Post adoption disruption

Annie what a heartbreaking post. And you are right, adoption is often only portrayed as love and light. The author Lemn Sissay also tells a very different story. So sorry that your family has been affected.

I agree the social care system is broken - in many places.

I understand the number of failed adoptions is quite high, far more than people realise.
Everyone assumes it is all successful and a happy family life ensues.
It is a tragedy for the children and the parents involved.
The children feel abandoned and the parents feel like failures.

Is the training for SS rigorous enough, is the transition period long enough?Are there the right answers?
Who knows?

The system has failed, miserably ! There is far more to being a member of SS than " working by the book " and this is exactly where the failure lies. No two cases are ever alike in this world of displaced children.

From what I understand, the problem is complex. Due to the policy of trying to support and keep families together, children may not go into the care/adoption system until their home life is beyond help and the damage is done. Even babies are seriously affected by neglect which occurs before their 'conscious' life. My heart goes out to anyone who has to make this decision, the guilt must stay for life. Truly awful situation for all. Social Services are seriously overstretched and in all of this, the children who most need it are unable to become part of a loving welcoming family and that same family are left bereft and mourning what could and should have been.

SS are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. However I am no apologist for them, I saw both good and less than good work over my 20 odd years service.

In that time I came across just one case where an adoption had broken down. A little girl aged only 8. It seemed to me that the department hadn’t been as honest as they should have been about the child’s history possibly in case it put prospective adopters off.
I became involved after she had returned to care but despite a lot of support damage was done. I think and wonder about her sometimes so many years later.

I was listening to a radio broadcast, can’t remember the channel, which said that 1/3 of children offered for adoption suffer from foetal alcohol syndrome and all that entails.

We had an adopted child in our school, who literally broke her adopted parents. They knew she was troubled, but nothing could have prepared them for what she was like.
She had gone through so much trauma in her early years. ?
As teachers, we felt helpless and that we had failed her.
At five years old she was angry, defiant, violent, didn't know the difference between right and wrong and had no boundaries.
It was such a sad case.

Social Care Services are and have been for a long time overstretched and often subject to the political whim of the day. I worked in this sector for many years. As silverlining said the truth about behavioural issues and background is often glossed over. Support promised to prospective parents which does not materialise. Sometimes the problems do not manifest until later. So many reasons for things to go wrong and sometimes the parents expectations are not realistic.
I think the people who foster children with problems are greatly undervalued and deserve much more in the way of support and financial recompense.

When I was working in this field the children adopted were nearly all babies at about 6 weeks old. That has totally changed. The stigma of the unmarried mother, which caused girls to give up their babies for adoption, no longer exists; so those who are put up for adoption now tend to be older (or sets of siblings) and have very often already had a troubled existence.

Also, some are the children of drug addicts and are physically damaged by this.

Adopters take on a huge challenge - and the help received from Social Services is, in my experience, minimal to non-existent. The adoptive parents are often taking in very very damaged children; children whom professionals struggle to deal with. But the adoptive parents are expected to deal with this with only minimal support. And some of these children struggle in a normal family environment, because they do no have the emotional skills or the ability to trust others because of their traumatic experiences.

It is a very difficult balance between the rights of birth parents to be given a chance to make a go of it; and the need for the child to find "forever parents" quickly before too much damage has been done.

It is imperative that proper intensive support is given to adoptive parents to help them provide this essential service.

The children who fall through this system can be a huge drain on the public purse in the future, sadly often via drugs rehabilitation services and the prison system. And the emotional damage to the adoptive parents who "fail" is enormous and often takes years to overcome.

Another example of government failure to value preventative work.

I do recommend Lemn Sissay’s book “my name is why”
I’ve just finished reading it. Heartbreaking.

We had two lots of friends our age who had a nightmare with their adopted children and this was 40 years ago . One accused her father of terrible things and one married and left her child behind . The grandparents travelled miles to keep in touch with him but had to give up . These children were adopted as babies but still went off the rails .

Nothing to do with adoption but a couple of days ago I was watching a programme about the Kaiser and his relationship with his mother. Although he had a terrible childhood with doctors trying to "cure" his withered arm the real damage was done by his mother refusing to accept him because he was disabled. To the end of his life he was full of hatred because his mother wanted nothing to do with him. It's a huge hurdle to overcome.

I saw that programme as well Deeda I felt so sorry for the poor little boy, that was the feeling of the time though.
Apropos of that I remember many years ago an intelligent lady, a teacher who had a son with very severe learning disabilities and she was convinced his problems were the result of her having an affair with a married man. Nothing we said would convince her otherwise, very sad.