Should we be allowed to adopt a child who is mixed race, when we are white?

[PSCMUM]

I think so.
I think the travesty of thousands (is this right?) maybe hundreds, anyway loads, of mixed race and black and asian children languishing in care without a permanent family whilst there are so many people who would love them and be their parents, well i think it is just awful.

also if a hld iz mixed race, surely they are MIXED race, not just black or white, so it should be black or white or mixed race adopters who should be considered?

Porpsective adopters and little children in need of parents are losing out and why?
any views?

Also does anyone know anything about inter country adoption? does it ever happen without you needing about £60billion or so at your disposal?!

THANK YOU.
i'm just really dispirited after finally deciding to go for it< ringing round agencies and local authorities today and being basically told that although they have loads of kidS< INcludING under 3s who are in need of adoption, they are black or mixed race and ew are white so we can@t have them> its just madness. i accept it'd be better for them to be placed with parents WHO LOOK THE SAME AS THEM, AND ARE OF A SIMILAR OR THE SAME RACIAL BACKGROUND, THE FACT THAT THIS IS JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPE AND THESE KIDS ARE GOING TO STAY IN LOCAL AUTHORITY CARE FOR YEARS UNTIL THEY ARE TOO OLD TO BE ADOPTED AND NO ONE WANTS THEM. WELL IT IS JUST BONKERS. SORRY FOR CAPITALS COMPUTER IS GONE MAD. PERHAPS IN SYMPATHY

Hi

I am an Adoptive Mum of a little girl who
is 19 months old, we adopted her when she was
8 months old.I can understand your frustations
however it's the way the system works & they
like to keep the cultural/hertiage of the child & place them with the same ethnic background. To adopt from overseas you have
to be approved in this country & also approved in the country of the child you wish to adopt from. A friend of mine adopted from China & the process was a lot longer than Adopting in the UK. There are many white children/toddlers/babies awaiting loving homes & this week is Adoption week in the UK & it highlights even more how desperate they are for Adoptive parents.
My advice is don't give up, Adoption is the best thing that has ever happened to us.
Good Luck Bev x

News today reports of a baby being tortured to death by his natural 'mother' yet children are kept in care because prospective parents of other races/heritages are deemed not good enough, purely (in many cases) due to their race/heritage.

This is not the 1970s (when inter-racial adoptions were last easily allowed)Britain in the 21st century is a multi-racial place, surely adoption policies should reflect that?

How anyone can say that it is better to be within the care system than to be wanted in a family is beyond me.

In an ideal world maybe it would be better but in the current one no.

It sickens me.

I have two friends who were adopted, they consider themselves to be black and their parents are white. They said they do have some issues with feeling 'black' as they lived in a very white area as children and feel as if people expect them to be more 'black'. But another friend of ours who is black and grew up with his parents says he feels the same was as some people have expectaions of black people behaving in a certain way that he doesn't. So the problem lies with others not themselves. Anyhow the friends who were adopted say they feel lucky to have been adopted before the law came in about race.

I think it's preferable that a mixed race child who is going to otherwise grow up in foster care or a children's home be placed with a white family. However, a family that reflect it's racial (or even better, cultural) heritage would be the best option all around, in my opinion. Unfortunately, that isn't always an option, though, and with the disproportionate amount of mixed race children in care in this country, I don't see how social services can afford to be so picky. Good, loving parents are better than no parents. It's a no brainer.

agree its a no brainer, mrs m.. of course reflecting race or culture would be preferable but if it is not happening then it is truly shocking that anyone else who doesnt match these criteria cannot/will not be considered, it is just madness these kids are denied loving parents and secure home and instead are kept in state institutions for their one and only childhood....

infact in a society that pertains to be multi mixed et al surely this actually racist in itself?

i feel for you op i would be banging my head off the orphanage wall

no parent knows better than a white adoptive parent of a child of a different race that it would have been their preferable for their child to have been placed with parents who reflect their heritage better. They know it far more deeply and practically than any social worker ever will.

However I know everytime I read a bedtime story to DS or stick a plaster on his knee for a pretend hurt, everytime I fight for something he needs that having him here with me is still a far far better option for him than not having a permanent family of any colour.

The irony is that very many foster parents are white and so by not giving these children a permanent white home they are trading it off for a (at best) semi-permanent white alternative

I think its important to recognise the damage that can be done to coloured childrne growing up with white parents in predominantly white areas with no role model to inspire them. However much of the research that has been done on this, that social workers rely on are based on adoptions done in the 60's and 70's where little emphasis would have been placed on the importance of maintaining your child heritage and very little in the way of training would have been given to the adoptive parents.

Although it may raise valid issues about how to deal with children of transracial adoption, it rarely compared the results of how those children felt with the ones who were never adopted and spent a lifetime in care.

I went overseas to adopt a mixed racechild (not deliberately - I didn't express a racial preference in a country that has many races), makes me cross that I couldn't have done the same here in the UK.

Overseas adoption is not for billionaires, but it isn't the easy option and is probably in many cases the last resort for poeple who have been turned down by the UK authorites or told they were unsuitable.

I would persevere with the UK system if you can.

to clarify inter-racial adoption are allowed in the UK. IN fact Govt policy says better for achild to be adopted into any permanent family than none.

The problem is that councils and/or individual social workers are ignoering that and ultimately the matching is suggested/approved by the child socialworker - "not in teh best interest of the child" gos a long way unfortunately and of course they're right it may not be be in the best interest of the child but whilst they are waiting for best to come along the chldren get older and less adoptable and endup permanently in care.

[care]

I read a quote this week about 'the best sacrificing the good' or summat, this week wrt inter racial adoptions.

Of course it would be best if children were brought up by adoptive parents who reflected their own racial/cultural heritage - but it just seems spiteful to me that children are being denied a loving home because their prospective parents aren't the best choice.

yes its an old quote - "best" is the enemy of "good"

Oddly enough, I was reading our local council's adoption policy and they are happy to place children in mixed heritage environments.

BUT - a huge BUT, the area in which we live has a HUGE ethnic mix, and many different cultures and a family would be hard pushed not to have a connection of some sort with various different cultures. DD's school has 30% of applications taken up by children with English as a second language. I suppose it really does depend on where you live.

Kewcumber - at my adoption prep course we were assured that it is illegal to place a mixed race child in a white family. I was sure that was wrong, but having seen how the woman who raised the question was told off, I felt too vulnerable to question it.

We were also told they are not allowed to place children outside their religion.

I'm sure they could have reassured us that there is a common sense balance to be struck between trying to get as close a match as possible between the child's ethnicity and that of the adoptive family (which is sensible) and getting a child settled into a forever family as quickly as they can, and that they always try to get that balance. But they didn't. They preferred to act all aggrieved that somebody had raised the issue.

"I suppose it really does depend on where you live" - you would think so wouldn't you it would certianly make sense but in fact London social workers have the reputation for being the most dogmatic about this subject.

A nurse does not need to have had cancer to be a good cancer nurse. Fact, IMO.

A woman does not need to have given birth to a child to be good MW. I'm sure male MWs would agree.

But...Doesn't a social worker deciding whether prospective parents are good enough to adopt a child need to be a parent?

I know that, most of the time, my parenting is 'good enough' and certainly not the 'best'

When I was a (very earnest)childless 20 year old student nurse doing a three month placement on a paediatric ward I was horrified that the ward sister came into work complaining that her daughter had kept her up half the night.

How can a perhaps twenty something childless social worker judge the potential parenting abilities of others?

You may be right Kew - you have infinitely more knowledge on this subject than I do. I do live in an area next door to where social workers are very much in the press for all the wrong reasons at the moment

We recently "moved on" a mixed race child to a white family so it can't be illegal. He was not the first by any means either.

What our ss looked at in choosing adopters was their willingness to explore/promote the childs ethnicity.

This was discussed on the radio the other day and when my 10 year old foster daughter heard that a head of social services had said it was better to be in a childrens home than a white family she teared up and said she could not think of anything worse than being in a childrens home and was glad she was white so she could be with us.

nice to hear flower I know it happens (I know of one case myself) but it is exceptionally rare.

I've moved 2 mixed race babies on in the last 3 years Kew.

They were both the same ethnic mix but not related to each other IYKWIM

I used to know someone (white) who had adopted a child from abroad. They were subsequently approached by SS to see if they would be interested in adopting another child (within the UK) whose parent(s) were from the same continent as their first child but not the same country. The second child was about two at the time and had been fostered since birth by an Asian family who were also keen to adopt him. I think the end result was the white couple were given the child, purely I believe because they already had a child from the same neck of the woods, so to speak. I thought it was very sad that a small child was taken from the only family he had known purely because they did not "fit" SS criteria for race.

This is such a hard issue. So many social workers hold on in the hope "the best" will come along. One good thing that Tony Blair did sometime abround 2001 was to spot that there were too many children in care and demanded that social workers stop trying to find perfect adoptive parents and instead try to find "good enough" adoptive parents. His point covered all races but is particularly important for harder to place children.

Like Kewcumber, I am the very lucky adoptive mother of black children. I am very glad we did it and I hope we offer our children a better option than anything else that was on the table but I think before the children arrived I underestimated the hard issues involved. When DS2 arrived, DS1 announced how happy he was that DS2 had the same skin colour as his so he would no longer be the odd one out. I also feel very keenly that my children have lost some privacy - children who are adopted by parents who look like them can choose who knows that they are adopted - my children have no such choice.

We adopted from overseas but I had already had some experience within the UK of their resistance to transracial adoptions. The sws doing our home study were fine but it was always the sw to the child who held back. They always hope that the perfect family is going to come along at any moment. Sadly they often don't

pete - luckily (kind of) DS is mixed race (though not everyone realsies) and I'm single so mostly people do assume I had/had an Asian partner so DS does get a degree of privacy which i agree can be a big issue.