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Adoption

Adoption Q&A answers

2 replies

Phineyj · 16/05/2013 21:04

What did you think of the answers from the adoption person from the new national organisation?

answers

In my case, she referred me to read the book which made me concerned about the issue in the first place... Hmm

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Lilka · 16/05/2013 22:15

My question wasn't answered at all Grin Hmm

But how frustrating, Phiney. As a mother in this exact position my honest best answer to you is - there is no official knowledge of how many birth parents contact their children on facebook - there are no statistics kept, no one has asked the councils for that information, and so you will only find anecdotes about this, because there is no record keeping on this matter. To find it out, LA's would have to comb through all their post adopton support records and find out how many adoptive families have had problems with this. Likewise, there is no research at all in this, especially long term research as facebook and social media have only sprung up in the last 8 ish years. Contact via Facebook has only been raised as an issue in the last few years, so I wouldn't expect proper research for at least a few years yet to come, and long term research will take some years more.


I did notice some questions were not answered or skipped around. Someone asked if the average age at adoption was 4, and how common it was to adopt a child under 18 months and that was just waffled around

By the way, to whoever asked that question, the current average age at adoption is 3. The last figure I saw was 3 years 9 months.This average age is dropping, indeed it used to be 4. If 3 is an average, that shows there are a lot of children aged 0,1 and 2 being placed overall. Indeed if you look at the online forum posts if recently placed people, you will notice nearly adoptions are of 0-3 year olds with a vast number of 0-2 year olds. I had a nosy on fertility friends to see if i should add it my blog resources and found that nearly everyone adopted 0-3's and a very significant number were 0-18 months old, and similar posts on AdoptionUK - I believe that the changes in adoption and 'speed up' has most definitely taken effect, because there are suddenly rather a lot of 0-12 month baby's around. My advice is to ask your LA the ages of their waiting children, but I would not be too pessimistic about adopting a baby with the right LA. Although some LA's won't have nearly as many baby's as others

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Phineyj · 20/05/2013 22:04

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me lilka, that's really helpful. Even if there were research, I don't know what on earth a good solution would be.

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