by Sarah
I’ve been looking at the social media posts of the adoption industry during this year’s National Adoption Week. Carefully selected and curated families are on display. There’s a child waiting just for you! Come and save them! They’ll make you a mummy! If you love them enough, they’ll love you back!
No child can live up to the expectations put on them by these campaigns and by adoption propaganda in general. Visit any adopters’ forum and they are full of anguished parents who feel they weren’t adequately prepared and are in crisis. They are begging for support. The Adoption and Special Guardianship Fund (ASGF) attempts to bridge the gap but it is a leaky tap in a burning building.
A lucrative industry has popped up of adopters and therapists offering courses on how to manage your difficult child. Nearly 30% of the ASGF is spent on ’therapeutic parenting’. Despite this support, a percentage of adoptions break down (proper stats aren’t kept so we don’t know how many). A child can be returned to the care system and society shakes its head sorrowfully. The child was just too broken, too far gone. The adopters move on with their life. Of course, adoptees cannot decide that it’s not working and undo their adoptions. Even as adults.
The selection of ‘adoption journey’ as a theme for this year’s National Adoption Week shows just how profoundly disconnected the adoption industry is from the experience of actual adoptees. We often hear that modern adoption is different. But it’s not different in its fundamentals. Legal identities are still changed, medical records are still sealed and the adoption industry continues to promote unicorns and rainbows. The messaging has not changed in the last 20 or 30 years.
All children deserve permanence but adoption is archaic and it fundamentally does not work. It broke the generation that were taken from their mothers at only days old, and it further traumatises children who have experienced neglect or abuse at home. We need to work harder to keep children with their families, and where that’s not possible, support kinship care and special guardianship.
Adoption. Is. Trauma.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash