. My eldest contacted her family at 18 - on my advice she phoned the LA for support but was too anxious to fully take in what they said and decided to jump right in by using FB to contact her bm. It was a worrying time for us, but essentially, after the initial excitement, we discovered firstly that the family were no threat to us (they were actually respectful) and dd discovered that she didn't really feel part of her birth family either. She still maintains some contact but rarely meets them in person now, although they live in our area.

Youngest has always had a negative view of her bm (removed at a few months old) - separate family from her sister. She also made contact through FB - this was before she turned 18 - but has never met any of them in real life - only messages and phone calls, mostly with her half sisters. Nothing recently.

I have to say the contact in both cases seems to have confirmed to them that we are their family and there isn't much ongoing interest in being a part of their birth families. So for us, and seemingly them, despite both making unregulated contact, it has turned out to be positive. I would much have preferred it to have been facilitated properly though, with counselling involved.

I think that there are trends in adoption. For the lastv 25 years or so, adopters got organised and got their (our) needs listened to. But now it's shifting to the adopted children. Some of them, now adults, are organising, and making their wishes known. AUK has stated a desire to do more for adoptees. And I see this as part of that move. Imo it is based on good intentions but impractical and naive.

There is a post on here, a few threads down, from someone thinking of adoption but worried about contact. With surrogacy becoming ever more popular, how is this going to help children in care find families?

If it's adequately funded and supported, planned contact could be much easier to manage as an adopter than unexpected social media or internet driven contact.

The idea of a "letterbox" is outdated. It should be a secure online repository or something, at least. But if society wants more direct contact (and for many, I can see it being beneficial) them society needs to resource that.

I don't think adopters (good ones, anyway) will be put off, or go to people trafficking (which is what surrogacy is) over being asked to consider direct contact or contact in a more modern way.

Adoption rates are well down and surrogacy is one of the reasons. There are agencies pushing it here. Gay men are particularly being targeted. They use surrogates in Mexico etc. Very unregulated. I know someone heavily involved in infertility counselling and she tells me it's huge.

I agree about social media and modern technology forcing the issue really. If a teen is set on making contact with birth family they can usually do so. If they are doing that covertly it can have very difficult consequences. Better they grow up knowing their family in a lot of cases.

Problem I can forsee is children who decide they no longer want to see their family, or who find seeing them distressing, and how that is managed,. As with the child who didn't want letterbox in the article. I do think it will put some adopters off too - but again, probably not the ones you want.

I don't think someone with the ethical code that allows them to feel ok buying a baby from abroad would make a good adopter anyway. So it's good they're self filtering out.

They're unlikely to be the sort of people who understand developmental trauma. Or they wouldn't separate a newborn from its mother voluntarily.

I get that, but it is just another reason adoption rates are low. Add in ongoing contact...

Hi, I've been thinking about this a lot, so forgive me for ranting and rambling. I'm hijacking the post a bit, so sorry if any of these things are off topic, but I have many thoughts and not many places to share them!

I think it might put off some adopters who are not willing to engage with the complexity of adoption at least on a theoretical level. Whether that's a bad thing or not remains to be seen- to this day I remain perpetually amazed when I have conversations with some adopters who just sort of gloss over the moral and ethical aspects of adoption, and their lack of acknowledgement that they may play a part in the systemic oppression of a minority or underprivileged group, regardless of how good their intentions are. The lack of compassion for birth parents never ceases to amaze me, and the complex duality of adoption often goes unnoticed until it is too late. Maybe a system with direct contact as a default may allow some closer contact between APs and BPs that would otherwise have been missed, and a more nuanced view of BPs to emerge more generally. One doesn't have to stray far from the confines of the Mumsnet forum to find many adoptive social media spaces filled with people full of self righteous indignation about how they adopted their babies and will always be their one and only mummy and so on and so forth with very little recognition of the fact that for adoptees this may feel more complicated, and we may have (shock, horror) to stray beyond the bounds of having only one mum, and recognise the roles that multiple women can play in a child's life. Nuance does, unfortunately, not around in many of these spaces!

I suspect in practice, ultimately social workers may err on the side of caution with recommending contact, especially if pressure starts to build on them to support contact in ways that feel more secure, or face legal challenges when it inevitably goes wrong and they hadn't foreseen something. It is a shame that the government doesn't seem to be willing to put their money where their mouth is and fund extra contact centres, specially trained social workers, stuff like that.

The burden seems to be placed squarely on the adopters shoulders, but with no legal obligation to continue contact (how can adopters be legally compelled to do something that isn't in the interests of their legal child?) then it won't be long before a movement builds that recognises that it can easily become a checkbox thing that you can decline to participate in once the AO is signed. What will they do, take the child back into care? Fine you? Put you in prison? And without the appropriate support long term (and who on earth knows how that will work out-like I've said, who is able to make decisions about BPs and where they are in their life? Where are the army of psychotherapists who are able to help support children who are at risk of being retraumatised? Any special training for social workers to help them support potentially fraught interactions?)

Obviously, from my previous posts it will be pretty obvious that I support wholeheartedly the concept and idea of direct contact. We asked for it, and would still be open to it if a mechanism opened up that we had confidence in to support all parties. However, our very experienced assessing social worker, who had previously pushed us on being open to direct contact, was very clear that her recommendation was for letterbox only because she had no faith in the ongoing mechanisms to support all parties moving forward, and the risk was too great. Having experienced subsequent social worker incompetence, I concur. The risk to our children of poorly managed contact would be devastating, far outweighing the benefits.

It's just interesting to me that the article doesn't have examples of successful (from the POV of the adopted) childhood contact, and although I know they do exist because some people I know have maintained BP relationships, they weren't really able to find anyone for the article?

As with any trend or fad, there will be a generation of adopters coming through for whom this will become the new normal, and we will be all be the doddering old dinosaurs who are living in the past as we wail and gnash our teeth about contact, I'm sure, but I do worry about the capacity of the system to cope with any fallout... Or not, as the case may be, in which case who will pick up the pieces when inexperience adoptive families and direct contact inexperienced social workers stress test a system that could quickly snowball?

The numbers are also staggering. 3000 adoptions a year, if say 80% go to direct contact, 2,400 a year, if even 10%of those have problems that require support that's 240 a year. Within 5 years you are looking at 1200 families potentially needing ongoing, highly specialised, nuanced support from multiple agencies, potentially including police, social workers, multiple adoptive and foster families, CAMHS and schools. For a system that currently can't handle letterbox or changing a child's NHS number with any degree of efficiency, not to allocate specific funding, training or resources, I believe is naievety bordering on wilful neglect.

As with the shift towards the focus on therapeutic parenting being the first line of defense (rather than, you know, funded therapy), it very much feels like agencies are basically going to say "we've filled out the paperwork -well someone who has met the family once has looked at it, here's a guidance pack.about how to meet up safely in a park. Don't go alone, leave if your kid gets upset and uh.. Don't drink hot coffee. There, we've done what we were supposed to, you've had your single supervised contact, off you pop now. Enjoy."

I suspect that people who have adopted and settled children may have biological siblings come along for whom this blanket assumption will be in place, and priority will subsequently be given to adopters who will maintain relationships with birth family rather than siblings being placed together if adopters refuse to have contact with BPs. I don't know how I feel about that- would guaranteed contact and a bond with bio siblings being better or worse than intermittent and potentially fraught contact with BPs? Maybe, as the BP relationship could be more significant than siblings... Maybe?

But then again, direct contact may be with a grandparent or aunty or uncle too. Or, I'm sure I saw somewhere, potentially a family friend. So the links become more tenuous or more nuanced too. Will the person remain the same for all siblings? I think the assumption here is that BP families remain constant, whereas the reality is that may not be the case. Even as adopters, how many times have we seen our own family dynamics change, those that we thought knew us best fade away? And so when you look at contact, there is a difference between maintaining relationships that have already formed (I.e with an older child) and then the adults making choices about who they will maintain a relationship with on the child's behalf. Which aunty do you choose? Why that one? I like to imagine that social workers get it right, but nobody can see the future. Arguments happen, people fall out. Letterbox at least allows BPs who are in a bad place delay or mete out the letters, share them with people or not as the case may be. Direct contact is in the moment, more volatile, and how can you make a true judgement call about whether the person they are seeing (if not BPs) is still in contact with BPs? Or not as the case may be?

None of these questions or issues are things that necessarily mean that direct contact is a bad idea, or that things aren't moving in the right direction. I do think it is a stretch to say that adoption is being turned into long term foster care, but I understand why people feel that way.

Ultimately, I think there will be many bunps in the road, but unfortunately that is children's lives that are being messed with.

Sorry, one more thing, I do also worry that the focus on contact may deter certain geographical placements. What if someone in Cornwall is matched perfectly with someone in Newcastle? Is someone providing funding for the BPs and adoptive families to meet? Or will this be a case of "of the BPs wanted it enough they would make it work? " What about the adoptive family on the bones of their arse who can't afford to take their kids away for several days to see a birth relative several hours away? I suspect once again it will fall on adopters to make most of the arrangements and accomodations, making them accessible to BPs as well as their own children. I the suspect that if agencies are placing children, there will be a rise in post adoption order support agreements that will require financial input from the LAs in the form of grants or allowances for tricky to place children to be placed out of area if the commitment is for the children to have contact. But is this sustainable across the years? Or if there is not funding, are we essentially saying to children oh the reason you don't get to see your BPs is because they weren't rich and nor were your adoptive parents. Boohoo, sucks to be you. How damaging! So there must be a element of allowance that will have to be built into these offers.

I resonate strongly with what others have written, @Torvy especially is moving in what your wrote. My concerns are twofold:

1- the bbc article and indeed other things I've read always frames things as it being the adopters who are the ones throwing up roadblocks, but I don't think this matches reality. Social care departments that are chronically underfunded and lacking in skilled workers are by far the biggest problem. Letters regularly go missing in the hands of Social care, Adopters personal details are accidentally shared with BPs, little to no support in writing them or dealing with the fallout for both BPs, Adopters and children. So how do they propose managing f2f?!

Secondly it's been experience that many SWs lack the skills and most importantly time and space to learn and reflect when they are managing complex or unusual cases. My daughter is profoundly disabled due to months long, highly sadistic and violent physical abuse perpetrated by BPs. The recent coverage of Sara Sharif's case is very similar to my daughter, except my daughter survived with horrendous lifelong injuries and emotional trauma. My daughter is obviously terrified of them, she knows them only as her abusers and does not see them as her parents. Despite BPs criminal convictions and 'no contact' orders, Social care got themselves absolutely stuck in following the 'usual' path. They told me to meet BPs f2f before placement, when I said no they arranged phonecalls which I also declined. They arranged letterbox which violated the non contact order. They sought BPs input into the lifestory book and asked them to contribute to it. It's been awful and consistently puts "good pracrice" above the welfare of my child. I have completely lost faith in the child protection system.

@Torvy brilliant, thank you, so insightful and thought provoking.
Also the Don't drink hot coffee really made me laugh!

@hollytree1 I'm so sorry to hear about your child's experiences. It must be extra difficult at the moment reading the news and having to relive each element of that each time.

Your experiences with social workers just highlight what a need there is to really be cautious and ensure that all parties have the requisite training and understanding of this. After all, the ramifications are huge, and if it is mishandled then the consequences for the child are massive- having to move house or school because they inadvertently let their homework address or teachers name slip so they are located, the guilt and worry that they can't tell APs what BP meetings mean to them emotionally, and potential re triggering contact without appropriate support. It is genuinely my concern that without the right support for social workers too, their lack of experience will have these contacts breaking all sorts of laws and rules that could be potentially legally....tricky. I'm intrigued to see how these will play out in the future, and suspect a healthy increase in legal challenges if this is to go ahead on many levels.

However, I do think that ultimately, once the furore has settled down and systems have kicked into place, a realistic prospect might be that:

In cases of significant abuse, it seems quite clear cut to me- surely as parents it is neglectful to allow your child contact with someone with a direct track record or abuse against your child. I had to promise the social workers I wouldn't ever let my child get into the car with my brother driving because he got a drink driving conviction after one too many pints at the pub a decade ago and that I would break all ties with him immediately if he did it again. I think there is fair grounds to be critical of a policy that demonises the adopters family if contact with a known and proven abuser is permitted. However, that seems like commmon sense, and lord only knows sometimes that feels like it is in short supply sometimes.

I suspect that direct contact is likely to become predominantly with a family member who is not the birth parent (siblings in care or who are adopted, older siblings who have less contact with parents, paternal grandparents who have no capacity to parent the themselves but aren't an active danger, maternal grandparents who just were suitable for ill health, an aunty who bucked the birth family trend and is now away at uni studying social work herself), things like that. With siblings it feels much more manageable (although not without risks, as I outlined above).

I would also like to imagine that prospective adopters are found by adoption communities who can advise them about contact arrangements before matches are made and AOs signed. Therefore they can benefit from the experience of someone other than adoption social workers, people who have the lived experience.

I would hope that there was some serious recognition given to foster carer experience with BPs and how they experienced the child after contact (although how to communicate this to the child might be hard- if BPs start to realise that if the child reacts badly after contact, they may not see them after adoption, they may put pressure on the child to not be honest about how they are feeling.

I hope that the training for birth parents is rigourous as letterbox in positioning them and their comments as either helpful or unhelpful, and that being a valid basis on which to guide adoptive parents as to what is and isn't appropriate. Whatever training letterbox coordinators currently go through, we need that as adoptive parents.

I hope there is a mechanism built in for a graded system of contact- there is a long way between letterbox and face to face contact. It could include anonymised number phonecalls, known number phonecalls, WhatsApp messages between parents, video calls with a anonymised background (maybe in a social workers office, and for BPs with a support worker until they are ready), short videos of the children being shared. Adoptive families could move between them more organically, but with each party being about to scale and number the interactions where they feel comfortable. However, obviously, once you move past the anonymous part, that is where the unchartered waters lie.

Ultimately, I think that the system will rumble on, and what is recommended as the ideal will be diluted by mixture of pre existing caution amongst social workers, ingenious workarounds through contact with other family members dragged out of the woodwork, a nod to "creative" contact -e.g video calls against a white background, the highlighting and parading of a few success stories where contact could have been done originally but just wasn't because it wasn't the done thing, and legal challenges tempering the initial enthusiasm of a new trendy social worker managers who are pressuring their social workers to get the box checked. Nothing like a legal challenge and threat of being sued because a social worker gave the wrong contact details to the wrong person and now it's all gone tits up to really put the kibosh onto any over enthusiastic idealistic application of policy. It's amazing how many suggestions become suddenly inconvenient for your child when you suggest that it may become litigious were anything to go wrong.

@Confusernme can you tell Ive had social worker "guidance" before? 😂

Interesting points, as ever.

We were actually open to direct contact when we adopted. Grandparents didn't want it as they thought they would be too upset. Birth dad was a convicted paedophile so he wasn't allowed any contact at all. Birth mother wasn't interested.

Sws felt that it would be detrimental to the older half sisters, who were now in long term foster care. They thought they would be jealous and that their placements could be undermined.

It is not as easy to keep contact going with people who are themselves traumatised. Imo you need high levels of support.

We reconnected with the half siblings a few years ago. We had to come upcwith a plan as letterbox was aging out.

We had social workers assigned to us and to each of the half siblings (who were not speaking). We had asf life story therapy for both of my girls. We drew up contracts around expectations, photos, gifts etc. I went to the placing LA ( a long way away) and met with one sister then the other, with a sw involved. Then I took one of my girls up to meet one of the half sisters - the other one didn't want to proceed- and then later I took the other one. Both were with sw present. Later the other half sister did proceed so we repeated it.

It was full on. Then the sisters visited our town ( separately) and we had a few years of good contact and then it all went very badly wrong. My younger daughter will not have anything to do with either of them.

It is likexwe needed a third party involved at all contact. They are all too traumatised to do it themselves.

we offered one direct contact a year as our child has complex needs and will never be capable of looking for his birth family when he is older and more importantly we adopted our foster child so we had worked through the awkward stage with birth parents already and had a reasonably good relationship.with them. In all honesty we did it for their benefit as our son doesn't have the capacity to know who they are and therefore would get little positive from any direct contact.
The reality is that they quickly lost interest and have not taken advantage of the contact offered for over 5 yrs now. And this is a valid reservation in my opinion because as a foster carer I have seen how hard it is for many parents to maintain any sort of level.of commitment which could cause further psychological damage to children many of whom are already struggling with attachment and identity issues.

A final thought is looking at the state of social care at present I simply cannot see any way that the intensive support required would be available to all those concerned and I think it would v much be a case of adoptive families being left to get on with it and manage any fallout as best they could. Frankly that is a pressure no one needs and so I think that whilst it could be beneficial.in some cases it is unlikely to be manageable in a lot of situations .

A few weeks ago our youngest son ( now early thirties) sent pictures of him and his wife and his older half sister( who remained in foster care) and her partner in a sports bar and then another photo of them axe throwing ! 2 couples having fun. We adopted our younger 2 sons who were then 8 and 6 with contact with their older sister who was in her early teens and lived 100 miles away They had lived with her til they were 6 and 4 . We took them to see her twice a year and her foster carer brought her to London twice a year. She came on holiday with us twice. Ny mid teens she was coming down by train on her own. By our sons mid teens we would go and stay near her foster carers and they would spend time together. I suppose they saw each other 4/5 times a year. By early twenties they were going up to stay with her and we all went to her wedding and she came to our sons wedding. I would describe their relationship as close. She cares about them and they care about her - a bit like cousins who have been brought up in different families but enjoy seeing one another.

One thing that is very rarely mentioned is Children can be placed in very different areas to where they might have grown up if they had stayed in their original local authority. Our sons came to live in inner London. Their sister lives in a village in a very rural county. Their accents are very different As a teenager she wanted to move in with us as she thought where we live was more exciting! We explored it with social workers but it was not right.

For our sons it has worked because we kept commmunication open with their sisters foster parents. We encouraged contact. And when their sister graduated a few years ago ( in her late twenties) we could not have been more proud.

As older teenagers they made links with wider birth family . And now are in touch with aunts,uncles and cousins. ( there are no safeguading issues)

I am an adult adoptee and from a very different era (1970s).

How is this supposed to work with very young children who have never lived with their birth family?

It's of course different if the child did and has memories of them but then you'd need to manage safety and other types risks.

It feels like there is no answer here regarding contact that would be 'right' for everyone.

But I think that the child should be allowed an undisturbed period of time to focus on bonding with the adoptive family.

What's totally missing here is the considerable stress put on a child managing their adoptive parents and biological family's reaction to this situation. It's being framed as totally positive, which it won't be. Maybe the best you can say for some people is more positive than negative. But there are lots of unarticulated downsides here.

We have direct contact with one of the birth parents, usually via video call due to distance. We also send things in the post, so the kids will make a card etc, we also send a yearly photo book. Theres also an email address so we can send videos etc to be saved. Birth parent also sometimes sends us stuff via a PO box.

How often varies, now our sons older he’ll generally chat to her once a month, our daughters too little to take a real interest, so she just causes chaos in the background. Birth parent typically keeps the camera off when one of us have set the video up, that way if birth parent looks a mess, or gets a bit upset its hidden so our son doesn’t worry. It also means any back ground chaos is hidden too. So birth parent will send pre-recorded bits every so often.

I would wonder how much and how effective support would be for birth parents, our son doesn’t consider them his parents and so doesn’t use mum or dad and instead uses first names, when direct contact started the birth parent had been primed that they would be called by their name, but obviously the reality of that happening was of course really tough on them. You also need a plan if contact abruptly stops for a while, we’re honest in an age appropriate way, so BP is unwell so can’t chat, but might like a card etc.

I think @OVienna makes a good point about the potential stress on the children. I’m an adoptee, was adopted as a small baby in the 1950s, so everything was very different to nowadays. However, as quite a young child, I felt very aware of not wanting to upset my parents (adoptive). I had a good, happy upbringing and loved my parents dearly. I can imagine that if I’d been in the position of meeting with birth parents too, I’d have been trying very hard to keep everyone happy. The stress could be huge for the children and, knowing something of the problems facing children’s services at the moment, I suspect that proper support for all involved will be pretty thin on the ground.

My girls' birth mother scapegoated the elder of the two. It sang out in the few letters she did send - she only ever made snarky references to her and only showed a real interest in her little sister.

She was no way appropriate to have direct contact. But also, social services sent these inappropriate letters on to me.

Just setting direct contact up between traumatised people, some of whom were perpetrators of violence and abuse, is crazy. Domestic violence victims are advised not to take part in reparations with their perpetrator - why is it OK for abused and neglected children?

I do feel that there may be a emerging theme within discussions about older children not wanting to continue contact and some difficult conerstaions about what that might mean for BPs too. One of ours has made it very clear that he has zero desire to have any cohact with BM, and when we look at that, I don't know that I can really blame him. Plenty of people have gone low or no contact with people who have done much less than that.

It is complex where siblings may have different ideas, but I suppose wasn't that ever so? If you have one who is over 18 and decides to make "legitimate"" contact, but a 14 year old still under the age for files, you will have to deal with it regardless.

@MrsMatty is right about the stress on the children. At the moment the idea of mine trying to keep me happy seem laughable when they so clearly don't give a hoot about my blood pressure as I'm trying to get them to put their school shoes on in the morning, but one day I have high hopes that they might develop the desire not to see me brought to the brink of madness each morning due to their sudden miraculous inability to see the shoe in the middle of the floor. However, jests aside, they are incredibly perceptive, and I can definitely see my eldest beginning to make some judgements about his interactions with me based on a nascent sense of empathy. Which I'm trying to develop, obviously, because him noticing that I'm dealing with cooking dinner, a meltdowning 3 year old and a smoking toaster so now isn't a great time for me to put the arm back on his minifigure is probably a great skill to have in life. But I can see how that, combined with his usual hypervigilance of other adults, and extra stress about any meeting with BPs could mean that he could end up thinking it was his job to manage our emotional state, when it isn't.

I've also been thinking about how it might deter families from taking on siblings. I assume that a judge would make orders based on the individual child, and so it may well be that they order contact with all BPs. For a sibling set of 2, this could potentially include 3 visits, maybe further away, and the logistics of that could be tricky, especially if you are also trying to maintain contact with foster carers too. Every couple of months you could be yoyoing upon and down the country.

Also, what if child 1 was not permitted contact, or was with BD1 but not BM. But second child was permitted contact with BM and BD2. It isn't a huge stretch too imagine the BPs all know each other, and they have no obligation per se to keep secrets or be discreet. Each child has the right to a judge prioritising them during care proceedings, but it could definitely throw a spanner in the works when the complexities of sibling dynamics are introduced. I can imagine that for many families, the potential to makeongoing siblings issues more entrenched could have a devastating impact (potentially more than intermittent contact with BPs because they are together every day) , and prospective adopters will have to be much more savvy in terms of being aware of the future ramifications for family building.

@Simonjt I will be honest, I had never thought about BPs not being on screen for those reasons. That's an interesting dynamic, as I had assumed BPs would want to be seen, but it all makes sense. I guess it would rely upon BPs and APs having the kind or relationship where BPs were able to be vulnerable enough to share that about themselves in advance.

I was also wondering whether anybody knew how this might work if a BP was put in prison/rehab? Like, could there be legislation or guidance to make this a priority if contact is already established? How devastating if you had worked hard to get some stuff together, had it all planned out,were willing to continue contact and then just kept getting scuppered by institutions who didn't understand how important it was because there is no remaining legal relationship. I assume that there wouldn't necessarily be any thought given to that when sentencing or anything, but in terms of long term success, I do think there should be some thinking about that.

I wonder if, in the long run, putting adopters as a whole in direct contact with BPs might begin a bit of a shift in things like that. Out of necessity it may be that you are out into contact with institutions you wouldn't normally be in contact with in order to advocate for your child's right to see them, and it may well be that in doing so, some additional pressure on authorities knowing that they have a tenacious AP who won't give up questioning exactly what is happening might improve some situations for BPs. But the burden of that is heavy too. If I'm out there begging a prison to find a time that they can make a video call with my son's BF work because no bugger else has done it before and some prison governor has decided to make it the letter of the law to prevent it, I'm not spending that time advocating for his EHCP for example.

It's so easy too down the what ifs and maybes, but I think in pushing out the hypothetical situations and discussing them to their logical extremes, you can come across a real set of tangible needs and guiding principles.

Obviously, practicalities will always win. Humans will always find ways to do things that work, or will disengage, or miss appointments, or find ways around authority rulings. I'm not saying that people won't make things work, but I feel that the people in charge of this have a duty and an obligation to consider all different situations and put a mechanism in place to support the most vulnerable children as a proactive measure, rather than a reactive one. It brings me peace contemplating what other mysterious figures in the government need to do rather than trying to figure out how my laundry pile has grown into a mountain when I'm sure I only finished it yesterday! Everyone needs a hobby 😂