What is Disruption?

Sometimes the problems are too overwhelming and none of these works. You are faced with the awful prospect of a disrupted adoption: your child will leave you and return to the care of the local authority or a voluntary adoption society (not necessarily the one where he was before he came to you), to be fostered or adopted by another family, or perhaps to live in a children’s home. There is no such thing as un-adopting a child in Britain, or of “divorcing” your adoptive family just because it isn’t “working out”. Except in a few special circumstances, once an adoption is final it can only be terminated in the same way as the parental relationship between biological parent and child is terminated: by another adoption. If your child enters the care of the local authority, you will still be his parents, with parental responsibility, although you may not be able to exercise it any more. If your child has to go back into care, you may still be financially liable for his maintenance for as long as he remains in care, although the local authority may not necessarily enforce their claim.

It is impossible to give a firm figure about the rate of disruptions. It depends on the country and also on what kind of adoption was being measured and how long a period after placement was looked at. Obviously if you start with a population of emotionally damaged older children and follow them for 15 years you are going to find a far higher rate of disruption than if you look at adoptions as a whole and only look for disruptions within the first five years after placement.

The following are some figures from published academic research:

• USA: 897 children aged six+, during first year after placement: 8.2% disrupted. (Study published 1986),
• California: 927 children aged three+, period studied not stated: 10.2% disrupted. (Study published 1988),
• Same study as previous: subset of 99 children who were teenagers at placement: 24.2% disrupted (Study published 1990),
• Canada: 79 special needs placements: 8.8% disrupted. (Study published 1990),
• Country not given in my source: 234 long-term fostering and adoptive placements, followed over four years: 2% of the adoptive placements disrupted. (Study published 1997),
• UK: figures from a study of 61 placements made in the early 1990s of children aged 5-9: three had disrupted with one year, but other placements were judged to be in danger of disrupting. (Study published 1998),
• UK: figures published in February 2000 by the BAAF Adoption & Fostering: 20% of permanent placements from local authority care disrupted within five years. (This figure applies to all such placements, not just those formalised by adoption orders),
• UK: 24% of adoptive and foster placements of 51 Black special-needs children of all ages placed in the early 1980s disrupted (the child left the placement earlier than initially planned). (Study published 2000).

What Causes Disruption?

There are factors which seem to be associated with a greater than average chance of disruption. Social workers know what those are and try to avoid them in making a placement, since some of them involve the interrelationships of the adoptee and the existing adoptive family structure. Some factors which have been correlated with future disruption are, in no particular order:

Factors to do with the child and his pre-placement history:

• Age at placement (the older the child the more likely disruption is),
• Severe emotional problems in the child, especially cruelty, fighting, disobedience and vandalism,
• Child unable to attach emotionally to the new family,
• Mental handicap in the child,
• Need of the child for frequent medical or other treatment appointments,
• Child’s strong attachment to the birth mother,
• Previous neglect or abuse of the child.

Factors to do with the adoptive family:

• Unrealistic expectations of the adopters,
• Single parent adoptions,
• Unresolved fertility issues in the adoptive parents’ relationship,
• Adopters with unstable marriages,
• Unsupportive and non-participating adoptive fathers,
• Placement in a family where there were other children already living (only some studies support this),
• Placement in the middle of the age range of the family’s existing children,
• Placement in a family where a born-to child is close in age to the new adoptee,
• Highly educated adoptive mother (only one study has found this to be a factor),
• Adoption by people other than agency-approved applicants.

Factors to do with the social workers or “the system”:

• Separate placement of siblings,
• Previous disrupted placements,
• Numerous previous placements of any kind,
• Overly optimistic pre-placement information from the agency,
• Insufficient background information on the child for the adopters,
• Inadequate preparation of the child or adopters for the placement.

Of those, the ones consistently found to be definite predisposing factors are age at placement and behavioural or emotional problems in the child before placement.

You can see from this list why assessments of both the child and the prospective parents are so important: children with special needs need very special parents. Child-related factors are by far the most important predictors of disruption, as opposed to factors related to the agency’s handling of the adoption or factors related to the adopting family itself. The best predictor of disruption appears to be the age of the child, with severe emotional and behavioural problems and a previous history of disrupted placements coming next. But even here, some studies have found age at placement and previous disruptions not to be correlated with adoptions breaking down.

Factors which, contrary to popular belief, do not seem to correlate with disruption include trans-racial placement or placement across religious lines.

It should be pointed out here, too, that studies of adoption disruption are often unavoidably based on what are called biased samples. That is, the families studied do not necessarily represent a real cross-section of adoptive families. They may be drawn from families attending family counselling services, families of children hospitalised for mental problems, families who have volunteered to be part of a study, etc. For various reasons these are not going to be a representative cross-section. Very few studies have followed up really random samples of placements. Even those who try to do so are restricted to studying those families who agree to participate and can be traced, and this itself probably biases the sample in some way.

In addition, studies of disruption have to define what disruption means. Usually it is taken to mean that the child has left home before the normal age and under unhappy circumstances — been thrown out of the parental home, placed back in care, run away, asked to be taken back into care, etc. — and the child or parents or both agree that their relationship is effectively at an end. But as David Quinton and his co-authors point out in their study Joining New Families: A Study of Adoption and Fostering in Middle Childhood (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), an adoption can be a failure even if the members are still living under the same roof, if parents and child no longer (or never did) love and respect each other or function effectively as a family. In addition, there are families where the relationship has been stretched to the point where the child can no longer live at home, but the parent-child bond is still strong, the family members still deeply love each other and they still consider themselves a family. These might be considered disruptions by some definitions, but I don’t think they can be counted as failures. The line between success and failure has to be drawn somewhere, but we need to recognise that the cut-off point of residential separation, the family physically breaking apart, is artificial.

So the figures for adoption failures, which include those cases which don’t qualify as formal disruptions, but where the family has effectively broken down or never formed in the first place, will be higher, and the relative importance of different factors in the figures may well be different. In particular, I suspect that studies of adoption failure would reveal a larger proportion of trans-racial adoptions and those where the adopters or the child had unrealistic expectations of what adoption or a “forever family” would be like. But I have to stress that I have no evidence to back that assertion up with.

Although most studies show a disruption rate of under 10%, even with special needs placements, behind this statistic hides a larger number of families who are under great strain for a long time, even though they just manage to keep the adoption from breaking down. This is why you need to be a strong person or strong couple, in a good personal support network, with good back-up and preparation by an agency committed to helping you as long as necessary after placement. And that is why you need to think so hard about adoption when you start out, asking yourself all those hard questions. And that’s why agencies are so thorough when they do their home studies of applicants for adoption, especially for special needs adoptions.

What Does a Disruption Feel Like?

There are few things more traumatic in a family than losing a child, and an adoption which has broken down is a terrible event. The social services should of course be closely involved in trying to rescue the adoption if possible, but it must be said that one of the commonest complaints of adoptive parents where the adoption has disrupted is that the social services were too late in responding, automatically assumed the adopters were the cause of the problem, instead of taking into account the child’s pre-adoption history, and would or could not offer the kind of help needed in time. If the placement disrupts before the adoption order has been made it is still a deeply tragic event for you and the child, even if the child has been through it all before several times. An early disruption means a special disruption case conference, involving you and social services people, to try to find out what went wrong, in order to learn from the situation.

Your most overwhelming feelings after a disruption are likely to be relief, failure and guilt: relief that the situation has been resolved and your child has left, a sense of your very public failure as an adoptive parent and guilt at having further damaged your child, however unintentionally. While in some cases it really is the adoptive parents who are directly responsible for a disruption, research has found that much more often the problem lies in the child’s pre-adoption history, which has placed too big a burden on his shoulders and yours. Almost nothing is going to ameliorate your feelings of failure, or your feeling of guilt for feeling relief that your child has left.

You will probably need counselling, and you may well find that your agency turns it back on you at this critical point, unable to itself deal with the emotional issues surrounding a disruption, because they were also at fault, in not giving you the information you should have had or type of intervention you needed early enough to save the adoption. Although some agencies deal with adopters very sympathetically after a disruption, others are preoccupied with covering their own backs and blaming the adoptive parents. Again, you may find help from other adopters who have experienced a disruption. In time you may be able to help others.

Can You Adopt Again after a Disruption?

Sometimes. People must understand what went wrong and decide whether the problem is likely to occur again. It depends a lot on the causes of the disruption, how long the placement lasted, how well you coped with the lead-up and trying to save the adoption, and how you cope with the aftermath. It also depends on your agency. If the agency which placed the first child with you is not happy to place another, or you are unhappy with how they handled it the disruption, you may decide to try for a placement from a different agency. You will still have to spend a lot of time discussing the disruption with the new agency. Disruption is a long-term blow to everyone’s self-esteem and takes a very long time to get over.

© Roger Ridley Fenton