A letter to my pre-adoption self,
I find National Adoption Week difficult. Of course, children who are unable to live with their birth families should have secure, permanent, loving homes. But the current adoption narrative, combined with a lack of services and support, sets adoptive families up to fail. We must be honest with prospective adopters about the reality of modern adoption. I’ve been an adoptive Mum for over 13 years; here is what I wish I could tell my pre-adoption self.
- Adoption is not an alternative way to have a family
The adoption system is broken and there needs to be a whole new system and language used. Our current system sets everyone involved up to fail. Therapeutically parenting, or re-parenting, traumatised children is a highly skilled full-time job. The people who do this job need to be well-supported, psychologically, practically and financially. There needs to be a team of people around every traumatised child and their families. Vulnerable children cannot ‘fit’ into families or meet a couple’s wish to have a family. The adoption system needs radical change.
- Siblings shouldn’t be placed together
Sibling relationships are of course important; our children love each other very much; they also re-traumatise each other daily. They feel that the other one’s existence is a threat to their survival – that probably was the case when they were tiny and there wasn’t enough food. They cannot feel safe in a home with their sibling. Your daughter will be traumatised by her brother’s violent outbursts; your son will be traumatised by his sister’s self-harm. Despite it being physically unsafe for them to live together, everyone you meet will tell you how lovely it is that they have each other and were placed together.
- Love does not heal trauma
Love is so important and we love our children fiercely. But love cannot heal trauma. It does not fix the hurt, it does not rewire their brains, it does not undo the effects of drugs, and alcohol, and stress from before they were born. You wouldn’t expect love to heal cancer, or a broken leg, or a war veteran’s PTSD, but the idea that love can heal trauma is woven through the adoption narrative. This narrative sets families up to fail. Love can feel extremely uncomfortable and threatening to an adoptive child. They loved their birth families but were abused and hurt by them. Love is needed but it is not enough.
- All that childcare experience won’t help
That childcare business you’ve run successfully for 15 years, all those youth groups you’ve run, all that reading you’ve done about child development, trauma and attachment. It won’t help. All the skills and strategies mean nothing when your children do not trust adults to keep them safe. A theoretical understanding of the impact of trauma does not help when a coffee table comes flying at your face. The aggressive meltdowns might be manageable at 5/6, but they are impossible at 11/12 and terrifying at 16/17. When nervous systems are hardwired for danger and move quickly to ‘fight/flight/freeze’, clear boundaries and praise have little impact. All that experience just adds to your guilt when despite your best efforts you cannot manage your children’s behaviour. And when things escalate from fights to broken windows, school suspensions, middle of the night arrests and drug dealing, you will feel filled with shame.
- Your children will have Special Educational Needs
All those earnest conversations spent pre-adoption discussing what level of SEN need we would be able to manage, were a waste of time. The pre-adoption medicals and reports paint the most positive picture possible without telling any lies. The reality is all children who need adoptive homes have additional needs. Alcohol and drug taking whilst pregnant causes long term damage to brains, but so does a pregnancy full of stress and violence. Birth parents are often living such chaotic lives that neuro-developmental disorders such as ADHD/Autism/FASD are unlikely to have been diagnosed, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t present. For many years all developmental and behavioural challenges will be explained away as related to trauma and attachment. But that doesn’t mean that disabilities aren’t also present. Traumatised children are very good at ‘masking’ – sometimes their lives depended on it! If we’d known from the start that both my children were autistic, we would have been able to parent them in a way that met their needs, rather than causing us all additional pressure. The lack of additional needs assessments sets families up to fail.
- All your relationships will be changed forever
That support map you created during the assessment will fade away. Many friends will distance themselves when playdates become a disaster. The small-knit community you feel such a part of will come on this journey with you for a bit. Some of the other parents at school will cry when your son brings home his first Mother’s Day card, but they will also complain to the headteacher when he whacks their child with a skipping rope, and ruins Forest School. They like the idea of the happy-ever-after adoption narrative but when the embodiment of that is an out-of-control teenager, they’d suddenly rather he hadn’t been brought into their community. You won’t put effort into maintaining friendships with other people because it is so hard to care about how well Amelia is doing with her flute lessons, and how anxious Harry is about his SATs, when your ‘win’ of the week is that your child hasn’t hit you.
Some relationships will stick, your close family, and a few friends, will be your fiercest advocates, they will listen and provide hugs and endless cups of coffee. They will sweep up the broken glass and fix holes in the wall. They will stay up all night searching for your missing child and keep you company at the hospital. But you will hate that your children are causing trauma for the wider family, that your nieces and nephews’ successes are overshadowed by the latest incident or crisis. You feel guilty that you brought this trauma and stress into their lives, but you also know you couldn’t survive without their support.
- The education system does not work for traumatised, neuro-diverse children.
You will end up ‘electively home educating’ both children at different points – and there is nothing elective about any of it. It is a choice forced upon you because you cannot let the school system cause your child further harm. You will feel you are doing a crap job home-educating, you will have to fight for EHCPs, fight for a specialist school place, borrowing money for solicitors to take the Local Authority to Tribunal. You will only realise what a good job you were doing of keeping your son emotionally regulated at home when he starts his very expensive bespoke placement and becomes increasingly dysregulated and aggressive. He is frequently sent home from school as it isn’t ‘safe’ for the staff and other students, despite 2:1 staff ratios, trained therapeutic staff, and an enormous budget. You will wonder how on earth you are supposed to keep him, his sister (and yourself) safe on your own?
Don’t spend money on private education, despite the promises of small classes and excellent pastoral support. They won’t understand trauma and their false confidence that she just needs to work harder, follow the rules, and has no SEN needs will cause great harm. You will learn to fear a certain type of teacher who wants to be the one to ‘heal’ your child. They will take a strong interest and offer lots of sympathy, time out of Maths lessons and hot chocolates. They don’t understand the complex reality of neurodiversity combined with trauma, and when there is no ‘quick fix’ they will blame the parents or the child.
- Professional support often makes things worse
There are some professionals out there doing their best to make things better in awful systems. The professionals you will respect the most are the ones that don’t make false promises and are honest about their limitations. But overall, you will be shocked at the lack of support for your vulnerable, traumatised children. CAMHs will continually discharge your children despite their self-harm, risky behaviour and suicide attempts. The NHS that diagnosed both your children with autism cannot provide any reasonable adjustments so they can access healthcare, particularly in an emergency. You will have to leave A&E with your son with a suspected broken hand because he is so dysregulated he is going to harm himself or others. Your daughter will run away from A&E after taking an overdose and they will put a safeguarding referral in because you ‘took her away from hospital against medical advice’. You will spend a night crying outside your daughter’s hospital room and be ignored by staff discussing their dates and ordering pizzas. For every kind person who wants to help, there is another person who shows no empathy.
There is no good system for families where children are in mental health crisis and/or displaying aggressive or self-injurious behaviour but where the cause of that is not the parents. The system assumes that parents must be to blame. There are countless meetings and a move from a Child in Need plan to a Child Protection Plan. Everyone discusses how worried they are but does nothing to practically help. Everyone scores the level of risk and blames the other agencies involved. We go round in endless circles with different professionals arguing about who should be providing support. Each meeting adds more pressure and stress. Any upset or frustration shown is written up as a sign of our failures, whilst conflicting and sometimes dangerous advice is advocated by the professionals involved. Terrible decisions made by the professionals involved cause further harm, and trauma, to our child, in ways I cannot bring myself to write about.
- Contact will birth family will happen and you will navigate it alone
Your children will have contact with birth family a long time before they turn 18. After years of not posting photos online and concealing any identifying details from letterbox contact letters, you will have daily direct phone calls and messages with birth Mum, because it is your only hope of keeping your daughter safe. You will feel like you are parenting a third teenager whilst you try to support birth Mum (and her young daughter) so she can try and create some stability for your children. They visit you at home, and for a short while you will feel smug that you are navigating this so positively – such a great example of modern adoption contact. Then birth Mum will let your children down, she will reject them, and you will be left picking up the pieces. Social workers will discuss their concerns around birth family contact and how destabilising it is – but no one will offer any practical support. In fact, it will be written into the CP plan that it is your responsibility to supervise and coordinate contact and to ensure it is safe!
- You will become a different person
You will not recognise the person you become, and you will deal with things that you never thought would become part of your life. Contact with the emergency services will become a regular part of your life – being woken by the police or paramedics at the door becomes unsurprising. You will plead with police officers in the middle of the night to section your daughter because you are terrified for her safety. Your son will be arrested for a serious assault, he will come home a scared little boy needing a hug, but you worry it will be you he assaults next.
You will search bedrooms for razor blades, knives, weapons and drugs. You will routinely buy vapes and alcohol just to keep the peace. All boundaries and reasonable expectations for family life are slowly eroded, and you absorb their trauma like a sponge.
Advice given is usually contradictory and often makes situations worse but not following the advice of professionals and you risk being blamed when something goes wrong. The children’s need to be in control in a world that feels so scary creates extreme vulnerability and you learn about the very dark side of social media, sexual and criminal exploitation and county lines. Whilst you know they are vulnerable you will often feel like the victim of domestic abuse, walking on eggshells trying to prevent things from kicking off. You learn to sense in the air when something is escalating and have the de-escalation skills of a hostage negotiator.
The stress of just keeping two neuro-diverse and traumatised teenagers alive feels completely overwhelming. You feel you will break, but you don’t. You can’t break because there is no meaningful support system for families in crisis. So, there is no choice but to keep going because we are legally responsible for two vulnerable young people.
You would never recommend adoption to other people, the system isn’t safe, and there is no safety net for families in crisis. Families are being set up to fail, and it isn’t fair on anyone – especially the children.
Your children change you, their difficulties make you a tougher person, a strong advocate. They challenge your assumptions and you see the world in a different way. They make you a kinder, more open-minded and loving person. You marvel at their courage and resilience, their humour and creativity. You love them fiercely. You campaign for change in the adoption system for them. Because they deserve to live in a world where they are properly supported and their histories and needs are fully understood.