Key principles for foster carers and adopters who are helping a child to move to adoption

When children cannot safely return home from care, adoption provides legal security, love and belonging in a new family. But adoption also means that the child must be separated from a foster family where he or she has felt secure and loved, as well as from familiar routines and surroundings. In order to manage these losses, children of all ages will need the sensitive support and understanding of the adults around them before, during and after the move. This leaflet outlines six important principles for foster carers and adopters to hold in mind as they work together to help children to move to adoption

Getting Practice Right: Using the Strengths and Limits of Research Findings to Bridge the Gap Between Practice and Research

This session explores how gaps between research and practice can be bridged. In the first part of the session, Karen Zilberstein and Sally Popper will identify areas in which research has provided useful guides for practice and areas in which research and standardized interventions do not yet completely address the experiences and needs of individual children and families. The second contribution will be from Beth Neil who will outline the “Contact after Adoption Change Project” from the UK. This project brings together an adoption researcher with experienced adoption professionals with the aim of coproducing online resources to help make research-informed, case sensitive decisions about post adoption contact for children adopted from foster care

Practices to improve communication between birth parents and permanent families

Background: Support to maintain important family relationships is seen as a right for children in permanent care in Australia. In New South Wales, newly legislated permanency principles prioritise open adoption over long-term foster care and require plans for ongoing, face-to-face (known as direct) birth family contact for children in permanent placements. Countries with similar child welfare systems do not place the same emphasis on contact after permanent removal and it is especially uncommon to see direct contact given priority in open adoption. The problem: There is mixed evidence on the benefits of contact for children in permanent care. The quality of the relationship between birth relatives and caregivers is critical to the success of contact. Casework support is key to promoting understanding and communication between children’s birth parents and permanent carers or adoptive parents. The emerging permanency model in New South Wales does not yet have an evidence base and most caseworkers lack the skills to help these families build a constructive relationship in the interests of ongoing contact for children. The solution: Casework practices developed for use in child welfare placements elsewhere may be successfully applied to New South Wales to help build the practical skills needed to facilitate openness, empathy and respectful interactions. These practices need to be tested and refined to build an evidence base on what works to support ongoing direct contact for children who are permanently removed from parental care

Exploring links between early adversities and later outcomes for children adopted from care: Implications for planning post adoption support

This study explored how child maltreatment, alongside a range of other variables, predicted adverse outcomes for children adopted from the foster care system in England. The participants were 319 adoptive parents who completed an in-depth online survey about their most recently adopted child. The mean age of children at placement for adoption was 28 months (range 0–11 years) and their ages at the time of the survey ranged from 0 years to 17 years (mean¼7 years). Detailed information was collected about children’s backgrounds, including their experiences in the birth family and the care system before adoption. Adoptive parents also reported on how well children were getting on in a range of areas of functioning and how well they felt the adoption was going overall. Child maltreatment and child adverse outcomes were modeled as two factors in a latent factor structural equation model. The relationship between these two factors was explored alongside a range of covariates. Associated with worse outcomes for children were potentially heritable factors (parental learning disability), the pre-birth environment (exposure to drugs or alcohol in utero) and the period between birth and moving to the adoptive family (higher levels of maltreatment, spending more than a year in care, having two or more foster placements). The child’s distress on moving from the foster home to the adoptive family was also highly significant in linking to poorer outcomes, suggesting the detrimental effect of poorly managed transitions. Implications for child welfare practices before and after adoption are discussed

How do adopted adults see the significance of adoption and being a parent in their life stories? A narrative analysis of 40 life story interviews with male and female adoptees

Being adopted and becoming a parent are both highly significant events in the life course. How adopted people represent adoption and parenthood in their life stories is the focus of the current study. The research explored the views of adopted people who were parents, focusing on those adopted since the late 1980s in order to capture the experiences of people adopted through the child protection system. The participants were 40 adult adoptees who had at least one child. Equal numbers of men and women were recruited, and purposive sampling was used to ensure a diverse range of people were included. Most participants (34 of 40) were in their 20s or 30s and age at adoption varied from 0 to 12 years old. All except one person were domestically adopted in England, with two-thirds having been adopted through the child protection system; 32 were White British, and 8 were Black, Mixed or Asian ethnicity. An adaptation of McAdam’s life story interview method was used to enable participants to describe their whole life including their adoption and being a parent. Interviews were first analysed ‘within case’ looking at narrative themes and structure. Then looking across cases four types of life story narrative were identified: “continuously stable”, “pulling through”, “still struggling” and “robbed of parenthood”. The research illustrates the wide diversity of adopted people’s experiences and the ongoing impact of difficult early life experiences on adopted individuals as adults and parents. Parenting raised additional challenges for many adopted people, but could also be a positive turning point. The pathways to overcoming (or not overcoming) early adversity to succeed as parents are illustrated and the role of adoption as both a risk and protective factor is discussed