The Adoption - anyone listening?

[Jenijena]

Over the past day I’ve downloaded and listened to all the available episodes of Tge Adoption - I think it’s also being broadcast on WATO? I’m not an expert but it appears very sensitively done and is excellent listening (would be interested in the views of people closer to adopriob). All credit to Lincolnshire County Council, and all the adults involved, for letting the microphones in.

I’m listening and it has been excellent. I tweeted about it and Jon M and Martha Carney both liked my tweet. The only thing that has been missing for me has been the birth parents doing last minute appeals to the courts but that might just be because I see so many in my job.

I'm very glad that WATO are running this series, it is really well done and my reaction is a little different perhaps to that of most I have read here and elsewhere.

I feel tremendously sad about it. Specifically about what does not appear to have been done to support the birth parents. While its hard to tell for sure with so much (necessarily) missing information, it seems that the main support they got, besides social worker visits, was parenting classes, which "weren't for us" the mother said and then one on one parenting classes which seemed to be better received.

Surely though this is not enough effort by society to keep children with their natural parents. If the children are traumatised (we're told they all are in that family) then its very likely that so too are the parents. We don't know their stories of course and they are bound to have big stories, which are pretty much bound to contain traumatising experiences.

The way to break these cycles of trauma and neglect and abuse is to try to help people to heal from trauma. And no that's not going to happen with 10 sessions of CBT counselling. It needs deeper and potentially longer term work than that. And I think we should be doing that. For everyone's sake involved. The rate of break down and issues within adoptive families is relatively high from what I have read and heard. I think we should be doing way more to help families stay together or at least help kids to stay with one birth parent. From what this series has featured we are doing no where near enough, the surface is barely being scratched. Just because children are adopted by a loving couple does not mean that that family cycle of trauma and its consequences will be over for them.

I'll remain riveted to the rest of the series and open minded, I hope I am reassured by future episodes, that at least the children will have proper on-going professional support rather than just considered 'ok now'.

Thanks again WATO, my comments are not meant to be a negative reflection of the series. Quite the opposite, I am very glad you made it.

Genuine question, fruitbat - what do you think they should have done? Social workers spent years intervening with this family, so time clearly wasn't going to help. What would deep help look like? Since the children were being neglected, should someone have lived with them? Again, I'm not being sarcastic or disagreeing with you. I agree that it's a desperately sad situation. But I just don't know that I can imagine what could have been done, especially while leaving the children in a situation like that?

What was the situation? I don't quite understand what more social services could do here when there were so many children affected at such critical stages in their lives.

Are you sure you listened to it all fruit? As Lisa says, it stated in the programme that they had had SS intervention for years. Even the mother’s own parents said she hadn’t followed what the SS had asked her to do.

Oh, I'd forgotten the bit where the grandparents said that but it was so heart breaking. I can't imagine how hard and painful it was for them to accept that their own daughter had failed their grandchildren.

This series is brilliant. It keeps making me well up, especially the bits with the grandparents. When they were talking about having to pick two of the four children - obviously they had to take the older ones, it was the only logical decision, but just to have to be in that position...

I'm listening, it's brilliant. I don't see what else could have been done. The father said he walked out of one seat of parenting courses because it wasn't for him. He then alluded to the fact that he didn't like the parenting courses because they didn't fit with his way of disciplining and parenting. But the point is that was the problem.

In the meeting they discussed issues like denying children access to a toilet. And the mother only paying attention to them as babies and ignoring older children.

How the children were so happy to have a bath with bubbles in, like they'd never had anything like it.

I found the dad mugs thing interesting. I mean it's easy enough to buy a 'world's best dad' mug because you think you it's what you do. It doesn't make someone a great parent. They both seemed very much in denial.

cornflake such an awful decision to have to make. I was thinking about it afterwards and what they did was very selfless too. As they said, the older two probably would have stayed in foster care much longer-term, maybe forever - and they'd have carried on seeing them. Taking the older two meant possibly giving up contact with the younger ones forever. It was absolutely the right decision for all four children, but it meant they put their own feelings last and gave up their relationship with the younger two so that all the children could have the best life possible.

And the mother only paying attention to them as babies and ignoring older children.

I thought that was so sad. I really hope that the mother continues to get social work support even after the children are removed? I really hope so, as she clearly needed help - and it seemed like a real but awful possibility that she'd just keep having babies that got removed.

Just subscribed to podcast. Thanks op. Love radio tips!

I think fruitbat does raise a good point, in that it's usually not possible to break a generational cycle of poor parenting, trauma and mental health issues or addiction issues etc etc, with a short course of CBT or one short parenting course. Many birth parents have had very traumatic histories and might have been abused, never seen or had good parenting in their life, been in care, suffered long term domestic violence and so on. In order for people to move forward and parent well and safely, they are likely to need long term support with more high intensity therapy.

The problem obviously is that small children can't wait in care for years for their parents to make enough progress to attempt to reunify them, and in plenty of cases, still fail to parent appropriately. I think in social work terms when higher intensity therapy for the parent would take 18 months or whatever it gets described as 'not meeting the child's timescales' or similar. Adoption isn't the wrong thing to do in those circumstances, and I also felt the parents in this series seemed to be in denial or unable to face up to the reality of why their children were taken away.

But we do have a societal problem, exacerbated by austerity and cuts, of attempting to opt for the shortest term, cheapest and lower intensity interventions wherever possible, even when those are probably doomed to failure. But given that small children can't grow up in care waiting for change to happen, adoption needs to be on the cards for some of them. I've heard great things about Pause programs etc, which can help a mother to have a break from having more children and thus have a period of stability and time to tackle the difficulties she has. I guess you have to start by breaking the cycle of having one baby taken away after another.

Fantastic radio

Just listened to episode 13 and my goodness I’m raging 😤😡

The father is in total denial over his part in all of this. He locked the children in rooms, refused access to toilets and was cruel in way of disciplining the children, but he says that he is totally & utterly blameless!!

This is the problem, and actually why he probably needs some sort of therapy to help him understand what is acceptable and what isn’t.

I just hope that his current girlfriend doesn’t have children with him, given her own past I fear that she is being drawn to situations like her own birth family.

Very sad 😔 but I’m looking forward to hearing about how they children get on with their new family

I hope I am reassured by future episodes, that at least the children will have proper on-going professional support rather than just considered 'ok now'.

fruitbat Sadly it is hard to access proper on-going support for children once they have been legally adopted. (Easier whilst in foster care). Often adopters of the children with the highest needs battle for ages to get any kind of support. This links to the woeful underfunding of mental health support for all ages across the country, and CAMHS is part of this. There is the adoption support fund but any more than 5k is hard to get. One good thing is in schooling where adopted children now get priority for school places and come with enhanced pupil premium funding - but that only goes so far.

I think it is quite easy to say 'more support' is needed for birth parents. But ultimately a parent who doesn't realise that hitting a child is wrong, that leaving a 5 year old in charge of a 6 month old home alone for a couple of hours at night is wrong, that using what money you have for alcohol rather than food is wrong, that hitting your partner in front of your children is wrong, is very hard to help.

Social services worked with my children's parents for 6 years before they were taken into care. You can do a hell of a lot of harm to a child's long term mental health in 6 years ...

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I’ve missed most of it - thanks for the link so I can catch up.

I also found today's podcast a hard listen. Again, I think it brings up the question of what can be done: if he's insistent that he's parenting correctly what can a class or even counselling achieve? My understanding is that you need to be willing to accept help to have a chance of overcoming any kind of mental or emotional problem.

I also felt very sad for his girlfriend

Just wanted to add my thanks to the WATO team - this is the best radio of the year for me. So compelling and insightful whilst remaining unjudgemental.

Thank you for the op as I had missed this. I am an adopitive parent and it bought back a lot of hard memories.

Just listened to preview and episodes 1-13. Excellent programme, best thing I seen or heard on adoption in a very long time. Well done R4.

Thanks for the recommendation. Just started.

I found the episode with the father and his girlfriend hard to listen to. I was really surprised that she said she thought it was the right outcome for the children.

I was also puzzled by the way that everyone seemed to jump to calling the new parents mummy and daddy. I assume there would have been a more phased approach that just wasn't recorded.

I've read quite a lot on the adoption boards on here the sort of things that Teen has said - that once the adoption is formalised, it's really hard to get support, and there can be a lot of issues that adopters aren't necessarily equipped to deal with. I guess this podcast won't really be able to cover that, but it would be interesting to have a similar sort of podcast, targeted at non-adopters, that explored the issues and the misconceptions. I had a very fairy-tale view of adoption before reading the boards on here, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I was also puzzled by the way that everyone seemed to jump to calling the new parents mummy and daddy. I assume there would have been a more phased approach that just wasn't recorded.

Presumably this was because they are so incredibly young that 'this is Julie and Robert, who will be looking after you as a mummy and daddy' is a lot more confusing and less reassuring than 'this is mummy and daddy'.

I thought this morning's was an absolute joy. I welled up a couple of times, but in very different ways to some of the previous episodes.

In the time after we had been identified for them, my DDs were moved slowly from referring to birth Mum & Dad as 'Mummy and Daddy' to 'Mummy X and Daddy Y'.

In our introduction books, we referred to ourselves as Mummy A and Daddy B, but right from the start of introductions the foster carer called us Mummy and Daddy.

I think its true that the reality doesn't hit. ADD1 was very excited to finally have her new Mummy and Daddy (she'd been waiting for a long time and was 7). After she moved in, it finally hit home to her, that having a new Mummy and Daddy also meant not seeing her old Mummy .... It had been explained to her, she 'knew' it, but didn't properly understand until it became reality.