First, some facts:
- There are over 58,000 children in the UK living in care either with foster families or in children's homes.
- There are approximately 1,300 families waiting to adopt one or more children
- 70% of children in care return to their birth families
This therefore leaves a gap of over 15,000 children needing a home ?
I used to get upset when I heard people talk of adoption as being their last resort. I'm not saying it was our first thought when we decided to have a family, but it was our first choice when we realised that natural conception wasn't going to happen.
Adoption is difficult. It is lengthy, tiring and frustrating, but ultimately the best thing we have ever achieved. It took us just over 2 years, from contacting Social Services, to the final adoption hearing in court but we were a family long before then. Our two boys (aged two and four) arrived within six months of our being approved for adoption, and we cared for them for a year, while the final approvals and legalities took place.
And then another miracle happened we got pregnant within a month of the boys arriving! How this could have happened is another story, but I'm told it's quite common (which would explain Social Services' insistence on us using contraception, despite over seven years of fruitless effort!).
Zero to three children in a year is a shock to the system, and, from an objective point of view, not an ideal adoption situation. However, we were delighted - once we got over the shock! - but concerned that it may affect our chances of being approved to adopt the boys, who were already 'ours' as far as we were concerned. We worried it might change our whole family set-up, and potentially our ability to bond with our adopted children.
In reality, it had the opposite effect the new baby changed the dynamics of the family, and introduced a new factor for all of us. The boys felt total love for our daughter from the day she arrived, and she is growing up in awe of her two fabulous older brothers.
The boys' legal adoption was announced with us all in court ' including our baby daughter snoozing peacefully at the back in a carrycot!
Two years on ' we rarely think about our adoption these days and are watching our children grow up just like those of our friends ' although I think ours are a lot better behaved! We get the odd question from the boys about life before 'us' and we deal with it as it comes.
Every council in the UK has an adoption agency, so a call to your local Social Services is a good start. Alternatively, there are just fewer than 40 private adoption agencies, usually run by charitable organisations or religions.
BAAF (national fostering and adoption organisation) provides an agency search service on their website. They also run the National Adoption Week (November 3-9 2004) and produce the 'Be My Parent' publication, which presents children in need of a family.
Other sites offering specialist advice are:
www.adoption.org.uk - independent site with useful articles and facts
www.doh.gov.uk/adoption - government site with details of domestic and overseas adoption, legal aspects and any recent changes
www.adoption-net.co.uk - News and information website about adoption and fostering in the UK, including child profiles, bulletin board, adoption diaries and step-by-step guide to the adoption procedure.
www.adoptionuk.com - a pre- and post- adoption support organisation which provides information, advice, training and member forums worth subscribing to, plus you'll also get 50% off the membership cost of PleaseMiss.co.uk if you're a member of Adoption UK!
The Overseas Adoption Helpline can be reached on 0870 516 8742.
This is a summary of the stages you will go through and a rough idea of timings go to www.adoptionuk.com/ for more detail, especially on the legal side:
|
|
|
|
Apply to adoption agency and submit application form
|
1-2 weeks |
|
Attend approval-training course & familiarisation
You must attend this it's vital for information and networking
|
3-6 months depending on availability |
|
Gain approval by authorities to adopt
You must pass this assessment to be able to adopt it's tough but worth it. Your focus will be to:
-
Pass medical and police checks
-
Provide 2-3 referees
-
Survive up to 6 lengthy home visits
-
Have submitted a full report by social services, called form 'F'
-
Successfully appear before a panel of about 10 local community representatives
|
1 year from original application |
|
Identify a child or children to adopt
|
1 month 3 years (average 6-12 months) |
|
Successful matching
You may be in competition with other couples to find the most suitable match for the child
|
1 month |
|
Transition planning
Everyone involved gets together to plan the meeting and hand over the child/ren into your care
|
2-4 weeks |
|
Meeting your child
Depends on the circumstances
|
2 weeks |
Taking care of your child pre-adoption
You can start to apply for adoption after three months of having your child/ren. During this period you will be visited by the child's social worker (different to yours) and the council usually retains parental responsibility
|
6-18 months |
|
Legal adoption
From application to success in court! Depends on birth parents approving adoption
|
average 9 months |
The total amount of time from contacting your adoption agency to legally parenting your child will be between 18 months and 3 years.
First, the practical advice!
At the beginning of the process:
- Be realistic don't expect things to happen at once just because you're ready.
- Once you've started the process, work hard and stick with it some things may annoy you or seem trivial, but they will probably make great sense in the long run.
- The adoption process will be the major focus of your life for about 2 years it will take over and bring both joy and stress. Think about who you want to tell at this stage, otherwise you will face a barrage of ?how's it going then?' every time you go out ' and often you will just want to take a break from the whole thing!
- Make friends with your social worker or agency worker they are the key to your future family. Manage them well, and don't be afraid to be a little pushy agree some deadlines and targets.
- Start looking through 'Be My Parent' to get a feeling for the kind of family you want to be keep an open mind.
- Consider adopting more than one child, and don't rule out boys because everyone says they are difficult! We adopted two brothers and they are fantastic.
- Think about appointing a solicitor early on, so that you're ready when you need them your Social Services will have a list of Adoption Specialists.
After approval:
- Relax the child or children for you are out there somewhere.
- Don't just rely on your social worker to find your child ' keep looking in 'Be My Parent? and reading the Adoption papers and web sites.
- When you are presented with information on a prospective match, read it carefully, ask lots of questions and take your time. Placement professionals will interview you and other couples to find the best match, so be honest and trust them to do their job.
- Trust your instincts and don't agree to take on more than you know you can cope with it's not a failure to resist a challenging or demanding child placement, even though you'd love to try and give that child a home. You need to make sure everything is right for your match to succeed.
- Make sure you really are ready for children to arrive; it could take anywhere between 3 months and 3 years. Ensure your employer is up to speed with your plans, and take lots of time out from work if you're able.
- Although you won't know the exact ages of your children until matching, make sure you've checked out local schools and childcare, and reserved places just in case (see Finding a School). If there's a problem with schools, your Social Services professional will be able to pull some strings.
- The weirdest experience we had was speaking to our children for the first time ever, over the phone - that 'Hello Mummy' reduced me to tears. Remember that - depending on how your children have been prepared for your first meeting - they will probably have even higher expectations than you; their new Mummy and Daddy are coming to see them! Ours were keen to please and we all fell in love at once.
- Again, trust your instincts - we had two weeks to get to know our children before bringing them home, and it never occurred to us to question the match because it felt so right; it was apparent that the professionals had really done their homework.
- Be sensitive to your child's needs and how they want things to happen. Take advice from the foster carers who may have spent more time with them than their birth parents.
- Don't be tempted to rush this process and whisk the children home get to know them in their current home and make the most of getting some rest before they come; you will be exhausted once they arrive!
- Learn everything you can from the foster carers especially if your child is small. As you've never raised a child before, you'll have to think on your feet and get help from anywhere and everywhere.
- Enlist help from friends and relatives for babysitting, advice and food parcels. Don't underestimate the change in your life that's about to happen.
- Let the children bring any toys and special things home with them and keep them safe you may have everything new and shiny waiting for them, but they need their familiar things too, to keep the past in perspective. Our boys had tons of fabulous toys and books, which they brought home, and still play with.
- You'll be asked to make a small book of pictures and information about your family, for the children to see before you meet them our boys still look at theirs, and it's very special to them.
For us as new parents' Weird. Amazing. Right. Scary. Exhausting. Frustrating. Rewarding. Fantastic. At last?
For the children? They simply seem happy and relaxed. They're too busy playing and fighting to talk about it. Sometimes they refer to life with their foster carers, usually when there's a change or holiday in the offing, which obviously jogs a memory.
And if the subject of their background crops up, we just talk about it and answer their questions having a birth in the family is always a prime trigger for questions. We have these top tips for handling your adoptive child's curiosity about the life 'before you', and ensuring that they feel they know their history:
-
Try and get as much birth information about your new children as possible, using red health books from their GP or Social Services reports. This will help you answer your children's questions, and fill in any gaps for them. When our own birth child was born, we were able to tell the boys their own birth weights and times of birth, which made them feel part of the whole event.
-
Try and get photos of them with their foster parents, and pictures of their birth family. We have a book for each of the children, with as much as we could gather about their life story, in preparation for their questions in later years.
-
Don't rely on the child's social worker to prepare the life story ours was really poor. Our guardian ad litem helped us get the information we required to fill in the boys' past.
-
How will you know they are the 'right' children' They just are ' once you've committed your family to adoption, and are ready to welcome a child, then providing everyone's willing to make it work, it should work. Keep an open mind and avoid pre-conceptions let the child be their own person.
?
Early Learning Sheets
