Matches

[Thedandyanddude]

So I enquired about a child i saw on linkmaker, over 7 weeks ago. My social worker has told me she has requested info from the child's social worker several times and she doesn't seem in any rush to get back to my social worker.

I've now seen another child id like to know more about, would it be frowned upon to enquire about this child when I haven't heard back about the first child?

As someone who spent a long time in the matching stage, albeit close to ten years ago now, I would say that given you are only at the 'tentative enquiry' stage, and they are certainly not showing you that they are interested in progressing, it is fine to make enquiries about another child. When I was going through matching I certainly had lines of enquiry out about more than child at any given time. I would only be cautious if it is the same local authority placing both children, they might question your commitment to pursuing either child, especially if the two children are very different. You may not come across as very focussed in your criteria. Have a chat to your social worker though, and see what they say.

In short - yes, it's fine, particularly under those circumstances. We adopted via a Voluntary Agency and our family finder said ideally no more than four concurrent enquiries. But it's going to take you a million years to find a match if you pursue them one at a time in series, instead of at least somewhat in parallel, for exactly the reason you've discovered - so many of the people on the other side fielding enquiries are incredibly unresponsive.

I have to say that I'm not sure we would've wanted four open enquiries at one time and there's some judgement involved obviously as it depends what stage the enquiries are at. In your situation I would absolutely be still looking at every profile, every day on LinkMaker and making enquiries about any that felt potentially right. So yes - go ahead and enquire.

That said, the previous advice about checking which LA it is definitely stands, and in general it's best to discuss this with your family finding social worker.

Best of luck finding a match!

We had enquired about Child 1 and had a similar experience when we found Child 2. Child 2's social worker got back to us very fast and then followed a slightly painful experience of trying to extract sensible/ good quality information from them whilst they pushed the pace as much as possible (it's a long story and not for this thread, but they had their reasons due to what was going on at the time unknown to us, but it came across incredibly badly to us and as if they were trying to hide something - and our social worker agreed!)

Anyway long story short, as we learned more about Child 2 gradually we continued to ask our social worker to push for a response on Child 1 and we even asked for information about Child 3. But along the way Child 1 social worker finally got back to us with a no, and then we stopped chasing for info on Child 3 as Child 2 was definitely going somewhere (and we were linked, then matched, then Child 2 came home to us and now we have our AO!) We always felt really strange about Child 2, the one we were matched with, being the first child on whom we received any proper info (Child 3's info came to us later). It felt really odd that we only ever 'got to know' one child and 'went for it'. But at this point I'd say it was definitely the right thing.

Short story: Family finding is stressful and LinkMaker is awful, and the 'system' in its broadest sense is very overstretched. Don't hang back at this point, go for it! (albeit you're right to think about how things 'look' even now. One of the greatest things about receiving our AO was finally, finally. I no longer care what [insert long list of professionals] think about our motivations!

Good luck!

@sunshineandskyscrapers it is the same LA. The children are in the same age bracket, although this 2nd child has more "unknowns"

@OldForANewMum a part of me thinks "screw it" I'm just going to enquire, they obviously don't care how they appear so whyvshould I. But I'm a really cautious person, so would probably regret that. Was it difficult to get the first child and 3rd child our of your head or was it fine?

7 weeks is a long time to wait. I think we received first info within 2 weeks and our SW said it was slow. We initially couldn't decide between two children (it's so hard to decide and they were quite similar when reading their profiles). We discussed with our SW and they gave us more information about both we also attended an family finding event organized by our agency where we met the family finding SW so she could see us and we got more information about both children. We then chose one to move forward with.

Talk to your SW, 7 weeks is a long time to wait for information, it maybe that there's another family that they are considering.

It’s totally fine to enquire about another child. There may be lots of reasons why you’ve not heard about the first - there may a crisis for the child in care, the foster placement may have broken down, there may be issues in the legal process all of which might make it difficult for the social worker to pursue permanency right now.

You’re looking for a child that might become your child, you need to see which kids are available and expressing interest initially is a good thing. As one child looks more possible you’ll find information about others will drop off and you’ll follow the matching process with the one. I bloody hated matching tbh, hardest part of the process for me.

We were told 3 concurrent lines of enquiry, and we were methodical with it-so we had 2 that we thought we had a reasonable chance and then one which was a bit of a outside gamble, all within our parameters. We were with LA so obviously all the same placing authority.

I would think that they are relatively similar profiles is a positive- it isn't like you have asked for a 7 year old boy, early permanence unborn girl and 3 year old boy with significant special needs all at the same time. It fits within the categories of what you have said you are expecting to be able to support. It's creating an understanding of you as wanting to start your parenting with a certain profile of child.

I dunno, the etiquette of this stuff is the subject of a dissertation. Someone somewhere needs to write a book about the linguistic and social dance between prospective adoptive parents and social workers, with a sequel about how much that style has to change once you've been placed and have to start demanding stuff actually gets done. I remember analysing every email, every step, every conversation, the length of reply, whereas now we border on rudeness when we start off with "as per my last email, we expected a response within the stated timeframe of..." Because so many places are so rubbish.

Anyway.

Be as pushy as you think you can- our kids ended up spending an extra 3 months in foster care because social workers couldn't get themselves together before summer holidays, and literally only moved into gear because one of their foster carers called time on the placement to force their hand. I regret so much not asking for clear deadlines and holding to them. Maybe we wouldn't have had such rushed transitions and subsequent difficulties. It's your job to advocate for the child, even from the very start of your journey

Child 3 naturally fell out of our minds as we progressed with Child 2.

I think you should be discussing this with your family finding social worker - presumably you have one? 7 weeks is a wholly unreasonable amount of time to be entirely on hold. When you think about it, that's almost as long as Stage 2 assessments are supposed to last, and that's a regulated timescale for a reason (i.e. not to put off prospective adopters, if only it was that simple!)

Personally I'd be making the enquiry, but I remember well how it felt to feel so powerless and judged, one of the hardest experiences of my life. At this point though, as an approved adopter, you're starting to get some power in the process. Reach out to your family finding social worker and discuss with them, and unless they come up with a very good reason why not, enquire about the second child.

@OldForANewMum I wasn't sure if it was unreasonable or not, especially when all I've read on here is that you have to be patient in this process. It just seems like a lot of stalling.

Does anyone know how linkmaker actually works? I've seen children leave the site and then reappear. Is that them leaving because they have a match and then reappearing because its fallen through?

Some local authorities will remove children where someone expresses an interest to avoid a situation where 3 potential adopters are under consideration for the same child. I imagine the kids have been taken off a bit prematurely.

The other possibility is that there’s a kink in the legal process that needs ironed out before anything happens re linking, so they’re taken down and put back up once the issue is resolved.

Ah thank you! I wondered why I was seeing so many "reappear"