VIII. Who Can Adopt?, Page 7
What Positive Qualities Are Agencies Looking for in Adopters?
The sections above covered some of the areas that social workers consider when assessing people to adopt. They are the more tangible factors. Even more important are the intangibles that go to make up a family that can welcome a child into their home and lives and help that child overcome her past problems and make a start to a new life. Some of these are touched on in other places in this and other chapters, but I want to mention them all together here as well. They are mostly taken (modified) from guidelines sent to prospective applicants by Parents for Children, a voluntary agency in London, which places very special children and offers a high-quality aftercare service, and also from the book Adopting a Child. This is a far cry from the advice you might have received 30 or 40 years ago.
- You need a strong, enduring marriage or partnership.
- You need an extended family and/or support network of friends which can support you emotionally and practically when you need it, even more so if you are single. They need to understand what you are doing and why.
- You need to understand that many adopted children are not like other children, and raising adopted children is not the same as raising other children.
- Whatever their experiences, many of these children will remember the past, and some of these memories are positive and need to be encouraged. Other children will have temporarily repressed painful memories, which can re-emerge later and cause problem behaviour as they and you try to make sense of them. Their pasts are part of them and cannot be denied or ignored.
- You must understand that children placed with you may have been so damaged that they cannot easily learn to love you, and maybe never will. Nor can you expect adopted children to be grateful. These are learned behaviours, and their lives may not so far have given them any reason to either love or be grateful, nor any adult patterns from which to learn them.
- You need to like and enjoy children as well as love them in the abstract. The children placed with you may not at first be likeable. You must like and love them for themselves, and not expect them to conform to any idealised image of a child you may have had. Many of them have been through very bad experiences, and whatever childhood they should have had may have been stolen from them. They need time and space to be children, even though at first they may not know how.
- You need to be understanding and empathetic. Damaged children often have real difficulty talking about their pasts and their problems, and you need to be able to help them learn how to cope with their troubles now and to move on. You may need to be almost psychic to discover connections between behaviours and underlying causes.
- You need to be able to accept that these children may have developed coping mechanisms to survive in previous families which are no longer necessary. These may seem bizarre or self-destructive to you, and indeed some of them are, in their new surroundings. The relationship between these behaviours and the life experiences which caused them may not always be clear-cut. It will take time and help for them to understand that they no longer need to behave that way and to learn new ways of behaving. Some of them will never learn new ways.
- You need to understand that some of these children are (rightly) angry with the world. As the adults closest to them you will have to bear the brunt of their anger and help them to deal with it constructively.
- Although you are in the front line, you need to be able to understand that most of the negative behaviour these children may have is not directed at you personally, but either simply because you are standing in the firing line or because you somehow represent the world which failed them in the past.
- You need to accept that some of these children may unintentionally or deliberately be destructive of your possessions. They may be cruel to animals or other children. They may try to destroy relationships between other people, especially between their new parents and between adults and other children.
- You need to be forgiving, emotionally strong and thick-skinned.
- Because of their experiences or cultural background, these children may not share your own value system. They may have learned values from previous adults which are the opposite to yours. You need to be able to distinguish between values which are simply different from yours but still valid and those which really need to be changed.
- These children often make very slow progress, especially in terms of learning new behaviour patterns. Mentally or learning-handicapped and physically handicapped children may also only make slow progress, and you need to be able to be happy with and for them. Progress can only be measured against the child’s own past and present, not against outside standards.
- A sense of humour is essential, as is flexibility.
- You need to be open and accepting.
- You need to be able to acknowledge your own strengths and weaknesses.
- You need to be able to accept sadness and loss in your child and yourself.
- You need to be able to ask for and accept help from others when you need it. You need to be able to talk to others honestly about yourself and the situation, in order for them to be able to help.
- You need the ability to fight for your child’s rights against education and medical authorities who may not always understand or be sympathetic.
- You need an iron-clad determination to make the adoption work. Sometimes the child will fail or regress; sometimes you will not meet your own high standards of parenting. You also need to be able to accept this and try again. In the end, you may need to be able to accept that the placement is going to break down.
- You need to be able to put the child’s interests above your own, including not feeling undermined by his other relationships, past, present or future.
These can be summarised by a joint statement from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering and the Association of Directors of Social Services: “Parents must be child centred and able to meet the needs that a growing child will have. They must be able to accept the child for what he or she is, including all the details of their birth history”.
If you can satisfy the agency that you can provide what a child needs in these areas, almost everything else is negotiable.
Something else, which agencies assessing you may not look for, but which may be needed if you parent a special needs child, is courage. I mean the courage to stand up to "authorities" and "experts", who think they know your child better than you do on the basis of a couple of hours of observation in an artificial clinical setting. I mean facing up to schools,
teachers and education authorities who stall in assessing your child's needs and stall when it comes to meeting the specifications of a Statement of Special Educational Needs. I mean challenging family and neighbours who blame you for your child's behaviour, when the problems were created by pre-adoption experiences. I also mean the courage to take decisions, often on the basis of incomplete evidence and conflicting advice, when faced with difficult and painful choices about medical and psychiatric treatment for the uncommon and often distressing multiple conditions which today's
adopted children too often present, because of abuse before and after birth by their parents and the social care system.
Next: Chapter IX: Applying to an Agency
© Roger Ridley Fenton
