Questions & Answers #NAW17

In raising our concerns, highlighting our struggles, developing our knowledge of the impacts of trauma, loss and separation to better serve our adopted children are we in fact killing adoption one convert to our message at a time.

October rolls around again and National Adoption Week creeps into my calendar, faces of happy adopters and lovable ragamuffins looking for a mum and dad appear in the media.

I’m pausing as I write, the temptation is to fall words about truth and lies in recruitment but that’s an easy cynicism that has no nuance. I don’t believe that there’s a conspiracy or a covering of the realities but how I feel about the push to recruit adopters is complicated. Adoption is the best thing I’ve ever done, of course I’d do it differently, that’s hindsight for you, but would I recommend it? Erm……….. it’s complicated.

Of course, I understand that National Adoption Week is a recruitment drive. I don’t think that it’s being duplicitous when it shows the pictures and tells the good news stories. I don’t think that it’s a sinister plot marketing plot. #NAW17 is the same as it’s always been it’s about supply and demand. Yes, that is perhaps a crude phrase to use in relation to children. However, it’s the reality and an ever constant concern for many policy makers and those charged with keeping the system running. Too many children that are in need of permanent homes and too few prospective adopters.

With the figures of children waiting for adoption remaining static and the number of prospective adopters falling then questions are being asked how do we arrest this trend. A lot of money has been thrown at the problem but the trend is set in. What are the underlying causes? I’m no sociologist but I’m sure the answers are complicated.

As a community of adoptive parents we’ve had a frenetic year raising the profile of some of the difficulties that many of us face as we seek support for our children. The list of challenges makes for dire reading; school systems, family understanding, health services, mental health services, challenging behaviour, aggression and violence, challenges with access to service and poor understanding. This year I feel we’ve seen a tide change, my perspective may not be right and I know that many, if not all, still face significant challenges. I feel people are starting to listen but I’m under no illusion that there’s a long way to go.   Adoption is not all bad, far from it, AUK’s survey highlighted that most adopters would do it again, as I said it’s the best, and most difficult, thing I’ve ever done. I love them.

However, I’m not sure what prospective adopters are hearing or reading, perhaps prospective is to strong a word. People don’t see an advert and make a U turn in their life, run to the nearest prep group and sign on the dotted line. The idea grows over years, is influenced by experience, knowledge,  culture, media and circumstance and then is perhaps realised in National Adoption Week when all the moments up to then align.

However, the narrative is changing. Is adoption, once held so dear, not seen as the gold standard any longer? Media raises the spectre of misuses, abuses and injustice through the likes of Long Lost Families and revelatory documentaries. If you search the internet the adoption community has filled it to overflowing with blogs, twitter threads and Facebook pages brimming with the ‘reality’ of adopted life. Adoptees tell their stories, adopters tell theirs and birth families theirs. By the very nature of people, we rarely rush to our phones and laptops to tell our good stories or our normal days but we share our worries and struggles. Even our #Glomos are small and sometimes only reflect a lack of challenge and conflict rather than achievement as measured by the wider parenting world.

Can #NAW17 compete with this tide of information, freely available, at the fingertips of the curious and the potential? I don’t know. Are we, adopters, unintentionally casting a fatal shadow over adoption as we know it? Is that a bad thing?

As always National Adoption Week leaves me with more questions than answers.

The Adoption Contract

It feels like the time is right to ask the difficult questions about adoption. During an average week I speak to many adopters, adoption professionals and a few adoptees, what strikes me is the gap between the lived experience of adopters and much of the media portrayal and popular perception of adoption. I know I’m banging the same drum that I always seem to be banging, however it remains true.

The adoption contract used to be simple, nice childless couples, with a good reference, committed themselves to raising nice babies that the State could not look after and nobody else wanted.

The State committed to not meddle and the couple committed to not ask for anything else.

The children’s duty in all this is to be glad for the opportunity to live a better life and remain silent on the issue if possible. 

Biological parents were expected to understand the consequences of their actions and quietly accept their fate, ideally without fuss.

How gloriously convenient, fantastically simple and resolutely final. Secrecy was encouraged and many lived under its protective but stifling shroud. Adoptees silenced by deception or indoctrination. Adopters following instructions; Parents shamed into silence. It seems a nonsense from this side of history, but it was real and echoes remain.

Though tinkered with and given a new slap of paint contemporary adoption is based on the same foundation. Adults raising other people’s children, a legal change of identity and a severance of the past for children. We’ve broadened out the criteria of who can adopt reflecting the changes in our society and our ideas of what makes an appropriate parent. We’ve introduced modest changes and channels of contact between birth families and their children.  In reality not much has changed.

By the end of the 1960’s 25,000 children were adopted from the care system, that has now reduced to a relative trickle of less than 5,000 children a year. Society and culture has changed beyond all recognition since then and we’ve reduced the number of children adopted to the most vulnerable, the most impacted, the most hurt children. Caring for hurt children can be hard. Adoption is not what it was. It does remains a safe and secure place for children but the reality for many adoptive parents is that they’re struggling. This deal or contract was not what they feel they were sold. Up to a third of adopters describing themselves as having major difficulties and 8% of them talking in terms of adoption disruption; is it time to think again about renegotiating the adoption contract? Many adoptive families are discovering that their involvement with social care and  mental services stretches beyond the first months of placement through childhood and transforms into involvement with adults social care. The idea that we’d take our children and move into the mythical happy ever after has gone, adoption is not what it was if it ever was. Some adoptive families now find that they feel as vulnerable as the families that their children were removed from. 

The landscape has shifted for all persons in this contract, social care is having to evolve, with varying success, to meet the enduring long term needs of families, it’s getting better but it’s not there yet. Adopters have changed, yes the criteria to adopt has shifted and mirrored changes in culture but challenges remain. Expectations have to be managed and that’s hard. Many infertile couples have traversed the painful and extracted medical processes to try for their own biological children; bruised by this process like no other generation adoption may be their third or fourth choice. When it does not reflect the happy ever afters of popular culture then the fall can be hard.   

Adoptees now live in a world that is connected like never before through social media. The time and effort that tracing family members created a buffer and time to think and reflect. Now, connections can be made with the tap of the finger in seconds in an impulse. Many children are looking to join the dots of their lives and be connected to some of the key people in their life stories.

Birth parents and families are no longer shackled by society’s shame and conventions like in earlier times. Families are asking difficult questions about the legality and the ethics of this severance and removal. Language is emotive and tabloids run stories of social care mistakes and judge’s rulings. Difficult and challenging stuff.

So, is now the time to re write the adoption contract? To build a new model of permanence for our most vulnerable children? To offer them the legal stability and security that remains elusive in foster care? To provide additional parents that can keep them safe and help them make sense of their lives? To offer, where possible, real and meaningful contact for parents and families to the children that they cannot and perhaps should not, look after? To provide adoptive parents with the preparation, resources and recognition that they deserve and need? To prepare children and support them in this new landscape and where possible be given tangible and meaningful connections to the people that make up their lives and stories?

I think now is the time.



I'd like to acknowledge Andrew Christie who during a conversation sparked this post. 

Challenging Behaviour Top Trumps

I like conferences and training. Though the conference and trainy bit can be hit and miss, ranging from excellent to dire, it's meeting other people on a similar path that feels the most rewarding. Chewing the fat, crying on shoulders and sharing tips and tricks.

Of course, you meet at least one person who you can't help wonder how they managed to get approved as adopters and one person on the edge of firebombing their local adoption office.

One of my favourite bits is when we all play 'Challenging behaviour top trumps' in the breaks. There's always someone who starts with a relatively modest,

'Oh, we have challenging bedtimes, sometimes I have to get really firm'. 

Sensing an easy victory another will come in.

'Well, I must tell you that Tarquin spontaneously combusts at the mere thought of bedtime'

Not to be outdone a bystander will add.

'Combusts? Once when we tried to get Petula to bed she held a three day rooftop protest that had to be quelled by the local branch of the territorial army'

And so it goes on, the anecdotes slowly getting more extreme, we laugh and our mouths are agog at the scale and scope of the challenging behaviour. Of course someone wins, my friends true story of having cement poured down their toilet usually wins.
But all the losers walk away feeling much better and thinking 'Crickey, I thought I had it bad, little Franella seems quite tame by comparison'. In fact it was quite productive for the losers and they can pick up tips, tricks and the number of the local TA.

Of course there are other break time activities including my personal favourite, 'Stupid and Insulting things my Social Worker Said Snap'.

The best bit being that we're in environment where we can use shorthand, not have to start at the beginning and can share our fears, joys and journey with people who get it. The 'games' are a therapeutic and  important part for all the above reasons. Of course, everywhere parents meet, playgrounds and playgroups, similar games are played. It's a parent thing.

So, in light of this I wish all of you at the Adoption UK conference a smashing day and next year they should formalise the games and give out awards.

Feedback: Adoption Support Mental Health Roundtable Event

First of all I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my request for people's views and experiences of CAHMS in relation to their adopted children.

Forgive me for not giving a blow by blow account of what was a long and very detailed meeting with a wide range of professionals, professors, doctors of this and that, NHS types, civil servants, Social Workers, Sally Donovan and me.  Edward Timpson, the Children's Minister, came at the beginning of the meeting and the fearful look in his eye of a man being stalked was not missed by me. This was the third time I'd been in a room with him in 24 hours and the second time involved a hug and a selfie.

The views and contributions by the attendees was excellent with Professor Jonathan Green's presentation on delivery models and the rationale behind them being a high point. His description and explanation of adoption as being such a high indicator of risk for children's mental ill health was reassuring for me as a parent, he clearly 'gets it'. Discussion around the alternative eco system of adoption interventions was excellently summarised by Professor Peter Fonagy acknowledging their ability to engage and work with adoptive families in ways that engaged and acknowledged the challenges we all know.

Sally and I had been given the opportunity to share the views and perspectives of adoptive parents. We both were overwhelmed by the responses that we had received when we put out the call on social media but we realised that the messages were  in the main critical and raw. We'd both been impacted at the difficult and distressing stories we'd heard. So the challenge was how to maintain that honesty and still make it palatable to those who work in this field. I struggled to add much more to what had been said to me so I gave a brief introduction and read out a representative sample of direct quotes (see below). All thought provoking stuff and quite different in tone from the content prior to that. Sally followed this pulling together key themes and messages that adopters had passed onto her. These resonated with what others were saying and it was received well.

So where do we go from here? It's clear that there is desire to implement accurate assessment of children and families that links to then identifying appropriate and effective interventions. Serious considerations is being given to the formation of regional CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) that specialise in serving adopted and children in the looked after system. As you can see there's an awful lot to go at there and not all without controversy but there appears to be a move across the stakeholders in relation to making positive changes to the current system.

Those are my selected highlights. I'm encouraged and hopeful, not words I use lightly, so take heart and thank you for your help.

Quotes 
‘Our needs just too complex for CAHMS, is my guess. Tried a bit of everything, then time was up, case closed’

‘Emergency CAMHS services must be improved to give parents of young children genuine out of hours support and there must be a recognition of the real level and prominence of child on adult violence and access to funded safe holding training for all adoptive parents.’

‘Social Workers, including those in CAMHS, must stop blaming and disbelieving parents who are traumatised by parenting traumatised children without support! I could go on...’

‘find staff who know how to work with children, the old chestnut saying 'wont engage ' should not be allowed to pass their lips. Try something else then!! Talking therapies with children who suffer with anxiety, seriously do they think they are going to work!!’

‘We need ‪a clear referral pathway to CAMHS; fast initial assessment of needs and support for the whole family in terms of emotional support and helping parents with practical strategies and advice for helping/managing the child’

‘My GP was clueless and not at all interested or helpful. Adoption support did agree to refer although this took 3 months from me contacting them.’

‘My daughter has issues around attachment, guilt and loss about her past experiences and birth mother. This affects her behaviour and learning. However, she is not eligible for work with CAHMS as her behaviour is not severe enough to meet their criteria’

‘Intervention is not happening before crisis point. Educate schools that pretty much every adopted child needs mental health support within the school environment, and that we are not neurotic parents, we just fear, and in many cases know, that the behaviours that happen at home will, in time, happen at school and this will affect friendships and how well they can succeed to the best of their educational ability.’

‘In my doctors surgery they hesitate to refer any child to CAHMS as they know the waiting list is so long. We are failing a whole generation and it's so sad’

‘For me CAHMS have been a fantastic service. Help when needed for both S and me (as support/somewhere to offload). We have had a huge waiting list each referral to get through, and are now 10mths into waiting for art therapy - but I know when we get to the top of the list (very soon now!), that the service will be fantastic. However, support from PAS, both here and where we originally adopted has been horrendous.’

‘We will never, EVER work with CAMHS again. I honestly believe that in its current state my local CAMHS does more harm than good for adoptive families. They insist a square peg must fit into a square hole, what they offer is what you get, regardless of suitability.’ 

‘….it has taken us 6 months to finally see someone who has any clue about being able to help us.  It was 4 months from urgent GP referral to seeing anyone at all. It needs to be less than a fortnight. Now we we have found someone to help, I think what's being offered is excellent.’