Linkmaker advice needed!

[waitinginwonderland]

Approved recently and on linkmaker now and feel completely overwhelmed! We’ve had lots of expressions of interest but none of the children feel quite right for our family to me, awful as that sounds! Did anyone have the experience of saying no? And did you feel a “pull” or just know when you saw your children? Many of the family finding social workers don’t appear to be reading our profile and are just sending us any children - some are well outside of the age range we are approved for!

I'm a professional not an adopter, but I can tell you this is all very normal. Social workers are sometimes pretty desperate to find adopters for children they are working with, simply because the kids have already been in the system for a long while. It's also totally normal to give a lot of "no's" and you can take your time and get a feel for it all, no rush.

Re the "pull", some adopters do wait for that immediate emotional connection to a profile, but others approach things much more logically based on their own criteria. Neither is better and neither results in better matches imo, it's just a matter of your own personality. The only thing to watch out for is the obsession with the "perfect" match which can lead to never finding the right child and is something I see from time to time, but as it's still early days for you I wouldn't be pushing you to be more open minded at this stage, just go with it for now.

Thank you! We’re approved for two and would really like to bring siblings home even if takes a bit longer, but people are sending me single children’s profiles and I feel so guilty saying no!

To be honest, even though you are approved for siblings, I would not rule out singles. Please read up about sibling trauma bonds. Not all sibling relationships are healthy. Sometimes it can be good/helpfuI to focus one child at a time. I think there is enough discussion about this in preparation training. I know there can be a temptation to create an instant family but there are so many factors at play here.

I second what @ThePieceHall says. I’m an adoptive grandmother and can see how my grandchild has thrived through being on only child. They would have really struggled with a sibling. I know a lot of adoptive families who brought home siblings and are facing tremendous challenges because of trauma bonding.

Many of the family finding social workers don’t appear to be reading our profile and are just sending us any children - some are well outside of the age range we are approved for!

Yes, this is normal. The job of the family finder is to find families so it's not unusual for them to cast as wide a net as possible, particularly for hard to place children. It's not efficient for them to comb Linkmaker reading each profile. They will only take the time to read your profile if you're genuinely interested in the child, and then they still might not if they are already sitting on the profiles of 40 other interested families. If you are new to Linkmaker though, you might find that the frequency of profiles being sent to you slows down after an initial flurry.

The family finding stage is really hard. It's probably the most important decision you will make in your life. You do need a combination of head and heart. I echo what others have said above about keeping an open mind. Try to look at reasons to rule in children rather than rule them out. Over time, you may find your criteria shifts. Mine certainly did.

Have you spoken to your social worker about feeling overwhelmed? Depending on their own workload and also on how many children are waiting within your own local authority, they may be able to take some of the sifting off your hands or simply recommend stepping away from Linkmaker while (s)he explores other avenues.

Thank you for your reply! I think I just wanted reassurance that it’s normal and I’m definitely keeping an open mind, we’ve got a couple of activity days coming up too that we’ve been invited on.

My daughters are adults in their late 20s now but we cannot leave them alone together for a second (very long story about what they both get up to). We cannot even have them sit together in the back of the car and at home or in a restaurant, I have to take one of them to the toilet with me. And they are both supposed adoption success stories.

Sibling rivalry has been our single biggest issue. It was there in foster care and it never went away.

I would be very cautious about siblings tbh and if you want to proceed, get it in writing that you can have an adoption allowance if needed, and make sure it's not income dependant.

I felt exactly the same throughout the matching process - we were approved April 25 and are just about to start introductions now. Most of the profiles just felt like images of other people’s children, and what little text was there was not really enough to spark any interest. Considering how significant adoption will be in their lives, it’s astounding how little effort is put into some of the profiles on Linkmaker. None really do any of the children justice.

We found it much better when you actually meet the children in real life. The first child we met to be matched with felt like the complete wrong child - a great child which met all the criteria but somehow wasn’t ours. We ended the match before we went to panel, our social worker was surprised but ultimately supportive - it was hard choice but ultimately the right decision.

After that we went to some activity days - they are terrifying and daunting at first, but it completely convinced me we would eventually find the right child. We met many lovely children and expressed interest in a few of them, which for various different reasons didn’t proceed. But finally (after 9 months) we met the child who is on the verge of moving in.

In my opinion Linkmaker doesn’t give a real sense of any of the children on it, and some of the ones we dismissed on Linkmaker we later met in person and expressed interest in them. It’s much easier to feel something when you see a child in the real world.

Our kids were picked by Sw and we were given the option to say Yes or No. We definitely didn’t have an ‘OMG, these are our kids’ feeling or even particularly, a spark. We look nothing like each other. But there wasn’t really any reason to say No. Anyway, needless to say, 14 years on and they are absolutely perfect and I can’t imagine life without them 🥰🥰