V. Are You Right for Adoption?, Page 3

Are You United in Your Adoption Goals?

It is important that if you are in a partnership that you both have compatible ideas about adopting a child. This primarily means that you must both want to adopt. It’s no good one of you acquiescing because the other one is keen on the idea. That’s no way to start a family, and it can undermine everything for year. Also, you need to have pretty similar ideas about what kind of child you want or can accept. Both of you must have a veto here; if you would be happy to accept a toddler with severe learning difficulties but your partner says she wouldn’t be able to deal with it, that’s that. There are likely to be considerable areas where your “specifications” overlap; stick to those.

And when it comes to an individual child who may be offered to you, you must both be able to say, “No, that child isn’t right for me”, and both be able to accept the other’s decision. If one of you has serious doubts about a proposed placement (not just temporary cold feet, although it’s not always easy to tell the difference) you must discuss it openly and thoroughly with your partner and with the social worker. It may be that the problem is based on a misunderstanding about the prognosis for a medical condition, or something else which can be cleared up; maybe just talking about the doubts will help resolve them. But they must be talked about. And the sooner the better, to avoid wasting your and the social workers’ time and money, to say nothing of the feelings of the child, if it goes that far. There will be another chance.

We were once being considered for a toddler who had a very tragic family history, although it didn’t involve him directly. I was able to accept him happily, but my wife felt she was unable to cope with the task of explaining to him why he had come to need a new family. It was really hard for me to agree to withdraw our application. But I knew the placement wouldn’t work without both of us being united. Luckily friends of ours adopted him, and we have had the pleasure of watching him grow up anyway.

Do You Like Children as Well as Love Them?

We can take it as understood that you love children or you wouldn’t be considering adopting. Loving children is easy. But do you like them? It’s all very well cuddling a nice clean baby. Anyone can do that. But babies grow very quickly into toddlers and then into children and then into ... teenagers. Everyone has or her own favourite stage of childhood. I especially love babies; my wife finds them rather uninteresting. We both like primary-school children. She really likes secondary-school children; they drive me up the wall.

Children need more than cuddles; they need to be played with, learn how to interact with other people. They need lots and lots of parental time, and you need to be able to give that time pretty freely and happily. That doesn’t mean that children need to take up your entire life, but except when they’re asleep or in school that’s pretty much the case until they’re about ten. Children with special needs need even more time and attention.

A good indicator of whether you really like children is other people’s behaviour towards you:

Do children seek you out? Are parents happy for their children to play in your garden?
Do people ask you to baby-sit for them; do their children ask for you to baby-sit?
Do your brothers’ and sisters’ children want to come to spend the night?
Is your home child-friendly (or do you have expensive and fragile things on the floor)?
Do people with babies feel able to feed and change them in your home?
Do older children come to you for help and advice?

If you tend to answer “Yes” to questions like these, that’s a good indication that you really do like children, because parents and children usually know who their friends are, and where they are welcome and safe.

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