Adoption breakdown is not failure to love or try to do your best for the child. Adoption breakdown is not abandonment, lack of parenting skills, or neglect.
Adoption breakdown is in the sad reality that many hundreds of families up and down the country face each year due to the trauma that their children have gone through by being separated from their birth families and their experiences before adoption.
This is the reality of modern adoption in the UK.
The truth is, some of these children cannot cope with normal family life; social services promise the world and then disappear when the adoption order is granted, only reappearing when we are desperate for help and can take no more of the abuse, stealing, lying, violence etc that our children subject us to daily.
Are social services reappearing to help us, offer us respite or therapy? No! Quite the opposite in fact.
The same service that gave us these children with promises of support are now here to accuse us of failure, bad parenting, and abuse.
They may even threaten to take our other children and make sure we lose our jobs if we work with children.
Some of us start to wonder if our children’s birth families were targeted unnecessarily, such is the feeling of being attacked and the lack of trust in social services.
Most people who adopt are professional, loving, caring people who want to make a difference to children’s lives – the sad reality is that the difference that is made to our lives at the hands of social services is often irreversible, and the children end up back in the system that we tried to save them from in the first place.
The answer is honesty at the outset, some children need more support than a family can give – better to keep these children with therapeutic foster carers. And for those children who can be adopted safely, continue to support the family throughout their child’s life into adulthood – the cost will be nothing compared to a lifetime of public funds and the cycle continuing down the generations if the adoption breaks down.
Stop demonising adoptive parents when adoptions break down – we are finding each other in this modern age of the internet and sharing our stories which are worryingly similar and offering each other support and we refuse to continue being blamed and shamed.