A gay couple adopted our grandchildren.. and kids think we're dead

[Notsotired]

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The heartbroken grandparents of two children adopted by a gay couple have been told they will never see them again.

Despite looking after their five-year-old grandson and four-year-old granddaughter for three years, social workers decided they were "too old" and unsuitable to continue.

And, tragically, the children now think that their grandparents are dead.

"Social workers made up their minds that we were too old," says the grandad, who is 59. His wife is just 46 and both look much younger.

"It just breaks my heart and eats away at me every day. My own grandchildren have been wrenched away and now they think that me and their granny are dead."

The children went to live with their grandparents because their mother, a heroin addict, couldn't look after them. The boy's father is dead and the girl's father has not had any contact with her.

But social workers later insisted the children would be better off with the two gay men. "My wife and I were happy bringing the children up ourselves," says the grandfather.

"We are their family. Now we've been told we'll never see them again. How can that possibly be right? They are our flesh and blood."

The children have now been given new identities and totally removed from their former life, family and friends.

The only contact their grandparents have had with the children in the last eight months is a two-paragraph letter from their new parents giving a few scraps of news about the pair.

The case provoked a storm of criticism in February when the adoption was first revealed.

The grandparents and children cannot be identified for legal reasons so we are calling the boy Adam and his sister Katie. We are calling their grandparents Brian and Margaret.

Thanks to a well-wisher, the grandparents know where the children are living, only a few miles away in an affluent area near Edinburgh.

Whenever they are in the area the grandparents find themselves staring out of their car windows in the forlorn hope of catching a glimpse of the children.

"Even if we saw them we would never approach them or do anything that would upset them," says Brian with tears welling up in his eyes. "But we can't help hoping we might see them in the distance."

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When it became clear that the children's mum was incapable of looking after them, social workers were happy for Brian and Margaret to be granted "interim parental rights".

But problems began when the mum, addled by drink and drugs, began making threats against her parents, saying she wanted her children back.

In September 2006, Brian and Margaret reluctantly suggested to social workers that Adam and Katie should stay briefly with foster parents until their daughter stopped menacing them.

Then Brian and Margaret say they found themselves under immense scrutiny from social workers who later changed their minds about their suitability to care for the children. Brian and Margaret hired solicitors to get the children back.

Four times a court ruled in their favour, but eventually, they say, they were left unable to cope with the lawyers' bills and emotional stress.

Brian claims they were then "bullied and manipulated" into eventually agreeing to the children being adopted last year - on the basis that they would still have some contact with the children.

Then, last October, they were shocked to discover that two men were adopting Adam and Katie. And in the row that has followed all access has been cut off. Margaret says: "We honestly are not bigots. It's just the practicalities which bother me. Which dad do they call dad? "How can anyone explain to a five-and a four-year-old what on earth has happened here? It's all so sad."

The gay couple have been together for eight years. They live in a smart home and lead a well-off lifestyle. They are both in their thirties and one has given up work to look after the children, taking them to school and nursery.

Before the children moved in, they got planning permission improvements to their home to accommodate the children Knowing that Adam and Katie live so close makes the agony even worse for Brian and Margaret. "It's Adam's birthday next month," says Margaret.

"I want to give him a present like any normal granny. I just want to see the kids - even if it's only twice a year, that would be better than nothing." Brian says social workers told him that the children think he and Margaret are dead because they haven't seen them since October.

"It's not surprising that they think we're dead when they haven't seen us for so long. We've been just erased from everything.

"I can't stand the thought that these kids will think we have abandoned them."

Originally Brian and Margaret say they were told they would be still be allowed contact with the children. "We would never have consented to adoption otherwise," says Brian. "But now we've been told we will never see them."

The couple are in talks with solicitors in the hope of winning some limited access, but accept the adoption cannot now be overturned.

A sympathetic businessman is paying their legal bills, but it will be a long drawn-out process. Meanwhile, a short drive away, Brian and Margaret fear Adam and Katie are starting a new life believing that Gran and Grandad are dead.

poor child sounded so ground down, real abject misery.

Edam, I'm sorry, it may just be me being thick but I don't understand your point.

You say 'gay adoptive parents are only fit for the most troubled children when we can't find a straight couple or single mother'?

I repeat; the lovely straight couple do not want the troubled children. These troubled children do not fit into their world view and the 'perfect family' they thought they were going to be before infertility got in the way.

But those of us who make up the less conventional families have already struggled with the issue that we are not 'perfect' and I dare say have thought about the whole issue of parenting with a great deal more care and insight than Mr and Ms Perfect who just assumed they would have children because that is what you do.

Children need to be loved, and by that I mean they need to feel safe, secure and valued. I absolutely refuse to accept that your marital status or sexual preferences should make others 'doubtful' about your ability to offer this to a child.

for what its worth, I think what needs to be done to improve the situation is remove children from rubbish parents far, far more quickly than we do at the moment, before all the difficulties around insecure attachments set in. For eg I would give my drug addict parents six months to complete detox and show initial success on rehab. If they fail, game over, children removed.

But you can imagine the howls of rage that would meet that proposal.

I know someone who in real life was adopted by a lesbian couple. She is a happy and well adjusted teenager. There is no doult that she is a credit to her adoptive parents.

When a child is adopted they are seperated from all their biological family. Its not just the parents or granparents. It can be Aunts, Uncles and baby cousins who have done nothing wrong.

I think social workers are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't. Taking a child into care should be a last restort.

Spot on, Spero

Spero 'For eg I would give my drug addict parents six months to complete detox and show initial success on rehab. If they fail, game over, children removed.

But you can imagine the howls of rage that would meet that proposal. '

I don't think there would be howls of rage, in fact I don't think you have gone far enough, most liberal handringers might disagree, but then we Have had a labour government for far too long when social engineering has taken president over common sense.

Parents have 9 months warning that a baby is coming, any parent who does not immediately detox is committing child abuse and the child should be taken at birth, they should not however be put into care or put up for adoption they should be placed in kinship care, adoption should always be a last resort when there is no family left willing to take on the child.

One of my ex's was adopted and noone could have designed a better upbringing for a child, but he still had that inner calling that part of him was missing, that he needed to find his biological family, so even when adoption is the last resort, in all but a few cases, it should be an open adoption so the roots are not lost and the children do not feel rejected.

but atlantis, kinship care will only work if the child does not de facto end up with the abusive parents, don't you agree?

in the present case, my understanding is that SS felt the gps were not willing to promise that the children would be protected from the abusive mother

so kinship care not much better than staying with her

and the gps only came forward as willing to adopt when they found out about the adoptive parents being gay- before then they had been quite happy for the childen to be taken into care and put up for adoption

so to all intents and purposes there was not family willing to take the children on

I do understand the concern that children don't lose links with their biological families, and you can be reassured that social services try very hard - the first thing parents are asked to do in care proceedings is provide names and addresses of any family members who might step forward.

It is bizarre and very sad how difficult it is to get them to do this.

What you also need to remember is that sadly, very often, the biological family are not much cop as a whole.

Adoption nowadays is not as it was even 20 years ago. Each child will have a 'life story' book prepared with pictures of the biological family, letter box contact is the usual minimum and there are happy signs that everyone is getting more relaxed about post adoptive direct contact, albeit not more than a couple of times a year. No child will ever be left ignorant of his or her roots.

I would urge anyone who has ever even felt a flicker of interest in adoption/fostering to take it further and just see what you think. I'm going to apply when my dd is a bit older; I think she'd love the chance of a bigger family and I would love the chance to think i had made a difference to a child.

But as a disabled single parent, no doubt some of you will be thinking 'shame! poor child!'. and that's a pity.

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'Take our 10-year-old son away before he kills someone': Couple begs social services for help

A couple fears their 10-year-old adopted son will kill unless he receives the correct treatment for his mental illness.

The child, who suffers from an attachment disorder, was taken into care in January after a sustained period of committing dangerous and violent acts against his family.

The family, who asked not to be identified, has been issued with a string of death threats.

The child has stabbed his father with a kitchen knife, attempted to strangle his mother with a seatbelt as she was driving a car, and left traps of shattered glass to cut his siblings' feet.

He also began trying to sexually assault young girls and was even caught trying to attack his half-sister.

The boy's 44-year-old adoptive father, who does not want to be named, said: 'I went to pick him up from school and found six teachers restraining him.

'He was like a wild animal. He was absolutely mad,' he told The Sun.

'I couldn?t understand it. As he got older, it got worse.'

Attachment disorders are thought to occur when children fail to form normal attachments to their primary carers in early childhood.

As he grew up, he began to exhibit signs of this disorder, including narcissism and an inability to respond to social interaction, and was eventually diagnosed in 2004.

The family want to send the child on a six-month course of psychotherapy at a specialist treatment centre for children with Reactive Attachment Disorder in Lancashire.

But treatment costs between £3,000 and £5,000 a week, the father said, and the centre can only accept patients who have been referred to them by local authorities.

His father, who is self-employed, said it had been a 'nightmare'.

'He could easily kill someone. He is capable of doing it - he has threatened us all.

'The therapy he gets now isn?t enough. But the treatment centre is beyond the means of most people. We are stuck in a Catch 22 situation.'

A spokesman for Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust said: 'We are working closely with our colleagues in social services and the primary care trust to make sure this child gets the care and support he needs.'

The article I just posted is in the daily mail (26 June).

I don't claim to personally know many adoptive parents, but I do know from people I work with that most adoptive parents have difficulties with adopted children. I can't (sadly) quote statistics. It seems that adoptive parents hang onto an upset and disruptive child for fear of being "branded" a failure.

Adoption is not what it's cut out to be.

My view is that children should not be taken. If a parent breaks the law when looking after a child, send the parent(s) to jail or impose a penalty of hard labor. Don't take the children from the family or the family home.

A disruptive child is obviously not happy where they are and the social work experiment on children being taken from their families seems to think that more social worker involvement will help, when it was the social worker intervention that caused the problem in the first place. When the social workers can't make the diffrence they want to make, the social workers ask a doctor to administer drugs to suppress the child's feelings and upset.

To be clear. I am not against adoption. It does have it's place. I am against forced adoption.

I am not against child removal, if it's a last resort. I am against social workers forcing their expectations onto a family who might not be "good" but are not criminal either. When a parent doesn't "welcome" the social workers "ideas" and "help", the parent is classed as rejecting "professional" help and therefor is incapable of putting their child's "needs" first.

A child in a family who is classed as being in poverty shouldn't be removed from his or her family.

Blimey notsotired - I think that post has made me more cross than anything I've read on MN for a while. Allow me to blast every single one of your points into oblivion one by one:

"I do know from people I work with that most adoptive parents have difficulties with adopted children"

Are these people who work in SS or mental health or some other area of work that comes into contact with adoptive families on a professional basis? Which means that they are only seeing the cases where there are issues. I have a good few friends who have grown up in adoptive families as well as knowing some very happy adoptive families with young children.

"It seems that adoptive parents hang onto an upset and disruptive child for fear of being "branded" a failure."
No, adoptive parents hang on to their children because they are desperate to make it work, for them and for the children. You don't take an adopted child on lightly and you owe it to them and you to do everything you can to make it work.

"Adoption is not what it's cut out to be.
What does that mean? It's not 'cut out' to be anything other than a chance to build a new home with loving parents which your own biological parents could not or would not do.

"If a parent breaks the law when looking after a child, send the parent(s) to jail or impose a penalty of hard labor. Don't take the children from the family or the family home." As SGB says, where are the children supposed to go?

"A disruptive child is obviously not happy where they are"
No, a disruptive child is one that has been so damaged by absolutely shit biological parents that they are unable to form relationships.

"when it was the social worker intervention that caused the problem in the first place."
As above

"When the social workers can't make the diffrence they want to make, the social workers ask a doctor to administer drugs to suppress the child's feelings and upset."
I have never heard of that. Therapy and support, yes. Drugs no.

"I am against forced adoption."
So parents who abuse and neglect their children should be allowed to keep them, even though they are incapable, because they're biologically related to them? Why??

"When a parent doesn't "welcome" the social workers "ideas" and "help", the parent is classed as rejecting "professional" help and therefore is incapable of putting their child's "needs" first."
That's utter tosh

"A child in a family who is classed as being in poverty shouldn't be removed from his or her family."
As SGB says, a child in poverty is not removed. A child who is neglected and abused is.

Phew, I feel a bit better now

Wow, notsotired, that must qualify as the most ignorant post ever to appear on mumsnet.

notsotired - a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing. reproducing your slightly odd views on the internet isn't going to cause a problme except a little foaming at the mouth of people you're unlikely to ever meet.

But I do fear for your safety if you say anything similar within hearing of an adoptive parent dealing with a child with attachment disorder caused by appalling parenting in early life.

I personally know a boy adopted at 3 who had persistently been returned to birthparents who abused him - preety much in 6 monthly cycles for about 4 or 5 times because social workers were so convinced birth parents could reform. He arrived at adoptive parent with cigarette burns and already unable to form normal empathetic relationships with people. He was taken into a local authoirty boarding school eventually at 13 after a lifetime of violence and therapy and will probably never lead a "normal" life.

And do you know what? Adoption was still the best thing that happened to him, he has a family who care for him and support him, he comes home at weekends and has improved slowly over time, his adoptive parents love him and haven't given up on him.

Your view that children are forced into adoption through poverty is bizarre unless you are living in Ireland in the 1920's (you're not are you? it might explain a lot). The only contentious adoptions that still happen as far as I am aware (as a group rather than as individual contentious adoptions) are that forced adoption tends to happen in a higher proportion of cases where the mother has low IQ. Depending on what you beleive this is either a scandal or understandable.

Either way what you posted is drivel and I can;t beleive I've spent so long replying to it!!!!

More fool me!

as has already been pointed out by several posters the reason why so many adopted children have attachment disorder is because they have been neglected and abused by their natural parents. I would like to see notsotired explain why that is a reason to leave children with those same neglectful and abusive parents.