Replacing Letterbox with in-person meetings
Well it has been a while since I wrote a blog entry here. Just kind of forgot I was doing a blog if I’m honest. But the BBC article below, about a new official report recommending in-person meetings between adopted children and their birth parents (when the kids are still kids) sparked an interest. I am not quite sure what to make of it at the moment, so this is probably more of a stream of conciousness than well thought out opinion. I’ve skimmed the report, but it is huge. Too much for a lay-person to take in by themselves!
There is a worry voiced by adopters and some professionals that making in-person meetings a legal requirement might put off people who might want to become adopters. I don’t know. I think I may have been dissuaded, but it is difficult to know. I remember asking a question at the first information evening I attended which showed I was worried about the influence of birth parents. Your perspective changes over time so much though, more so as your kids get older. The argument though does seem to be based on rather old-fashioned view of adoption — the ‘Long Lost Family’ narrative of infertile couple being brow-beaten by cultural expectations to have children come-what-may, and pity the poor, vulnerable birth-mum. The kids who are adopted nowadays come from very different circumstances than they did 50 or 60 years ago.
Despite the rather cliched sterotypes that still exist, at least a third of adopters in the UK are either gay couples or single people, who in generations past wouldn’t have expected, and wouldn’t have been expected to, have children. Also about half of heterosexual couples already have biological children, or could do. Society has moved on. Being childless is actually quite fashionable. So the motivations to adopt now are obviously quite different. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we wouldn’t be put off by this change.
The report is a lot more detailed and more nuanced, and the fact that exists at all seems to show that most people (including birth parents and adopted people, who had a lot of input) still seem to be happy with the concept of adoption. However they want to change it to be more like the other forms of permanance. The trouble is, it isn’t. On the face of it making it a legal requirement to have face-to-face contact by default and then applying for exemptions, just seems to make it more bureaucratic. They just have to provide lots more paperwork duplicating all the effort already made, to tick a check box marked: “Yes, it really is not suitable for this child to meet their birth parents. That’s why they are being placed for adoption. Duh.” Are there any adoptions where ticking this box wouldn’t happen? If so, why? The fact that this box might not be ticked would be worrying for most potential adopters I think. Adopters are told that the whole point of adoption is to create a psychologically safe space and remove the influence of birth parents. If we now feel that this isn’t necessary, why adopt at all? What would be the point?
Why might potential adopters be put off? Well the most obvious thing is the ick-factor. There can’t be many parents who are legally obliged to regularly take their kids to meet the people who abused them, even if those people are blood relatives. Yes adopters are to a certain extent prepared for that, and I would hope would get some support to deal with the inevitable fallout (like that mentioned in the article), but really, why on Earth would you want to agree to that in the first place? Why place that control in the hands of the very people that you are trying to remove control from? If you genuinely thought it would be a good idea for the child then they should be placed in a fostering or guardianship arrangement. That’s what those are for.
The second is logistics and future planning. In a ‘normal’ family arrangement you are not legally bound to make sure your kids regularly meet up with the rest of their family. Obviously you would generally try, but life circumstances sometimes get in the way. What if you lived hundreds of miles away? What if you have to move away to get a job? Or spend more time looking after older relatives which makes it difficult to travel? If you are legally bound to make sure your child is able to meet up with someone then that puts a constraint on your own future too — more so than having children biologically. If that was only for a few years then it might not matter too much, but for 10 or 15 years? How can you look ahead and be certain that you’d be able to do that? Maybe proponents would say that if you can’t do it then you shouldn’t be an adopter. And that’s a fine opinion to have. Just doesn’t really take practical reality into account. Adopters have lives of their own, they are not robot carers who are happy to live their lives at the whim of a convicted criminal.
The third is the rest of the birth family. Yes, that’s right you read that correctly. Best practice in adoption is to try and keep the child meeting up with the rest of the birth family, particularly siblings. There is no legal obligation to, but it is generally accepted that keeping brothers and sisters in touch is a good thing and it often happens. I agree with that and do it myself. But what if those birth family members are very much against your child meeting up with their birth parents? Let’s face it, they have a far better idea about what happened than the police or social workers would have had, because they had to live through it. Their opinion of the birth parents might not be that positive, to put it mildly. These families have been blown apart. Trying to balance the relationship of your child with different members of the birth family would seem to me to be an obvious problem waiting to happen.
Adoption was described by one contributor — a birth mother — as a ‘life sentence’. I think this underlines the hyperbole around adoption at the moment. Best practice in adoption is that adopted children can ask to meet up with their birth parents once they are able to make an informed decision about it, and obviously any adopted adult can do it. Indeed one of her children had already done so once they became an adult. The other hadn’t. That is their decision. She doesn’t currently have a right to force them to meet her, but that’s OK. This is not a ‘life sentence’ for her. She had lived a long time before her kids were removed, she had to live a few years without them, and now she is back in contact. Most of her hopefully long life from now on will be spent being in touch in the way most people do with adult relatives. A normal adoption story. However the effect of what she did (or didn’t do) will be there on her children forever. From birth. It doesn’t magically disappear just because she has changed. That is a life sentence that her children will have to endure, and will have hopefully been alleviated somewhat by adoption.
Despite the headline the article was quite nicely balanced I think as it did show a possible consequence of doing it. Most of society still seems to think of adoption as being straight out of the grim kitchen sink dramas set in the more ‘traditional’ culture of the 60s, so sympathies naturally lie with birth parents. This well-meaning change would undoubtedly benefit those parents, and if you want to help them understand the massive problems they’ve caused maybe meeting the victim is a good idea. But at what price to the child? Basically, you are still stuck trying to answer the question: ‘If you don’t think that it is correct to keep the child away from the influence of the birth parents for a few years while they grow up, then why place that child for adoption in the first place?’ It is not as if there aren’t other ways nowadays.
