XIII. Getting to Know Your New Child

You’re about to start on the main leg of the most important journey of your life. Your life is totally changing from the moment you get out of the car and meet your new child. You’ve been “pregnant” for anything up to several years, and now suddenly there he is, your new son (or daughter, or whole family).

This stage in the proceedings can follow immediately (even the very next day) after the panel matches you with a child, or it may be days or even weeks before it gets under way. You need whatever time you have between learning of the agency’s decision and when the child comes to live with you:

To gather your wits about you,
To inform any people who need to know about that’s happening,
To make any alterations which might be necessary to your house or your work arrangements,
To arrange child care, if that is part of the plan,
To find out as much as possible about your new child,
If possible, to take the last real vacation you’re likely to get for the next few years!

Help! We Were Supposed to Be Going on Holiday

Sometimes it happens that you’ve booked a holiday and just before you’re due to go off the adoption agency tells you they have a child for you. What do you do? There are a couple of options.

You could cancel or reschedule the vacation. That might be the best option if it is not actually imminent but several months away and you could get a refund or change it, maybe even including your new child.
You could ask the agency to postpone things for a while, until you have returned. That is possible if the holiday is really supposed to start in the next couple of days, but the agency might take a dim view of that.
There is special holiday insurance available for prospective adopters. If you would like to book a holiday but don’t want to lose your deposit or payment in case of a sudden placement, you could take out such a policy, which will refund your costs in case it happens.

Information about the Child: Your Right to Know

Before we get into the next phase of your life, starting to get to know your new child, we need to discuss information.

You are about to become parents, probably for the first time. You are probably not thinking very clearly for a lot of the time, and after the child comes to live with you, you will be too tired and busy to think clearly. Now, before starting the introductions if possible, and definitely before the child moves in with you, is the time to be sure you have got the information you need to be the best possible parents for him.

You may be saying to yourself right now, or in the delirium of pre-placement, “I don’t care about his past or anything, I just want that kid!” That’s quite right. You want him just as much as you would want a child born to you, and you would no more turn down this placement now than you would turn away from your born-to baby in the maternity ward. But just as new biological parents want and need to know everything possible about him, so do you; not to decide whether to go ahead, but in order to do right by him. If your child has special needs or a past which is going to pose problems for him you want and need to know as much as possible, to help him make the best of his life.

I’m not saying that agencies routinely and deliberately withhold important information, but they are not always as forthcoming or thorough as they could be, and it is the case that agencies sometimes keep back information which would be important for adoptive parents, such as a history of abuse. This is wrong under the terms of Local Government Circular (98) 20, and agencies have been successfully sued for failing to disclose such crucial information to adopters. There are all kinds of psychological and medical conditions which could be directly affected by pre-adoption history, and if you don’t know what that history is, you, your child, and the professionals who are helping you are fighting with one hand tied behind your backs. Failure to tell the adopters everything the agency knows can lead and has led to adoptions breaking down unnecessarily.

William, my 21-year-old son, placed with me when he was 16, drove his car into a river trying to kill himself. There were voices telling him to run his car into the river or a brick wall. Thank goodness he chose the river. He was diagnosed afterwards with paranoid schizophrenia. I phoned his former foster parents, who told me he had been diagnosed with this several years before he came to me. He has been with me for five years and not one social worker told me about this! He has never been in therapy or on medication — nothing but a special education programme in school for slow learners. At 18 he graduated from the care system with no services in place. And no one told me, his new father, about it.

What kinds of information might there be? The older the child and the more time spent in a dysfunctional or abusive family or the more difficult his medical condition is, the more important the information is. The following is a list of what might be available, depending on your child’s age and circumstances. It is not exhaustive, and it would be very rare for an agency to have anything like all of these records available for you:

The child’s Form E and associated reports,
Photographic and video records of the child and his previous families,
Sound recordings of the child’s speech,
School and pre-school reports and other files, IQ and achievement test results,
Immigration records,
Social workers’ logs of their dealings with the birth family, and case notes,
Minutes of care reviews and other case conferences,
Police files relating to abuse of the child or of criminal behaviour by the child,
Court reports and transcripts of hearings and trials,
Height and weight and immunisation records,
Psychological and medical reports on the child and other relevant members of the birth family, from midwives, ante-natal clinic, family doctors, hospitals, consultants, visiting nurses, etc., from pregnancy to date,
Records of therapists who have worked with the child,
NSPCC files,
Foster family and children’s home notes about the child,
Previous adoptive family’s files relating to your child.

Be sure all possible medical records are also transferred to your own family doctor as soon as possible.

Not every child needs this kind of disclosure. Some placements are quite straightforward: healthy baby need new home. But these placements are becoming increasingly uncommon. Many more placements are of children with complex medical and psychiatric conditions caused by parental substance abuse during pregnancy, neglect or abuse after birth, multiple foster placements or shunting between foster placements and failed attempts to rehabilitate with the birth family, all combined with the normal risks of genetic and other problems that any child is subject to.

Of course agencies don’t know everything. The birth mother may not know very much about the birth father. The birth family may be deliberately obstructive and unco-operative, even to deliberately lying to the social workers. Certainly the birth family has its own right to privacy, but in my opinion that right is over-ridden by the moral right of an innocent child to the information he needs for effective treatment. Demand to see everything there is, and once you get it, photocopy it if you can.

Pursuing the information you need may bring you up against provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and other laws. More likely, it may bring you up against some agency’s over-zealous interpretation of the Act. If you think you’re being stonewalled or the agency is hiding unjustifiably behind confidentiality concerns, you can consult a lawyer or you can threaten to withdraw from the placement (which you are legally free to do at any time up to the formal adoption order); that can wonderfully concentrate the minds of stubborn social workers. You are not being difficult; you are not being nosy; you are being pushy: you are getting the information you need to be the best possible parents for your child, who needs all the help he can get.

This may be your initiation into the fraternity of Tiger Parents: parents whose children need special help and who find it hard to get. These parents have to fight the system like tigers to get what their children need. You may be called to join their ranks one day. Remember the Boy Scout motto: “Be Prepared”. The information you collect now may be needed later. And later, when you need it, it may be unavailable.