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?

A 2 hour meet once a year? I see my dentist more often than that.

Utterly pointless, not needed, and cannot be good for anyone.

And many bio parents have much more visits/access than that anyway.

That poster was right. Adoption was always the child being 'adopted' and never having a thing to do with the bio parents. When did all this 'bio parents can meet up with the child' nonsense start???

For me and many others it was a fresh start though. It transformed my life. I am absolutely grateful. I feel the pity narratives overwhelm this though, often encouraged by ‘professionals’. Nothing in life is perfect. As a professional I’m sure you understand the absolute shit holes that most of us were removed from?

Is this your profession or are you an adoptee or adopter?

Your approach seems ideal.

I’ve worked with young people who have been through the double trauma of adoption and I think the choice would have helped so many.

I understand a lot of birth families will not be great for contact when children are young, but by the time children might want a relationship or answers from them, there needs to be a way to contact them. Your annual letter to the birth family seems a good way to keep this contact alive for when it is needed.

A lot of the young people I have worked with have had to wait until 18 and then had to seek out birth families themselves, not knowing what kind of reception they would receive. Another trauma for them.

I will post the statistics. Adopter numbers are rapidly dwindling.

Life is hard. Not everything needs to be traumatic though. Shit happens everyday, to a wide range of people. As adoptees we are not special in this regard. All you can control is the here and now and your future. As an adoptee this is the message I’d like to give to young people who were once in the same situation as me. You are in control of your life and you don’t owe ‘birth families’ anything. You are the Captain of your own ship.

Sorry, this wasn’t aimed at you, it was at another poster who claimed that contact is always good. I don’t doubt numbers of adoptive parents are dwindling. I would never choose to adopt myself as you are clearly expected to be a fucking Saint, and Saint I ain’t! 😉

PMSL at my 18 years of adoptive parenting being ‘anecdotal’. Definitely a social worker.

Me neither. But I have been put through hell over 18 years. Mainly by dickhead social workers who have done a short course on ‘attachment and trauma’ and think they know it all. They don’t. They never will. There’s a few of them on here.

I think long term studies and some adoptee’s experiences have shown that the loss of any biological connection can be painful with life long consequences, though I’d think that works against some children who just want to embrace their adopted parents and leave the past behind.
My cousin was adopted from Romanian, he visited a few times throughout his childhood but it caused him a lot of distress meeting his biological mother in those poverty stricken circumstances.
He stopped visiting at 14.
I also think that this may impact surrogate children in the future who realise that their bio mother/egg donor lives in a slum.

You can tell by the tone straight away. You’ve definitely ordered one well meaning professional with a side order of steely condescension! Met too many of these in my time unfortunately.

I wonder how many would-be adopters are really so naive as to see a child as a “sticking plaster” to make up for not having a bio child? Would they get through the (usually rigorous and quite intrusive) adoption process with this attitude? I doubt it. Any adopting parents who tried to erase their child’s past or fail to address their trauma would run into trouble pretty fast.

And I thought “pretending the child isn’t adopted” went out decades ago? If not it certainly should have.

Also you say that an adoptive family is “not a normal family and never will be”. Maybe you have a rather rigid view of what a normal family is? Presumably you mean a genetically related family, but these come in so many varieties it’s impossible to generalise. An adoptive family can be as ‘normal’ and happy as any biological family if things go well, and as dysfunctional as an unhappy bio family if they don’t.

Contact with the bio parents and what form it takes depends on specific circumstances of the child, but it should be 100 per cent about the child’s interests and welfare (some adoptees are extremely curious about their origins, others indifferent). It seems to me that the needs or wants of the biological parents should come quite a way down the list of priorities, especially now that there have to be very strong reasons to remove a child from the bio family.

I don’t seek to change your mind @Popcornhero because once people have come to an opinion, they don’t tend to change it even when dealing with research and facts. But I do suggest that you should widen your information range to beyond your experience and that of a foster carer.

Research unequivocally shows that adoptions are far more stable and less likely to break down when children have some form of contact with their both family. This is in sharp contrast to the practice decades ago where adoptive parents were advised that they should cut every last vestige of a link between their adopted child and the birth family and act as though the slate had been wiped to clean.

That was cruel, nonsensical and, ultimately, harmful. It causes distress to children, who obviously retain some memory of their origins, whether good or bad come and to the birth family who could potentially support the placement: surprisingly many do, even if they originally opposed the care proceedings.

In many cases, the birth family even in court ordered adoptions, is able to meet the adoptive parents, if not before the adoption then afterwards. Contact can take place not just through letterbox but through video recordings and sometimes through meetings. The reality is that unless intensively supported, contact is not always maintained over the years.

You also have to bear in mind that sibling groups are not always adopted together and they will pass information between themselves. They also might have siblings who remain in the birth family and who have not been adopted. These are important connections that help the child have a sense of identity and stability. It also source of potential breakdown if these links are suppressed. There is also the added complication, which is a very real one, of adopted children finding their parents through social media. This is far, far more damaging than if they have maintained some link from adoption even of the most distant kind.

Even where children have suffered harm because of the parenting they received from their birth parents, they still want to know that those parents are ok. Knowing that helps enormously with being able to settle into the adoptive placement.

As I say, I don’t expect to change your mind but, as someone who is scientifically trained, you might be interested in the research, of which this is a small sample.

https://www.nuffieldfjo.org.uk/resource/adoption-connections

https://corambaaf.org.uk/contact-adoption-interview-professor-beth-neil

"data and studies show that it is beneficial for adopted children to maintain that contacts". Is this data and studies from old style 1950s adoption scenarios, or from the reality of adoption today? Because from what I can gather weight has been given to the wants of adoptees who were adopted 50+ years ago in very different circumstances to modern adoption - stories like you'd see on Long Lost Family, which is a million miles from adotion today. Likewise experiences from other countries where adoption comes from relinquishment not removal. And does this data and studies differentiate between direct and indirect contact, or which birth family members the contact is with - letterbox is a long way from meet ups, and meets ups with birth siblings and their adopters is a world away from meet ups with unsafe adult birth family members.

It's far far too simplistic and surface level to say 'contact benefits adoptees' without drilling into this stuff.

Thank you. This is an excellent post. Signed an adopter who posted YESTERDAY about my/our positive experiences of direct meet-ups. I actually hate the word ‘contact’ as it is not normal and not an everyday word. No one not in Adoption Land says they are going to have ‘contact’ with their relatives or friends. Still, I have been accused here of not really understanding ‘adoption’. Which is a huge shame if true as I have only been doing it for 18 challenging years. I think this thread only serves to highlight how ignorant folk and ignorant professionals jump on a trendy bandwagon. I appreciate the posts here from everyone genuinely in the triad. I have one AD (now legally an adult) and one AD(9) who have differing views and wishes about meeting up with their birth families, contingent on their both differing brains and experiences of their birth relatives.

Yup, you’re a hero until you’re a zero. You become a zero when, after years of battling for non-existent support, you try to thrown in the towel and have your AC recommitted by your LA. Then you are threatened with arrest by your local police force for child abandonment and then put through a s.47 child protection investigation. And emotionally blackmailed by your LA to keep your child at home. Because cheaper. Even though you have to lock
your knives away for fear of being stabbed in your bed. Any other children in the home are regarded as collateral damage. Except until you have recruited a ££££££ lawyer to expedite having your very dangerous child re accommodated, and then children’s social care retaliate by threatening to take the other child, long a victim of domestic abuse, into care. Ask me how I know this.

I’m not a social worker so presume I’m allowed to offer a difference of opinion. Anecdotal means exactly what you’ve described - one person’s experience. It’s not a criticism, it’s a descriptor. I’d have used subjective myself as anecdotal can seem a bit dismissive. But the fact is the same - people’s experiences are different. You need both forms of data to make good policy, and a range of subjective voices. Is a social worker’s 18 years of experience less valid than yours? I’ve found your posts really informative and helpful to be honest, because they’re subjective.

To be honest, yes, they are not trained adequately at university on ‘attachment and trauma’ or inherited mental health disorders or the high rate of neurodivergences in care-experienced children. Also, I hope you are not asking disingenuously, but I will respond with full transparency in the hope that if I make an iota of difference to the entrenched thinking of a professional’, then I will have been a protective factor for a broken adoptive family.

Agreed. I would also add weight to the fact that a social workers 18 years spans across many different families, communities, subsets, etc. however you may define all people involved, the social worker likely has experience. The best and worst. So their experience is, by definition, rounder and more fully formed than one person’s personal experience.

Adopting your own children and knowing how their lives and yours works or doesn’t is anecdotal. However much of your entire life is dedicated to it, it is one very insular view. One case report can’t make you an expert on the subject, only that specific case report.

Or adoptees!

I’m not asking disingenuously. My main experience with social work professionals is in child protection but I have some experience of adoption SW too. I think the professional experience is vastly different, not least because they are dealing with an array of different people but for a shorter time. Breadth but not necessarily depth. They need to understand the law and the psychology, so again breadth but not necessarily depth. Plus a lot of arse covering, especially on the CP side, which I understand because it’s an underfunded minefield. However, good policy - and ergo practice - means understanding how they carry out their role, how they make decisions etc. It also needs the depth of individual and shared experiences from others - adopters and adoptees past and present, birth families and other professionals involved. So from a policy creation perspective (ie should AC have contact with BP and on what basis) their experience is just as valid as the adopters, and the children’s. Bad policy causes harm but also just won’t be carried out so you can never tell if it achieved its aim. My understanding is that contact with BP is not a blanket policy, though OP seems to suggest it is. I think what I’m trying to say in this long winded way is that your experience is subjective/anecdotal - but that’s a good and essential component. Its also the best way to get others to understand issues - people do t relate to policies, they relate to people. I don’t believe the previous poster was trying to denigrate your experience, but if they were, they’re a fool. Subjective experience is equally important as objective research. You may well be right that professionals forget that. IME they’re not especially well versed in research either.

No, as I’ve written, children’s social care is comprehensively failing adopted children. The CSC system sees everything through the silo lens of ‘child protection’. So adoptive parents living with the legacy of epigenetics, genetics, trauma and attachment, suddenly in the eyes of CSC, become the abusers. Too many SWs and professionals’ think they know it all because they have done a CPD course on ‘trauma informed care’. The professionals get to clock off before five pm every day. The adopters are having several shades of the proverbial punched out of them 24/7. Adoption is on
a downward spiral, mainly because of endemic systemic abuse.

Would you apply that to any other marginalised group? The professionals know best so this is what will happen to people like you based on other people’s professional experience? As someone directly affected, your view is biased and skewed so weight should be given to the voices of social workers and professionals? Or should we listen to those with direct lived experience? Are you adopted or an adopter yourself?

Thank you. Fifty of us persecuted adoptive families worked with the BBC over a six-month period. To tell the truth of our stories. The coverage went around the world. Adoption England is in a tailspin. As are the RAAs and voluntary agencies. We have support now in Parliament and we have human rights lawyers lined up. It took the Post Office crew 20 years to have their truths told. We all feel the same way. We are going nowhere. Our campaigning continues. If I can get one prospective adopter to have a good think about what they’re committing to, I will consider that I have done a helpful thing. Adopter numbers are dropping off a cliff.

Why not tell this to your colleagues? Who generally seem to think they know it all.

Probably when people realised it wasn't in the best interests of the child. A quick read or Google of attachment theory would serve a lot of the posters on this thread well.

ETA not always in the best interests