III. More About the Children Available for Adoption, Page 2

Regression after placement is common with older children. They may have missed out on a proper babyhood or childhood in a chaotic household or because they had to look after younger children or incompetent parents. They may want somehow to experience being your baby, in order to feel more completely yours. No matter. If they feel the need, it has to be gone through. However strange it may be having a seven-year-old with a baby bottle or dummy or even in nappies, it’s only temporary. It is very common for them to regress only in part of their behaviour. You may have a child for a while who is a baby, a toddler and a junior-school pupil all at once, changing from one to the other with bewildering speed. It is simply a more extreme case of what most children go through when Mum has another baby. And if it’s confusing for you, think of how it must be for him! Relax and let him get through it at his own pace; anxiety on your part will just make matters more difficult. Anyway, it will be good practice for later, because the same sort of thing happens to most children when they are teenagers: seven one minute, 15 going on 23 the next.

Our first child went back on the baby bottle when he was six and we had our second child. Our second child, a toddler, regressed to new-born stage for a month after placement: she slept for 22 hours a day, waking only to be fed, until she had managed to assimilate in her own way the momentous change in her life. Our last child regressed from eight years to four when he arrived, and spent the next five years gradually catching up to his chronological age again.

Time is a great healer, and we all tend to forget unpleasant past experiences. A child removed from an inadequate family may come to forget the problems and remember only the good times — never-ending television, living on take-away burgers and pop, bedtime when he felt like it, no homework — it is only natural that he will not understand the reasons why he is now in a different family. The new family has to help him come to a realistic understanding of his past, without running the birth family down. Barring serious abuse in the birth family, older children are very likely to want and need to keep in touch with their birth parents or siblings or grandparents, even if their previous life was not happy.

If a child is able to understand what adoption is, the social services and courts have a legal obligation to explain what is happening and to get his consent. An older child may decide against adoption in order not to sever his legal relationship with his birth family completely, but still want to have a new permanent family via long-term fostering or special guardianship. Or it may take several years for an older child to decide that this is the right family and that he wants to be adopted.

Older children’s personalities, likes and dislikes are already largely settled. It is even more important than usual for older children to have continuity of care in terms of religion and ethnicity, to keep the extent of disruption to their lives to a minimum, but trans-racial placements of older children do take place and can be successful. They may find the change in lifestyle, school, food, geography or dialect hard to make. In other cases it may be that a complete and dramatic contrast between the new life and a painful past will be therapeutic for older children, but not very often. No matter how bad the past may have been they still need continuity and stability.

They may at first be subject to night fears, bedwetting and tantrums, caused by the fears and strain which inevitably accompany the upheavals which their lives have seen. They may find comfort in routine, but on the other hand, if they had a chaotic start to life they may have no concept of things like regular meals and bedtimes (although an older child will very likely have spent significant time in a therapeutic or pre-adoption foster family or children’s home where intensive work will have been done on matters like these). In contrast to babies, adoption of older children involves real and conscious compromise and negotiation between you and the child.

Adoption can sometimes turn an older child’s problems around literally overnight.

We adopted an older child who was a chronic bed-wetter. He wet his bed every single night. His foster family dealt with it with no fuss and he didn’t seemed neurotic about it, but he kept on wetting. He was told the Friday afternoon that he had been found a new forever family. The next day, when we began our introductions with him, his foster mother told us that he had been dry that night for the first time in over three years. And he has never once wet the bed since.

Older children, unless they are very developmentally delayed, disabled, or temporarily regressing, don’t need to have their nappies changed. They can feed and dress themselves. They go to school, instead of being constantly underfoot. They can hold a conversation. They can walk unaided. They don’t stick hair grips into the electrical outlets. They don’t run out into the street in front of articulated lorries. They don’t have to have prams or special car seats or other expensive baby equipment. They don’t have 3:00 a.m. feeds. They can run errands. They can play games properly. Older disabled children, even the few who need a great deal of practical care, can with few exceptions make their needs known and many are very independent and a joy to parent. Older children are great fun. Enjoy!

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