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Adoption

Article about adoption in yesterday's Guardian

4 replies

Happyasapiginshite · 29/11/2012 10:24

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/28/adoption-too-many-obstacles-matching

Great article, he sounds like a very sensible man.

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Moomoomie · 29/11/2012 10:51

He does sound very sensible and to be thinking of the children who are waiting.
I wonder how things can be changed so children and adopters are not left waiting for so long.
I do think every child should be placed with a post adoption support plan in place. I'm not sure if that really happens, but I have found post adoption support in my area to be dreadful, almost non exsistent.

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Lilka · 29/11/2012 14:04

Certainly in general he is right that there is no one type of person that is more likely to be successful. There are some children who do need a certain type of parent eg. My DD1 was placed with a single mother and one of her siblings with two mums deliberately. The problem is to correctly identify which children really do need a certain set up, usually children with moderate-serious emotional needs, whether that's about parents, pets, brothers/sisters or something else. And not to apply a hierarchy of 'perfect family set up' to every child, and only look for say a married couple, when there isn't any need for that

His last point on chemistry is interesting. I certainly felt 'chemistry' or something like that (a gut connection) when reading my kids information and seeing photos. Some adoptive parents only want to be matched to a child they feel a connection to, but other adoptive parents don't feel anything and/or don't see a need to feel anything because the children are strangers at that point. Some want to be very involved (like me!), others want their social worker to find them the right child. Whatever way they, it's important that chemistry doesn't overide serious thinking, epecially when presented with a child with extra parenting needs. You can feel a wonderful connection to a child you can't cope with. And social services need to share all relevent information and not fudge facts in matching. Perhaps Mr Narey could comment on that next. I know plenty of other adoptive parents with stories of this besides myself

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Devora · 29/11/2012 16:21

He is a sensible man. Of course you want to try to get the best match possible, but I'm sure it's true that we need to shift resources away from finding the 'perfect' match and towards post-adoption support for many more families.

I completely agree with Lilka's point of information-sharing. Fervently.

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Piffyonarock · 29/11/2012 21:15

I agree with Moomoomie, a support plan would be useful. When we first adopted we were paranoid that if we didn't appear to be coping that SS would take DS away. As our LA has in-house post-adoption support we would not have felt comfortable approaching them until our order was through. We said this when asked about it at our second panel, and they said then that they expected most adoptions to need support. Phew! If only we'd known.

I didn't realise matching was done in different ways depending LA, seems like there is a lot of variation in procedures which surely needs to be looked at in terms of all LAs doing things the best way.

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