What Adoption Means
Adoption is giving a child or children a permanent home. You become the legal parent – all the rights and responsibilities of the children’s parents are transferred to you. Adoption is a way of providing new families for children who are unable to live with their own parents or relatives.
Why do children need Adopting?
Children who need permanent families are usually already being looked after by Social Services and are living with foster carers.
The reasons why children cannot return to their birth family are varied. Some parents have not experienced the kind of upbringing which enables them to cope as parents. Some children will have been emotionally or physically neglected or had very unsettled lives. Some have been subjected to physical or sexual abuse. Emotional neglect can be as damaging as physical neglect and children have to learn to feel secure and to trust again. Sadly, some children may never fully recover from these earlier experiences and may need ongoing support from medical or psychological services.
We will support you pre and post adoption and can refer you to professionals and organisations that can give you the support you need.
The Adoption in the Black Country project focuses on children aged between 5 and 11 years old, some are single children and others are siblings who need to be able to grow up together. Most of the children are healthy and active, but others have physical disabilities or have learning difficulties. Children needing families come from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, Asian, black, white and dual heritage. We try to place children with adoptive parents who reflect the child's cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
The four participating adoption agencies in partnership with the project also care for children of 0-5 years, which means that if you want to know more about adoption but wish to consider younger children we can still offer advice and refer you to the most appropriate Adoption team.
What about the child's birth family?
It is natural and right for a child to want to know about his or her birth family and therefore important that adoptive parents are able to have an understanding and acceptance of the birth parents part in the child's life, whatever the circumstances.
The law expects all children to grow up knowing about their adoption and allows them at 18 years to have access to their adoption records. Therefore they need to have a gradual understanding of the facts throughout their childhood and adoptive parents are expected to help them with this.
In some situations birth parents have asked the Adoption agency to help by arranging the adoption. In other cases the parents may oppose the plans for adoption of their child, even when they are aware of their inability to bring the child up themselves. It can be extremely difficult for them to "let go". However, many parents will help by providing information, photographs etc.
There is a move to greater openness in adoption and as prospective adopters you will need to consider the degree of openness you could accept. For example, for many adopted children there will be an ongoing exchange of information, of photographs and letters, between the adopters and the birth family. This exchange is enabled through a "Letter Box System". This facility allows information to be exchanged through the agency and ensures that adopter whereabouts are kept confidential.
We do expect adopters to provide the adoption agency with written news about a child on an annual basis.
Before a child is placed with their new family the prospective adopters and the birth family may have a "one off" meeting. These meetings can be very helpful to all parties concerned but would only be arranged if it was felt to be appropriate. Some older children need to continue to see a parent or other family member, perhaps 2 or 3 times a year, with their adoptive parents there to support them.