Being Adoptive Parents

Is parenting an adopted child different from parenting my own child?

Certainly parenting an adopted child may be quite a different experience to parenting a birth child because the children may come into your life having already experienced very poor parenting. They may come into your life having been abused or neglected, having had a very difficult early life. And so helping children to recover from those early experiences and lead a happy and stable childhood like any other child may require some really very focused and talented parenting. So, I think it can well be a different type of experience, but that's why we need people with the capacity to parent children who desperately need stability but who may have a quite difficult background.

What do I if I don't think I can manage the child?

If you don't think you can manage the child that you have adopted, you must of course talk to the social workers and talk to the social service to ask for some help. Sometimes the adoptions do disrupt and break down. It is very sad when that happens but it doesn't mean that it has been a terrible failure on the part of the adopter. Sometimes that's just the way that life goes. That's a very sad result for the child's own early experience. If that happens, it's very tragic. But what we are trying to do is to avoid that happening by ensuring good matching between the child and the prospective adopter and also by making sure that there are supporters in place. What we also need is adopters who are confident, open and honest with themselves to be able to say that they need help.

Should I tell my children they have been adopted?

Absolutely. We believe very much in what we describe as open adoption. It must be extremely difficult for children to suddenly find out, perhaps with no warning, that they've been adopted. So no, we think it's extremely important that people are very open with children about their early origins, what happened to them as children, so that they grow up with a secure sense of who they are and aren't in for any unexpected surprises as they get older.