Kids in care

[Marie299]

My daughter is 9 and does not want to see me I don’t know what reason is but I have been told that it’s due to different reasons. It’s been two years since I’ve proper seen her and she’s on a SGO with grand parents and theys a court order stating my contact with her should be every 6 weeks which has not been happening.

When I have been on the phone to her she’s been asking when she can see me and then a few weeks down the line she does not want to speak to me or see me. Just finding things very strange I have spoken to her grand parent about this and they not really saying much other then my daughter is doing therapy play but how can my bond with her even build when I am not invited to these things either.

I don’t know what to do I’m in the middle on going to court or just waiting it out but it’s been two years and worried that if I do nothing then my bond with her will never be fixed.

need advice

I don't have any advice for you, just lots of sympathy. You're getting a hard time from some people, and I don't think it's fair.

I hope that with time, patience and gentle, loving, respectful consistency from you, you are able to build a better relationship with your daughter. You need support networks and people to be able to express your sadness at though, so I understand why you posted here.

Good luck to you.

I am a foster carer and have met many birth parents over the years. Every one of them feels wronged that their dc are not with them, no matter how horrendous they have behaved, its always someone else's fault. As pp said, children aren't removed unless there is a risk, ir at least a perceived risk. However you sound very measured op and if you are as sober and settled as you say you are there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to see your child. However, while your dd seems to like talking to you on the phone, it seems that she is reluctant to see you. Perhaps she is happy as she is, perhaps she likes engaging with you but doesn't want an actual visit, perhaps she doesn't feel safe around you. All you can do is be loving and consistent, keep doing what you are doing and hope that in time she will want to see you. Children have the right to see their parents, but they also have the right to not see them, especially in your dds circumstances.

Your daughter will have experienced trauma by being removed from her mum even if it was the right thing to do.. she may be saying she doesn’t want to see you because she will subconsciously worry that you won’t be there for her again and so perhaps in her mind it’s easier if she doesn’t see you. It’s possibly her way of protecting herself. Please see it from her perspective not yours. You’ve had a tough childhood but the reality is so has she by being removed from her mum - that’s why SS only do it in extreme cases because it’s traumatic for children. I’d focus on being honest why she had to go and live with her grandparents (that you were unable to care for them at that time - no excuses blaming your childhood) and reassure her that you’re not going to leave her life again.. and be consistent. Please do not have more children as that will damage your existing kids even more and the next ones may also be removed. I have an acquaintance who has 3 grandkids living with her because the daughter keeps getting pregnant and her mum takes them to avoid them going into care. So it’s good your exes parents have your daughter. You’ve had a shitty start to life yourself, but please focus on being the best mum to her now by being honest with her or working with her social worker for how to help your daughter now. Good luck

When was she removed? You said GM wanted her from day one, did she keep reporting you to social? I am very close to someone in your situation. The GM had reported her hundreds of times, pages and pages. Do you have a solicitor? If you have sorted yourself out, have you done parenting courses and everything else offered by the social?

I would be speaking to a solicitor and going back to family court to arrange regular contact. Start fighting for your child. When someone gets an SGO it states that the care is until the child is 18, it doesn't have to be

You can apply to the courts 2 years after removal, to take the child back.

Wish you luck x

But this doesn’t matter to your daughter

you are clearly angry about what has happened and the missed opportunity to be there for your daughter and have her with you but that isn’t relevant to her.

As I said before your truth and story about this simply isn’t hers - your anger and regret about not being able to be her parent her

and if you don’t see it like that you won’t get her back

Good post and advice. It is a fact that children from working class, poor and ethnic minority families are far more likely to be taken into care. Hardly any middle class, well spoken parents have children taken from them even when they are child molesters and child batterers. Reading about how fair and compassionate social workers are is very hard on those of us who have been on the receiving end of their actions and been left deeply traumatised.

@Marie299 I'm sorry you're getting such harsh replies from some posters. You've obviously come a long way since when you were pregnant and in care and should be proud of that.

When was the SGO put in place for your DD and why? That's quite a drastic move, because it means she's been placed under her grandparents' care until she's 18. I wonder if that's had an impact on why she runs hot and cold with you – she knows she won't ever get to live with you while the order is in place. And why is her brother not under an SGO too? That must be confusing for them both.

As others have said, trying to force more contact than your DD is comfortable with will most likely backfire. Make more effort to stay in touch in other ways – letters, texts, sending small but significant gifts. Let her know you are always there for her.

I believe you, OP. I work alongside social services sometimes. Care leavers are marked early on and everything they do can be twisted into a negative. I’ve seen children removed from care leavers where real support would have made the difference. I’ve scratched my head many a time at the different expectations.

I believe you. Be consistent with your daughter and be led by her. Love her and be a support, even when she pushes you away and tests you. She’ll be confused about how she feels about you.

AIBU is not the best place for this discussion, and I predict that as more people log on this morning you're going to get more and more replies seeing this solely from your daughter's perspective and having very little patience for your perspective.

Agree. OP, you should get MN to move this to Legal.

This @Marie299 take this advice.

fwiw - I don’t think GP are influencing your daughter if you have a fair relationship with your son and perhaps she’s just saying what she thinks you want to hear. All you can do is keep telling her you love her and you want to see her when she is ready and that you’re so sorry that you weren’t in a good place when you were younger to care for her.

maybe she’ll come round maybe she won’t.

but you have to accept that the therapy may well be for the trauma resulting of being removed from you.

im not sure if SS can give you any further help or info and im not sure that trying to go to court to enforce contact is right either but i wish you all well

Im going to put 2 points of view on here.

First a very close friend of mine, her teemage son was in a relationship with a teenage girl who lost her mum at an early age, dad became an alcoholic and she self harmed yo cope with her emotions, SS were involved but she wasnt taken into care. He moved into the house she shared with her dad to support her. SS played a massive role in their lives from the minute she was pregnant due to her age and background trauma. My friend obviously stepped up to support and I think this, and having a caring partner, stopped the child being taken into care. My friend was shocked at how intrusive it was but she understood it was for the protection of the baby.

As a foster parent I try and and support birth parents to have a positive relationship with their children.
Some children have a need to please their parents and will say what they believe their parents want to hear.
Some children, when they feel safe, such as on the telephone, will say they want to see the parent but actually the thought of meeting up is really quite scary (for various reasons that may or may not be factual , but are true to the child).

This can also be that they really DO want to see their parent but actually the emotion can be too much for them to cope with and that high emotion can cause them to become disregulated. We always went to supervised contact with the knowledge we could leave if they wanted to. It gave them some control in a life they have very little control of.

Regardless.of how.contact goes we have to deal with the aftermath of their emotions afterwards and that can be very distressing to see. We have regularly had...
Why am I so bad? Why can't mum/dad do the right thing/make the changes to look after me? Why am I not worth it? What is wrong with me?

It doesn't matter if these are not true but its often their belief.

Thank you for explaining the fact you are seeing your son and not your daughter (care order/SGO) even though they live together as I was struggling to see why there was a difference. I think this also probably difficult for both kids to understand. I imagine your son talks about seeing you which could cause further confusion for your daughter.

If your authority has someone from the SGO team uou could talk to I'd ask what they suggest you can do to support your daughter, or maybe your SW, or ask the grandparents, away from the children, how they feel uou can support her, writing letters, once a month? It needs to be something YOU need to be able to cope with as well, broken promises are another let down.
Reassure her you are not going anywhere and you are happy to move at her pace and if that is only letters/calls, thats how it is.
I know YOU want more but that is not child centred, that is looking at your needs instead of prioritising your daughter's.
Being an honest / reliable person is the first steps to building a relationship, however that looks.
I really do hope that you are able to develop.a relationship with your daughter. X x

I have a family members child on sgo. The child is 9, been with me since 3. Child now refuses all contact with the parent..doesn't want their phone calls won't open their letters or cards. How these kids feel will constantly change. My lo currently feels let down and angry about the fact his parents let him down by needing family to step in. He's entitled to feel this way. It's not my job to persuade him otherwise or to make him see his parents just to make the parents feel better. Court contact can't be enforced if the child doesn't want to do it.
I'd advise respecting the child's wishes and sending letters/card at a consistent rate to the sgo team for them to forward to the child.
Go via the sgo team because they will keep a copy of everything and file it for the child. That way if you think the ago holders aren't passing on your letters then when the child gets their file they will see you did bother.

@Marie299 I'm a GP. We sometimes beg social services to act and take children away from their parents, and they don't, because of their resourcing issues. If you can't understand the issues that led to the SGO, you aren't going to get anywhere. Would some counselling be of help?

Most of the time... The vast majority of times, it IS the right decision. The threshold for care proceedings and taking children into care is high. People have to consistently not do what they're asked.

I've worked with parents who were 'trying their best', they genuinely were... But it was still not good enough.

One family I recall, they were doing well with their 2 daughters about 6&8 certainly 'good enough' ... But they couldn't /wouldn't stop a paedophile uncle coming to the house.

They were completely vague about ensuring at any family events this man was nowhere near their kids.

Clearly this is a complex situation and I think this is one where people who know you in real life will be best placed to support. However, having been in your daughter's position I thought my experience may be helpful to you.

You describe that your daughter is inconsistent in whether she wants to see you or not. This was my experience as well. The reason behind it was that I wanted to want to see her but deep down I knew that she was not able to be a positive presence in my life. That internal tug of war is very powerful, especially when you are surrounded by your peers who have good relationships with their mothers. As an adult I have the tools to cope with this now and I have accepted that my mother is not able to be a positive presence in my life but a 9 year old does not have those tools. Her brain isn't even halfway through its development, try to put yourself in her shoes.

My advice to you is to continue to be there in whatever form your daughter is comfortable with. Writing to her may be helpful, though I would suggest asking someone who knows you in real life to help you with this. I also think that you should seek professional help to manage your feelings around this, perhaps via your GP?

I definitely wouldn’t go to court and push for more contact, that would just push her away even more.

What things have you tried so far?
You can create a bond without doing it face to face and I would start with creating a bond and building the relationship back up.

As she is getting older she is going to be questioning things and have mixed emotions about seeing you.

I know with my own DD, her dad got back in touch and wanted to see her which I facilitated but she hated it because instead of having fun with me or her friends/family, she had to spend her time with a practical stranger (it didn’t last long and then he got bored anyway).

It’s a bit like having to see an elderly relative that you have nothing in common with. At that age, you’d rather be doing anything but seeing that person.

What are her hobbies/interests?

Why do the grandparents have custody and not her dad?

And also you need to do some research into trauma. Your child will be traumatised. Leaving you alone is a Trauma. Scientifically we have proven that the brain grows and develops the most in the first two years of life. Also the traumas hardest to overcome are those that happen to children before the age they can talk about it. So the first two years are actually the most important years in a child's understanding and expectation of the world around them and of the adults in their world. Trauma shapes and changes the brain. It literally causes physical changes to the brain and body. So yes your child will carry Trauma for her whole life. We all do. But hers will be significant.

There will always be reasons, even if parents dispute it. But the bar is not ‘very high’. I feel this is a trope people hear and keep repeating. The bar for adoption is high, yes, but not for an SGO to family.

Edited to add: Some teams are willing to seek removal for spurious reasons, others do nothing and allow children to remain in harmful situations. There is a lot of variation between LAs.

Regardless, it’s not unreasonable for OP to want to have contact with her child and that likely would have been included in the court order.

If DD says she doesn’t want to go, I’d consider going back to square one and doing indirect contact or calls. And think about a contact centre if you can afford it.

Doesn’t matter how young you were, they do not breathe down your neck or criticise unless there’s a reason. You need to accept what happened then because until you do you can’t rebuild. You say you are in a good place now, brilliant, but you need to put your daughters needs central to this and accept she is settled at her grandparents, the only home she knows, and develop a new relationship with her, perhaps more of an aunt/big sister type relationship. I’m guessing contact is supervised so ask your social worker to help you reset this. Don’t push for custody because that isn’t in her best interest by this point, concentrate on being a person she can have fun with

This is incorrect. They literally do if the parent is care-experienced. They would have been breathing down her neck from the get-go.

Do you have SW involved or staff from family support centre to mediate.
If court order states contact frequency,then this should be facilitated, by court order.

If it helps you OP:

I was like your daughter. It’s hard to explain as I was young at the time but basically my dad would call and the times I was able to join I’d be able to chat happily and say I love you. But as soon as the call was over I didn’t feel right. My heart felt so heavy.

And when I was told my dad was on the phone I’d feel anxious. So sometimes I wouldn’t take the call.

I was always torn between feeling like I ‘was supposed’ to want to see him and want to talk to him (and so talking to him and asking to see him) vs a feeling of wanting to hide from him so I didn’t hurt.

I don’t know if that helps, but I hope it does.

This is awful for your children. My friend is a SW and she has always said children are always removed as a last resort. You now mention a partner. Do you have children with them too? How long have you been with him? Is that a red flag to SW's?

All your posts seem to be playing you as the victim and its hard for anyone to advise you when you play down what actually happened and why it got to this point.

So they took both of ur kids for no reason?🤔