IX. Applying to an Agency

Congratulations! You’re now ready to approach an adoption agency. You’ve thought of the good and bad reasons why people try to adopt, you’ve looked deeply into yourselves and found that you think you have what it takes. But before launching into the active search for an agency, we need to spend a minute considering ...

Do You Suffer from Social Worker Phobia?

You’re probably scared to death of social workers. Most prospective adopters will never have had professional or even personal contact with one. The day you have your first meeting with your social worker will be characterised by frequent trips to the bathroom and sweaty palms. It’s perfectly normal. It should settle down soon into at least a semblance of a normal relationship, but just like you can’t have a normal relationship with your boss or Catherine Zeta Jones, you can’t have a normal relationship with your social worker.

Everyone knows that the social worker holds the whip hand in this relationship, and most adopters will do or say almost anything they think will ingratiate themselves with the social worker and get them a child. A pamphlet published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering writes: “The relationship between the agency worker and applicants, however amiable and constructive, is one characterised by power. ... The assessment process has been compared to an obstacle course when applicants can feel as if they jump through hoops, giving the ‘right’ answers that will validate them as people and potential parents and ultimately convince those involved to allow them the possibility of their longed-for child”. Too right. Most prospective adopters would profess a fervent belief in alien abduction, take up barber shop quartet singing or join the Royal Australian Society for the Protection of Dust Kitties if their social worker told them it would guarantee them a child. Luckily, it doesn’t work like that.

There is supposed to be a movement in which the home study and preparation classes meld into a sort of self-assessment by the prospective adopters in consort with the social worker, and even other prospective adopters. The same British Association for Adoption and Fostering pamphlet states that “drawing distinctions between preparation and assessment is questionable if assessment is understood not just to be the task of the social worker” and mentions a research project “which is monitoring a model of empowerment and self assessment. The project aims to enable participants to assess themselves, compiling their own assessment form which transfers evidence-based learning from the preparation group. They then present their assessment to the panel”.

The chances of you having an assessment process like that are pretty slim.

They’re not out to get you and they start out with a bias in your favour. Adoption case work is one of the nicer kinds of social work jobs. There are of course sad aspects of the process which the social worker has to deal with: the dreadful homes some the children come from, or the feeling of loss felt by a young mother without family support, the pain and anxiety of the prospective adopters, the often damaged children. But at least at the end there is a real chance of a positive outcome for most of the parties.

The department or agency doesn’t want to hang on to its caseload; they want to find homes for those kids just as much as you want to give one of them a home. Think of yourself as wearing two hats. First, you are social services clients. You need and want a child. You may have been through some pretty hard times connected with infertility or losing a child. Part of your social worker’s job is to help you with that. But wearing your other hat you are a resource. You have something to offer that the social worker and her department urgently need: a family for a child. You are not entirely in the position of a supplicant knocking on the door cap in hand. And the more experience you have had with children, either yours or other people’s, the more confident you can be about your chances of success.

Do not cower and grovel. Cowering and grovelling are not characteristics associated with successful parenting and your social worker will not applaud. You need to be, or at least appear to be, self-confident. The social worker wants to see the real you, because the real you is what your child is going to have to live with after she’s gone. Try not to show your nervousness and fear too openly, although you can mention how scared you are. Social workers expect this and a good social worker will try her best to put you at your ease.

If your social worker comes to feel that you are definitely not adopter material she will try, gently, to get you to come to the same conclusion and withdraw your application, rather than face the trauma of formal rejection by the panel.

Ready now? Then let’s take the plunge!