Why Should You Adopt a Child?

First of all, banish any thoughts from your mind of single mothers giving up their newborn babies for adoption. Whilst this was the pattern perhaps 30 to 40 years ago, it is rare now.

Apart from those very very few children given up for adoption at birth, the remainder will have been abused and/or neglected in some way, or it has been shown that he or she is highly likely to suffer harm if they remained with their family.

These are children who will have experienced highly disrupted lives, and sometimes this disruption will have been as a result of the process of removal from their birth family.

The media often portray the social work profession as one where children are removed from their parents with little or no evidence. In actual fact the process is a rigorous one with evidence tested fully in court. As someone who has given evidence in court for up to two days at a time, I tell you it is not a comfortable place to be with every action you have taken and every judgement you have made scruntinised in minute detail.

The children being placed for adoption now are often older than they have been in the past. This is often due to the fact that social workers will have made considerable efforts to keep the children within the birth. This of course means that the children may have some understanding and some enduring memory of their birth family.

Now think for a moment about what happens in most families to help a child form his or her identity. This will be an entirely unconscious process where parents share memories with their children of being a baby. There may be stories of how the child was born in the middle of the night. There will be photos to look at with accompanying anecdotes. There will be conversations about first words spoken, first steps taken and how they used to fall asleep in their dinner.

With adopted children, you have none of these memories to share with your child. You will be provided with some detailed background information about the family, and you may even be provided with some early photographs of your adopted child. But what you won't have are the memories to share with your child. In our family we have one adopted child and one birth child, so trying to get this right and to be fair to both children can be a challenge to say the least.

Difficult as it may be, it is important that your adopted child has some understanding of their background and how they came to be adopted. How this information is given and when depends very much on your child. For our adopted child it is difficult to know when to give him the full story. He knows the basic information, but not details yet. So we will need to give him this information at a pace he can cope with.

Attachment theory is a branch of psychology looking at how enduring emotional bonds are formed between a child and their primary caregiver(s) and how this can affect emotional and physical development of children. Naturally this then translates into that person's emotional well-being and their ability to form relationships as they reach adulthood.

This is a huge subject, so I cannot possibly do it justice here, but it is clearly highly relevant to adoption. On its simplest level a secure attachment between baby and primary caregiver is formed by the baby letting the world know that it has a need of some sort (I am hungry/wet/too hot/too cold/frightened, etc) by the only means it knows - by crying! The caregiver responds in a sensitive and consistent way by satisfying the expressed need. Sounds simple enough, but for some parents there are things that impede this process - such as drugs, alcohol, their own experience of being parented, mental health problems, etc.

Adopted children of course, by definition, have had more than one set of caregivers (i.e. birth parents, foster carers, sometimes extended members of birth family) before arriving with the adoptive family. So these children learn that the world is a confusing and unpredictable place.

It is impossible to generalise what you may face looking after an adopted child. Some adopted children experience no more difficulties than other chidren. However, it has to be said this is the minority. Most adopted children will display some kind of difficulties around attachment and this may manifest itself in whole range of different ways.

Some children will indiscriminately seek affection from adults, including those they have never met before. Others will find it difficult to give or recieve affection. Many adopted children may be emotionally delayed. Our child, for example, is quite a bright child and intellectually easily on a par with his peers. Emotionally, however, he is functioning around 5 years behind his chronological age. As a result his social skills are very poor and he finds it very difficult to make and keep friends.

His behaviour generally can vary hugely from being extremely loving, affectionate, thoughful and generous to violent, obstinate and generally difficult to manage.

We are fortunate in that he now attends a school where he receives specialist help. When he was at his previous school he was extremely disruptive and had he stayed there any longer would have been excluded.

Well, only you can answer that one. Adopting a child gives you the opportunity to offer a loving home to a child and there are considerable rewards in doing this. There are of course the rewards that come with raising a child, but also you have the opportunity to help a child through whatever issues they may bring with them.

You do, of course, need to be prepared for the challenges this brings. The number of adoptive placements that fail is very high - this is in part because adopters do not always realise quite how challenging it can be at times.