Adoption Advice

[claraP84]

Has anyone who has Adopted a child give me some advice please.

I am doing a lot of research into adoption and would like to hear if some “real life” adoption stories.

My biggest worry, fear is if I adopt a child, when they are 18 and would want to naturally find their birth parents I will feel rejected. This sounds incredibly selfish I know but it is a huge fear of mine.

I have always wanted to adopt, more so than have my own children. I know it will be tough, especially if I adopt an older child as they will probably have an unsettled upbringing.

Has anyone on here adopted, and how did you find it.

No judgement please 🙏

Hi. You are expected to have ongoing contact with birth family these days, even if just through the regular exchange of letters. You will be expected to share life story information about birth family with your child right from the start. You could well be adopting an older child who remembers birth parents.

So your issue is not so much about "finding" birth parents at 18, but how you would cope with all of this.

My children are adults now and neither have sought out their birth parents. But they know all about them and tbh this is why they are not interested - it's grim reading.

I’m not going to say it’s easy because it’s anything but….but you have to accept that your child has another family there’s no getting away from that. Unfortunately for us birth mum was fairly unhinged, naming their nursery, threatening to snatch them, threatening to hurt us. We moved but were so scared for our child’s safety, lied about where we were going and ghosted everyone.

Every subsequent appearance in our lives (letterbox messing up because they’re all eijits and adoption of siblings) lobs a hand grenade into our lives and another round of her chaos. My child is also badly disabled because of her actions and has a bleak outlook longterm.

However, adoption has to be child centric and you have to do what’s best for your child regardless of your own feelings. Despite how much I dislike her for what she’s done I have to be positive and keep that door open for my child in case they one day want to build a relationship. Rationally I know she is someone who never had a first never mind second chance at life so we talk about her in terms of life opportunities and bad choices.

As an aside it’s the best thing we’ve ever done and although I always say I walked through hell barefoot to adopt them and lost a fair wodge of my mental health I’d do it all again in a heartbeat to be my child’s mother.

Parenting in the best of circumstances requires a lot of sacrifice and selflessness. In adoption, that is true tenfold. You would have to accept that your child has another family, that they will need to know about that family and that contact (ongoing and at 18) is a possibility in most cases. You will have to accept these things because it's in the best interest of the child you adopt.

Lots of research from the lived experience of adopters tells us that the more open and honest we are with adoptive children about their birth family, the better it is for the child, because imagination often fills in the gaps. So the child who doesn't know much about their birth family might imagine they were rejected by their birth family for some reason, or at the other extreme they might convince themselves that they were stolen unfairly from their birth family, and would have had a much happier life with them, for example. Or they can just be curious about who they are and struggle with missing part of their identiry.

These thoughts are natural and come up no matter how loving and devoted the adoptive parent is.

Unfortunately as a professional I have seen these scenarios play out in real life, and it causes huge damage. A particular issue is that these days most adolescents can find their family on social media if they want to. I've seen many cases where when the adoptee reaches adolescence, feels curious, but unable to talk to their adoptive parent, takes matters into their own hands, and connects with birth family without discussing it with any adult at all. You can imagine this is often catastrophic all round.

So in summary- adoption requires a great deal of selflessness, and this is one example where you have to put your own (also entirely natural) feelings aside in the best interests of your child.

I felt like this too when we first started talking about adoption. Then as I went through the training and the process it just started to make sense and become a lot less scary.
Several years later and now deeply in love with an actual adopted child it’s a daunting prospect but one that I feel I am much more equipped to deal with because basically I’d do absolutely anything for him.

Like a previous poster said, you need to accept that your child has two families and in my view the two are equally important (others might disagree with that). Adoption is not a moment in time, it is lifelong. You need to be completely at peace with that. We are not a birth family and never will be. And that is fine.

I was surprised by how much my children wanted to speak about their birth family. For years we spoke of them pretty much daily. At some point, their birth parents felt like relatives to me, relatives I had heard a lot about but never met.

My children are young adults now and we are all in frequent direct contact with their birth siblings which is mostly very positive. One of my children is in highly infrequent social media contact with her birth parents. She is well attached to us, so it is not a problem. My other child has chosen not to be in contact with anyone else than her siblings, which is a wise choice for her.