Social and cultural attitudes change all the time of course, and with the advent of social media that rate of change seems to have sped up. To an old dinosaur like me the new views on identity seem remarkably socially conservative compared to when I was a teenager and I…

Apparently there is a well-used hashtag and meme flashing around social media of ‘adoption is trauma’. There is very little context here so I thought I’d try and understand it myself. Why adoption specifically? Why isn’t there a ‘foster care is trauma’, or ‘guardianship is trauma’, or ‘remaining with abusive…

Ah you can tell I’ve not thought of much else to put on this blog recently when I decide to write about schools and schooling with respect to adopted kids. It is probably far too large a subject to fit into one post but I’ll try. Just for context —…

For the Western world it is the time of year to think about food. And it is probably the time of year that most of us worry about food too. For some of us maybe we are concerned about whether we can afford the big blow-out; especially this year —…

An interesting article recently appeared in Prospect Magazine in the UK about forced adoptions: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society-and-culture/the-uk-has-a-forced-adoption-problem Comments had closed by the time I noticed it, but I thought I’d post my thoughts here instead. The article is primarily about lack of support for birth parents and kinship carers, but it is…

#YouCanAdopt It is National Adoption Week in the UK again. So there’ll no doubt be people thinking about it right now, if the publicity has hit home. If you’ve landed here because you’ve been looking then no doubt you’ve already braved the cesspit of the Internet to find out a…

When you feel intensely that what you are being asked to do is not in your (or the group’s) best interests you are likely to oppose it. Why wouldn’t you? It is a basic survival instinct. In our relatively free and liberal Western world there isn’t actually that much day-to-day…

I’ve no idea how long the phrases ‘being fogged’ or ‘being in the fog’ have been around, as I’ve said before I’m not exactly the most up-to-date with the latest social media hate-fest shenanigans. Strava and Medium are about the closest I get to being on social media and even…

A BBC programme about siblings separated in the care system hit the headlines recently (well, a few months ago!) and seemed to cause a bit of an uproar in the press about the unfairness, but then equally as quickly seems to have been forgotten again. There is a link below…