Post adoption contact has ruined the chance of adoption for so many children

[Popcornhero]

I am a paediatrician, Mum of three children (who arrived by adoption) and have several foster carer and social worker friends. I keep seeing children no longer getting adopted now there is an expectation for face to face contact with birth families.

I have seen this through work recently, and today was chatting to a foster carer friend who was saying how many children in their fostering network are no longer being adopted. Shehas a 14 month old in her care, who she's been approached to keep as a long term foster as he's been up for adoption for a year with no one to take him.

The rules now around face to face contact with birth families have meant adoption rates have plummeted. I'm so angry about it. Children deserve a fresh start with their new family & they aren't getting it because needs of birth parents are being prioritised.

Some research suggests adoptees would have liked more contact, but there is a bias in the literature. It's those most affected by the adoption that are coming forward not those who grew up and moved on and adoption is only one part of their story.

I know we wouldn't have adopted it we had had to maintain face to face contact with the birth family. They are our children and they have a lovely protected life. We changed our children's names to give them a better chance in life ( they had for example names like Thor, Loki and Renesmee and are now, Theo, Luca and Esme) **just an example. We never send photos so they can be captured in birthday parties and their identity remains safe. They know their story, they know why we are their parents. We write to the birth family yearly. It would be awful for them to feel split between two worlds.

Surely they need to review the impact this has had,before more children lose the chance at having a family?

We would foster but never adopt and wouldn’t have a problem with children having contact. We have no desire to make a nuclear family though. We would be fostering just because we can help. If you’re adopting and want that ‘unit’ then I imagine it would interfere with that.

Such utter BS. Sorry. I don’t care that you’re a paediatrician. There is no ‘rule’ about direct contact with birth families. Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the Family Courts, is seeking to suggest about more ongoing direct contact with birth families for adopted children. I am an adopter of 18 years. My two adopted children are not birth related. My elder daughter, significant mental health issues, has never had any direct or indirect contact with her birth family. She has no sense of identity at all. Conversely, my AD2(9) has had regular, ongoing direct contact with her birth mother since her placement with me at 12-hours-old. Her birth mother is not a bad person. She is the victim of generations of abuse and neglect and social care failings. Birth mum is not the bogey woman. AD2 loves her, understands her vulnerabilities and is compassionate about BM’s difficulties in life. Equally, AD2 knows which side her bread is buttered on and knows that she is safer and has a better quality of life with me.

In my opinion, all adopted children should be privy to their narratives, however unpalatable they are to us. We are not ‘saviours’ as adopters. Our children have their genes and histories. If birth families are not dangerous, then why would contact be tricky?

We have recently adopted and just received our adoption order and weve been told that contact is totally up to us. Either letterbox or something more face to face, but the emphasis has always been the choice is ours

Children also deserve stability. Especially traumatised children - it's so important for recovery from trauma.

Some of the contact scenarios described here sound incredibly destabilising - and therefore damaging.

No, I am so glad this didn't happen when I was adopted. I only need one family and one stable home, it must be so disruptive to how well children settle and feel they belong. I do not see biological parents as parents of a child post adoption. To me, as an adoptee, they are simply irrelevant.

My children have a huge family (ours).

They also have one older and two younger half siblings. We can't see the oldest as she's in SGO with a family member but we have play dates with the little twins so we do see birth family.

I disagree, and I think you aren't taking into account what the modern world is like.
Young adoptees can now easily track down their birth families themselves. It's easy to do in the vast majority of cases via social media.
What we are increasingly seeing is adolescent adoptees taking matters into their own hands, finding their birth families and arranging contact themselves. This is generally complicated and disastrous as you can imagine.
You state you will support contact when it's best for your children, but once they are 13+, sometimes younger, you will likely find they do their own thing. Maybe your kids won't be curious. But most are.
Controlled contact with birth family is effectively a response to the reality that you cannot prevent contact in the way you could 25 years ago in a very connected, online world.

But it’s ridiculous to pretend they didn’t also have a birth family. They will always know about their existence via life story work etc.

OP, why not get this moved to the adoption board? Lots of knowledgeable posters there, some of whom have direct experience of face-to-face post-adoption contact, positive and negative,

nothing to do with adoptors egos.
More trying to protect your child from further trauma.
As an adoptor and foster carer of over 20 yrs experience I have seen first hand the damage contact can do to children in Foster care as well as adoption.
Each case is different though. As I said we offered face to face but the family can't be bothered to be quite frank. They say they love him but that doesn't translate into.any meaningful effort to see him. ( These children have been adopted for good reason after all. )
What does that do to a child and family forced to support it ?

NC to protect my family’s privacy.

Both myself and my younger brother were adopted. We had very ordinary, lovely lives in a family where we were desperately wanted and loved. There would have been absolutely no way that our parents would have adopted us if they had had to maintain contact with our birth parents. They wanted children of their own and that was what adoption gave them.

I don’t know my brother’s adoption story but looked into mine because I was moving for work to the town where I was born. The story was very sad, there was a lot of angst and my birth mother actually died when she was very young. I’d have been caught up in all of that and my parents would have had to pick up the pieces.

Things have changed a lot from when I was adopted and now babies are only put up for adoption in very extreme circumstances. Many children who are given up for adoption already have life limiting conditions or learning disabilities because of the lifestyle of their birth mother while they are in-utero and the way that they are treated during their early years. Prospective Adoptive parents have to deal with all of that with little to no support. To then expect that the birth parents still have the right to spend time with the child that they aren’t raising or responsible for, yet have already caused harm to, just seems completely unreasonable.

Who said anything about pretending? Just irrelevant, like a stranger you once met and have no reason to meet again unless you decide to as an adult.

I think it makes sense. Constant contact rather than suddenly starting a relationship at 18 or whenever they accidently connect with someone on ancestry.com. All out in the open seems much healthier.

My mother was adopted and a half/ sibling connected her out of the blue in her mid 40s. It was a right mess, the sibling had huge issues about her own adoption and was massively in denial about her birth family being crap.

Also I'm guessing that can mean contact with extended family when the parents are dead?

You seem very defensive about having adopted children.

Hardly irrelevant if they were the sole carer to a child for x years before adoption. They will be able to answer questions that the adopted parents cannot.

I’ve always thought about adopting and to be honest my concern was always the idea that they might become an adult and seek out their birth family at that point, or that they’d spend their childhood thinking that their birth family was somehow much better than our family.

it sounds selfish perhaps, but I somehow much prefer the idea of my adopted child growing up knowing their birth family from a distance and it becoming clear to them over time why they are better with us. I like the idea that the birth family would be more like distant (dysfunctional) relatives that they aren’t really that interested in, rather than some unknown mythical beings who they will definitely wish they lived with when they get to the terrible teens. I’d rather they were familiar and boring than unknown and moulded into a child’s fantasy family.

@Nn9011 I don't agree that they will always be the biological parents. I do understand however that its subjective and others see things differently. What non adopted people find hard to understand is that to many adopted people, raised without biological connections, that element can become very unimportant. Almost every adopted person I know has little interest other than curiosity or medical concerns. They simply dont value the biology. I've seen people who find out their uncle isn't their biological uncle make more drama out of their discovery than adoptees.

I think that calling a birth mother ‘irrelevant’ and comparing a birth mother to ‘a stranger you once met’ is incredibly tone deaf and prescriptive. It’s far more complicated than that for many adoptees.

Yes I completely agree with you.

I am an adopter and I could not disagree more.
My DCs, without giving too much away, had fairly standard reasons for needing adoption though some aspects were different.
Their birth family lives a very long way from us but meeting them - several times - has been invaluable for my DCs.
Two crucial family members have since died and I am so glad we met them before they did, as are my DCs. We still have some contact with siblings though we haven't met them in person since the central family members died. Hopefully we can do so in the future.
We are also planning DNA searches supervised by us when the DCs are older.
This is all so much better than unsupervised social media or DNA searches done by our children.

As is their biological family.

Tone deaf to my own experience and those I know who've been through the same?

Adoption rates plummeting isn't a bad thing in and of itself. In an ideal world there would be no adoption. I know that sounds like a very cruel thing to say to adoptive parents, and of course I'm very glad that you have your children. But if things were perfect all children would be wanted by and safe with their birth families.

If it's the case that the same number of children are being given up for adoption but are not being adopted because prospective adopters are being put off, then that is something concerning. Is there research supporting that this is the case?

@Autumn38 you are spot on - to my DCs their birth family members are like distant and slightly unreliable family members that they like to hear stories about.

No, they used to be. Family in the real sense is about who cares and is there for you.

yes there is a massive shortage of adoptors now.

This
I voted YABU because I think that in some circumstances, it may be in the best interest of the children.
Less chance of feeling rejected /abandoned etc and less of a risk of disappointment later if they choose to find their birth family.