There are other books about how to adopt, by social workers. There are also books by adoptive parents about how their families came about and grew. And there are many biographies and autobiographies of famous and not-so-famous adoptees.

This book is different: it is a book about how to adopt, written by an experienced adopter, from the adopter’s point of view, telling it like it really is, warts and all. I have no vested interest in adoption (except as a very satisfied consumer). I can safely air some of those fears and feelings all prospective adopters have but are afraid to talk about in case they scupper their chances. There is no pretence here that all adoption agencies are as good as each other, or that all social workers are caring and professionally competent, because it just ain’t so. Some social workers are marvellous; some are awful. Some agencies are efficient and well managed; some are grossly incompetent and should be shut down. But in general, adoption in the UK is remarkably well run and trouble free for prospective adopters, although our care system for children does leave a great deal to be desired, and the services available for families who have adopted and need help are also very undeveloped. Our two great boasts in this country are:

• We have taken the financial considerations pretty well out of the picture, both in terms of requirements for adopters and in terms of removing the profit motive for professionals, and
• More than most countries, Britain makes decisions about adoption from the point of view of the child’s best interests and not those of the prospective adopters.

Together these go a long way towards ensuring that the right people get to adopt and for the right reasons, and that everyone who should benefit does so. But there is nevertheless a lot of room for improvement:

• The bias in social work swung too far in the 1980s and ‘90s in favour of keeping children with their birth families, even where those families were grossly and irredeemably incompetent and dysfunctional, instead of getting children out, keeping them safe, and giving them new and better families. By the time the social workers finally realise the situation is hopeless the children are permanently damaged.
• The assessment process takes too long in some cases, not because the process itself is at fault or too scrupulous, but because social services departments are without exception underfunded and understaffed, and most are badly organised and supervised to boot. There is too much turnover in social work staff, leading to a woeful lack of continuity in assessment and case loads. Part of this is caused by staff leaving due to stress and poor pay, but part is also due to the continual organisational turmoil in most departments, with teams constantly being reorganised and reconstituted according to the latest theoretical wheeze: specialist teams, multi-functional teams, area teams, etc. What clients need most is continuity.
• There are many children still languishing in care who can and should be placed in adoptive homes. The reasons are not always to do with social worker incompetence; often the problem is outside their control, in outdated laws and regulations and organisational chaos.
• Many children are still being shunted around from foster home to foster home, with placements being terminated at short notice and for no good reason other than administrative convenience for the social services or the whim of the foster families. Again, children need consistency of care almost more than anything.
• The understandable and reasonable desire of social workers to place children with families of the same ethnicity became and in some places still is controlling adoption and fostering practice. There is too little attention paid to the ethnic needs of individual children, and a significant number of children who would be satisfactorily placed transracially are being kept in temporary care for too long while matching families are sought. Certainly for some children ethnicity should be a major factor in matching, but not necessarily for all.
• There is still far too little effective work being done to recruit adopters and foster carers from ethnic minorities, there are not nearly enough social workers from ethnic minorities, and too little is being done to prepare adopters and foster carers for transracial placements and to support those placements down the line.
• Social work professionals still have far too little realisation of the permanent effects of the damage done to children before placement. Consequently they blame the adopters for many problems their children develop as a direct consequence of their pre-adoption experiences. There is still not enough constructive help available to adoptive families in trouble, either in terms of counselling or respite care.

I don’t aim to cover the special aspects of raising adopted children in any depth. Even children adopted as tiny healthy babies need special parenting in some respects; children adopted at older ages often need very special parenting indeed. That is a special field, with its own experts and books, and the needs are so different for different kinds of children that it is best to get specialist advice if and when you need it. I do however try to indicate in a general way some of the problems modern adoption can pose for parents, to help you make informed decisions and know what to look out for along the way.

The laws governing adoption are not uniform throughout the United Kingdom. This book is aimed in its legal and procedural sections at readers in England and Wales. If you live elsewhere things will be somewhat different, although the underlying principles are identical.

Throughout the book I give examples in boxes from real-life families. A few of these are from my own family; most are not. But they are all told in the first person.

There is only one legitimate purpose for adoption: to find a new and permanent family (the rather twee term “forever family” is often used) for a child who, for whatever reason, can no longer be cared for by his family of birth or his current legal parents.

Historically, even within living memory, adoption was often recommended as a way to patch up a failing marriage or as a cure for an adult’s loneliness. It was a way to bring the joy of children to a childless couple. It was a means of gaining more working hands for a farm or family business or help in the kitchen for a family with too many children of one sex and too few of the other. It provided someone to care for aged and sick relatives. It relieved the financial burden of too many children in the days before reliable contraception. It was a way for a “fallen woman” to escape the wrath of a scandalised society and for her illegitimate child to conceal her shameful origins. It was a means of cementing alliances between families and clans. In all these situations the interests of the child were considered last if at all. Those days have long gone.

One of the hardest lessons for some prospective adopters to learn is that adoption now is about finding the right home for a child. The interests of the child come first and last; the interests of the adopters are emphatically secondary.

That said, there is no doubt that a good adoption fills the needs of many people. A child who can no longer be cared for in his birth family finds a permanent, happy home. A family who want a child get one. Birth parents who cannot cope are given a chance to start again (although they are not relieved of the loss, pain and guilt they almost always feel). The social workers are relieved of a part of their caseload. And society gives a chance of a better, more constructive life to a child who might otherwise grow up to become a drain on the social services, courts and prisons. A classic win-win situation.

But in considering these positive side-effects we must never lose sight of the child’s interests. If we as prospective adopters are not able to put the child’s interests first we have no business adopting. We may not always agree with the decisions of social workers, but with rare exceptions they are trying their hardest in a difficult situation to do what is best for the child; they are able to look at the picture as a whole, disinterestedly; and they have a lot more information about the needs of that child than we, the prospective adopters do; so they are in the best position to make those decisions. It may be hard for us to accept rejection or a decision not to go ahead with a planned placement, but we must accept their decisions, unless we have clear reasons for suspecting that people have really made a bad decision from the child’s point of view or seriously think we have been unjustly treated.

The term “older children” includes not only young school children; children as old as 17 can be adopted, and there are plenty of teenagers needing new families. Not all older children have severe problems, although there is a definite statistical correlation between age at placement and the severity of the child’s problems, as well as the likelihood that the adoption will break down.

Many people find babies scary (do they break easily? how do I know when it’s hungry? why won’t it stop crying? what’s that rash on its head?, why does it sleep so much?), and would feel happier and more confident with an older child. If you have already raised one family, you will have extra skills and could find the challenges of an older child exciting and especially fulfilling. If you are over the age of 35 you have no choice but to consider an older child; you are extremely unlikely to be considered for a baby, unless it has other special needs.

It used to be considered that any child over a year old was unadoptable. No more. Healthy white children under five are now considered to present no problems in terms of finding new families. The situation is slightly different for black children. Because of economic discrimination both partners in black families usually have to work to make ends meet, so that school-aged black children find homes more easily than toddlers.

The last few years have revealed that while the problem is more common in older children, even very young children can suffer lasting psychological trauma from the repeated transfer from one carer to another or due to maternal deprivation, even if they never had contact with their birth mothers. The condition is often obvious to the new adopters within days of placement, and just as often ignored or denied by social workers, most of whom have never heard of it. It is called RAD (reactive attachment disorder) or just attachment disorder, and it makes it virtually impossible for a child to bond to his or her new parents. Children who have been passed around foster families, abused children from dysfunctional birth families, and children from poorly-run children’s homes are most at risk. In a desperate attempt to control their lives they refuse to allow any adult to control them. They specialise in a seemingly perverse ability to appear perfectly normal to professionals and other people outside their families while determinedly attempting to destroy them. These children are truly victims of the System. There is more later in this book about attachment disorder.

Serious attachment disorder is not, however common. Most older children do make the transition from one home to another, although they need careful and sometimes long preparation, and it is by no means easy for them or their new parents. Many older children have justifiably become suspicious of all adults because of the way they have controlled or abused them, and it can take a long time to overcome this.

If they have bad memories of previous families they may make heroic efforts to blend in. They may have fears associated with neglect and abuse and need long-term psychological or psychiatric help to get over these. A fear of rejection can make them “too good,” unable to give vent to normal anger, frustration or disagreement, in case it brings another rejection. They may need to be constantly reassured that this is the end of the line, that they will never be sent back, no matter what happens. They may have fears that they will be kidnapped back by their birth families; conversely, they may believe that their new family has kidnapped them from a family which they have idealised, and be deeply resentful of their new situation.

Regression is common with older children. They may have missed out on a proper babyhood or childhood in a chaotic household or because they had to look after younger children or incompetent parents. They may want somehow to experience being your baby, in order to feel more completely yours. No matter. If they feel the need, it has to be gone through. However strange it may be having a seven-year-old with a baby bottle or dummy or even in nappies, it’s only temporary. It is very common for them to regress only in part of their behaviour. You may have a child for a while who is a baby, a toddler and a junior-school pupil all at once, changing from one to the other with bewildering speed. It is simply a more extreme case of what most children go through when Mum has another baby. And if it’s confusing for you, think of how it must be for him! Relax and let him get through it at his own pace; any anxiety on your part will just make matters more difficult. Anyway, it will be good practice for later, because the same sort of thing happens to most children when they are teenagers: seven one minute, fifteen going on 23 the next.

Time is a great healer, and we all tend to forget unpleasant past experiences. A child removed from an inadequate family may come to forget the problems and remember only the good times - never-ending television, living on take-away burgers and pop, bedtime when he felt like it, no homework - it is only natural that he will not understand the reasons why he is now in a different family. The new family has to help him come to a realistic understanding of his past, without however running the birth family down. Barring serious abuse in the birth family, older children are very likely to want and need to keep in touch with their birth parents or siblings or grandparents, even if their previous life was not happy.

If a child is able to understand what adoption is, the social services and courts have a legal obligation to explain what is happening and to get his consent. An older child may decide against adoption in order not to sever his legal relationship with the birth family completely, but still want to have a new permanent family via long-term fostering. Or it may take several years for an older child to decide that this is the right family and that he wants to be adopted.

Older children’s personalities, likes and dislikes are already largely settled. It is even more important than usual for older children to have continuity of care in terms of religion and ethnicity, to keep the extent of disruption to their lives to a minimum, but even transracial placements of older children do take place and can be successful. They may find the change in lifestyle, school, food, geography or dialect hard to make. In other cases it may be that a complete and dramatic contrast between the new life and a painful past will be therapeutic for older children, but not very often. No matter how bad the past may have been they still need continuity and stability.

They may at first be subject to night fears, bedwetting and tantrums, caused by the fears and strain which inevitably accompany the upheavals which their lives have seen. They may find comfort in routine, but on the other hand, if they had a chaotic start to life they may have no concept of things like regular meals and bedtimes (although an older child will very likely have spent significant time in a therapeutic or pre-adoption foster family or children’s home where intensive work will have been done on matters like these). In contrast to babies, adoption of older children involves real and conscious compromise and negotiation between you and the child.

Adoption can sometimes turn an older child’s problems around literally overnight.

Older children, unless they are very developmentally delayed, disabled, or temporarily regressing, don’t need to have their nappies changed. They can feed and dress themselves. They go to school, instead of being constantly underfoot. They can hold a conversation. They can walk unaided. They don’t stick hair grips into the electrical outlets. They don’t run out into the street in front of articulated lorries. They don’t have to have prams or special car seats or other expensive baby equipment. They don’t have 3:00 a.m. feeds. They can run errands. They can play games properly. Older disabled children, even the few who need a great deal of practical care, can with few exceptions make their needs known and many are very independent and a joy to parent. Older children are great fun. Enjoy!

This is not an easy thing to define. It's rather like good art: you know it when you see it.

When it comes down to it, I think this is possibly the most important criterion, and paradoxically, it comes very close to a total no-no. Adoption is basically a selfish thing to do. We adopt because we need to adopt. Many of the bad reasons to adopt listed in the previous section are also selfish, but they are selfish in a definite, definable way:

• To save your marriage
• To be a companion, a cure for depression or company for your old age
• As a pension plan
• To replace a child who has died
• As a companion for an only child
• To get a servant or extra hand on the farm
• Because your friends have babies
• As a fashion accessory or political statement
• To carry on the family name
• To have a successor in the family business

Each of these reasons would use the adopted child for a specific purpose and they all focus on one particular aspect or quality of the child, not the child as a whole or for its own sake. They are all essentially exploitative. But the best motive for adoption, while it uses children to fill a need in ourselves, uses them in the way they are intended to be used. Nature gives people, men and women, broody feelings for a purpose: so we will go out and reproduce the species.

That’s what I mean by a “child-shaped hole in your life.” If you get broody when a friend has a baby; if you get a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you see a father with his little boy; if you go to school Christmas pageants and cry because your child is not the ninth shepherd; if you sometimes cross the street to avoid passing a toy shop; if you involve yourself with other people’s children to help assuage these feelings but are only partially satisfied; if you want a child for herself, for her own sake - these are all indications of a child-shaped hole in your life which will only be filled by a child of your own. Go for it!

You don’t have to be married, you don’t have to be childless, you don’t have to be heterosexual, to have these feelings. You can still adopt.

But beware if any of these feelings get out of hand. If you are seriously tempted to steal a child; if you think about pretending you are pregnant or pretending you have children; if you think about ways to entice a child away from his parents; if you find yourself having sexual feelings towards children - these are very serious signs that you must not adopt, because they are not natural, and you would not be able to have a natural relationship with a child. You need counselling from a skilled professional.

There are some extra complications in raising adopted children.

• First, there is a comparative lack of knowledge of the child’s past to explain any problems or help you decide what to do now
• There are areas of special sensitivity which can crop up: school assignments asking for non-existent baby photos or about “my family tree,” cruel questions from other children and unthinking comments by adults who should know better
• You may need to emphasise to your child that while in one important respect he belongs to another family, he is still your child
• Some other parents may not accept your child as a playmate or life partner for theirs
• There may be special joys, pains and relationships ahead if your child decides to trace his birth family
• You may find yourself and your child under extra scrutiny by others, looking for weaknesses or expecting you to be super-parents
• There will be your own anxiety about your parenting skills

When you’re staggering groggily up the stairs at three in the morning with a bottle in your hand; when your child comes home from school with a grubby drawing of an elephant; when he comes home unrecognisable underneath a layer of football pitch mud; when she goes up the aisle for her first Holy Communion; when he brings home his GCSE results (no matter what they are); when you hold your first grandchild for the first time - spare a thought for some woman and man out there who would have given anything to be able to be there.

Raising someone else’s child is not the same as raising one born to you. In addition to being your own child’s parents you are acting in trust for the birth parents and society at large. Your child is both yours and theirs, and while you have all the good times and bad times over the years, much of what your child has that brings you joy and tears comes from her birth parents. Be thankful for that and be worthy of their trust. Being allowed to adopt is one of the greatest privileges in the world.

One of our collection of “telling” stories for small children describes an assessment interview of 30 years ago, when the social worker asked the prospective adopters what they had to offer one of her “special babies.” They answered that they had a house, a nursery all decorated, a dog and a cat. Each time she answered that it wasn’t enough, and did they have anything more. Finally the parents answered that they had lots of love, and that was all the nice social worker lady needed to hear. Unfortunately that won’t do now, if it ever did. Adopters need love, to be sure, but like having a dog and a cat, it isn’t enough for today’s children.

The sections above covered some of the areas that social workers consider when assessing people to adopt. They are the more tangible factors. Even more important are the intangible factors that go to make up a family which can accept a child into their home and lives and help that child overcome her past problems and make a start to a new life. Some of these are touched on in other places in this and other chapters, but I want to mention them all together here as well. They are mostly taken (modified) from guidelines sent to prospective applicants by Parents for Children, a voluntary agency in London, which places very special children and offers a high-quality aftercare service , and also from the book Adopting a Child. This is a far cry from the advice you might have received 30 or 40 years ago.

• You need a strong, enduring marriage or partnership
• You need an extended family and/or support network of friends which can support you emotionally and practically when you need it, even more so if you are single. They need to understand what you are doing and why
• You need to understand that many adopted children are not like other children, and raising adopted children is not the same as raising other children
• Whatever their experiences, many of these children will remember the past, and some of these memories are positive and need to be encouraged. Other children will have temporarily repressed their painful memories, which can re-emerge later and cause problem behaviour as they and you try to make sense of them. Their pasts are part of them and cannot be denied or ignored
• You must understand that children placed with you may have been so damaged that they cannot easily learn to love you, and maybe never will. Nor can you expect adopted children to be grateful. These are learned behaviours, and their lives may not so far have given them any reason to either love or be grateful, or any adult patterns from which to learn them
• You need to like and enjoy children as well as love them in the abstract. The children placed with you may not at first be likeable. You must like and love them for themselves, and not expect them to conform to any idealised image of a child you may have had. Many of them have been through very bad experiences, and whatever childhood they should have had may have been stolen from them. They need time and space to be children, even though they may not at first know how
• You need to be understanding and empathetic. Damaged children often have real difficulty talking abut their pasts and their problems, and you need to be able to help them learn how to cope with their troubles now and to move on. You may need to be almost psychic to discover connections between behaviours and underlying causes
• You need to be able to accept that these children may have developed coping mechanisms to survive in previous families which are no longer necessary. These may seem bizarre or self-destructive to you, and indeed some of them are, in their new surroundings. The relationship between these behaviours and the life experiences which caused them may not always be clear-cut. It will take time and help for them to understand that they no longer need to behave that way and to learn new ways of behaving. Some of them will never learn new ways
• You need to understand that some of these children are (rightly) angry with the world. As the adults closest to them you will have to bear the brunt of their anger and help them to deal with it constructively
• Although you are in the front line, you need to be able to understand that most of the negative behaviour these children may have is not directed at you personally, but either simply because you are standing in the firing line or because you somehow represent the world which failed them in the past
• You need to accept that some of these children may unintentionally or deliberately be destructive of your possessions. They may be cruel to animals or other children. They may try to destroy relationships between other people, especially between their new parents and between adults and other children
• You need to be forgiving, emotionally strong and thick-skinned
• Because of their experiences or cultural background, these children may not share your own value system. They may have learned values from previous adults which are the opposite to yours. You need to be able to distinguish between the values which are simply different but valid and those which really need to be changed
• These children often make very slow progress, especially in terms of learning new behaviour patterns. Mentally or learning-handicapped and physically handicapped children may also only make slow progress, and you need to be able to be happy with and for them. Progress can only be measured against the child’s own past and present, not against outside standards
• A sense of humour is essential, as is flexibility
• You need to be open and accepting
• You need to be able to acknowledge your own strengths and weaknesses
• You need to be able to accept sadness in loss in your child and yourself
• You need to be able to ask for and accept help from others when you need it. You need to be able to talk to others honestly about yourself and the situation, in order for them to be able to help
• You need the ability to fight for your child’s rights against education and medical authorities who may not always understand or be sympathetic
• You need an iron-clad determination to make the adoption work. Sometimes the child will fail or regress; sometimes you will not meet your own high standards of parenting. You also need to be able to accept this and try again. In the end, you may need to be able to accept that the placement is going to break down
• You need to be able to put the child’s interests above your own, including not feeling undermined by his other relationships, past, present or future

If you can satisfy the agency that you can provide what a child needs in these areas, almost everything else is negotiable.

It’s very difficult to give a precise answer to this question, because so much depends on the circumstances of each individual adoption, and especially on the child. There are certain things which need to be done, or phases which need to be gone through, but not necessarily in the same order for each placement.

• You and the child have quite possibly not met before; you may never even have seen her in the flesh before, although you will have seen photos and probably a video. She may not have even seen a photo of you until after the panel meeting, depending on how much the social workers have felt it was advisable to tell her beforehand, in case the placement didn’t go through. It may be necessary for the social worker to prime her with photos and information before you go to meet her for the first time. This is where the photo album or video you prepared while you were waiting comes in.
• If you have other children it needs to be decided whether the whole family starts together, or whether you start with just the new parents. Suddenly being presented with a gaggle of new brothers and sisters can be overwhelming for many children.
• You and the child have to get to know something about each other by being together. You and she need to get to the point where you both feel, “Yes this can work, if we try.”
• You probably have made your minds up already, and nothing short of a definitive word from the Pope that this child is the certified and literal Spawn of the Devil will make you pull out now, and that’s good; hold that thought! One thing which is crucial to the success of the introduction period as well as to the adoption itself will be your iron-clad determination to make it work.
• You and the child may or may not have bonded by the end of the introduction period, but there needs to be a real indication that bonding has begun. Some adoptive parents simply fall in love with their new children at first sight; others take longer. Very few children fall in love with their new families immediately! Treat it like a courtship. Don’t try to buy the child’s affection and consent with toys and treats. She may be very disappointed when the supply line gets cut later on. A new cuddly toy or a game, yes, but it’s not Christmas! (well, maybe it is, but Santa brought you each other, not a train set).

• There is a great deal of information about the child which you need to learn. Not just the “big” stuff mentioned earlier in this chapter, but more mundane things, which help make the child’s settling-in with you easier on everyone. These include things like favourite colours, hated foods, allergies, phobias, favourite snacks, games, toys, whether she sleeps on her right or left side, etc., etc. Hundreds of things like this.
• You need to learn about routines the child is used to: does she have a bedtime story before her bath or after? Does she like to join her foster family in bed for a few minutes in the morning? Does she eat breakfast before or after getting dressed for school? Do homework before or after tea? Does the baby have her bath in the morning or afternoon? Does she use a dummy? How do you wind her after her bottle? What kind of nappies does she use? Does a toddler like to sit on your shoulders? You haven’t got a hope of remembering it all. Take notebooks and write things down. The older a child is the more she can help you herself with this, but the foster family has an important role here.
• If your child is on any long-term medication, other medical treatment or therapy which needs continuity, you and the social worker and doctors should arrange things during the introduction period so that this is maintained. It may mean travelling back and forth to the child’s old home for some time, to see the same professionals, or you may be able to have things transferred closer to home.
• For children who have been abused or been through traumas, you will need to learn about triggers: things which can set off a chain of fears or behaviour patterns which she needs to unlearn. Does Daddy wearing a red shirt mean that she is expected to masturbate him at bedtime? Does a belt hanging on the banister mean she is going to get whipped? Did she once have a pet hamster which her step-mother threw into the fire as a punishment? Do you drive the same kind of car as the one in which her parents were killed? Did she use to hide behind green curtains to escape abuse? Were there apparently innocent code words which her grandfather used to prepare her for sex? These triggers may not be conscious, of course, and may not be fully known by anyone involved in her life now. You may have to learn to avoid certain behaviours, words, even smells, which are entirely innocent in your family but which have bad associations for the child; you cannot expect her to change, at least not yet and not overnight.

• Gradually during the introduction period you will take over the care of your child from the foster carers or children’s home staff. Things like dressing, feeding, bathing, putting to bed. As you do these you will learn the routines and the child will become more and more used to each other’s presence, smell, touch, sounds.
• The period often starts with you visiting the child during the day in her current home under supervision. You will begin to take her out with you, be alone with her, etc. more and more. Later she will probably spend the night at your house and return to the foster family, depending on distance. Like your care of her, this aspect of your relationship gradually deepens until she and you are pretty comfortable alone with each other.
• At least once during this time there will be discussions, not necessarily formal, between the parties - possibly including the child - about how things are going. As long as people are happy, it will continue to develop as described above. But there may be a point where one or more of you thinks there needs to be a cooling-off for a while. Or there may come a point where people think it is not going to work. If that happens, the relationship is broken off. It definitely does not necessarily mean that you will never have another chance of adopting. Some relationships just don’t work out, and, as with marriage, it is far better to realise it at this stage than after things become legal. Don’t hesitate to discuss with the foster family and the social worker any difficulties you are having. There may be some quite simple explanation or a way around the problem: it doesn’t have to be terminal.

If you are adopting a sibling group, everything becomes more complicated, of course. They may not all be in the same foster home, involving more social workers and foster carers. It is possible to stagger introductions with a larger sibling group, so that the placements don’t all happen together, but rather, say, one a month, giving everyone a little time to settle down before the next arrival. With most sibling groups the children act as mutual supports, making things easier for each other and you.

Almost always the foster family is very supportive and helpful during this period. They usually know the child better than anyone else and want the best for her. Sometimes they have legitimate reasons for thinking that the match is not going to work, and will discuss it with the social workers. But very occasionally a foster family will simply take an irrational dislike to prospective adopters and deliberately try to scupper the arrangements, like a father who thinks no boy is good enough to marry his little girl. If you think this is happening, tell your social worker. It’s possible that it has happened before with other prospective adopters and this foster family. There will be something which can be done to overcome the problem.

At some point everyone will decide “it’s time,” and you will take the child home for good. The next stage is usually known as the honeymoon period, and I discuss it in the next chapter. You pack the child’s bags in the car, and off you go.

It is probably not the end of the child’s relationship with the foster family. That will probably tail off naturally over the next few years, but there is certainly no reason to terminate it artificially or completely. Almost all foster parents are interested in how their former charges are getting along in the world. You will continue to need their knowledge and advice in the months ahead, as you discover gaps in your information base, and you will be phoning them up to find out whether little Winston really is allergic to every cereal except Frosties, or whether he’s just trying it on. The foster family may well be the best source of some kinds of information for the child when she grows up: a foster carer who originally took a child as part of a plan to rehabilitate her with her birth family and had significant contact with them before it turned into a pre-adoption placement, will know a lot which could be useful to your child later as she needs to know more about herself.

Simply because it is usually beneficial to everyone concerned.

• The birth family benefits because they can see their child growing up healthy and happy. Just because they gave their child for adoption or were unable to look after her, or even neglected her, it doesn’t mean that they have no love for her or can forget her - far from it. Very few birth parents are monsters. And being able to see with their own eyes that their child is doing well and in a loving family helps them deal with their loss.
• Your child benefits because the source of the answers is there. If he wants to know where his nose, which is unlike anyone’s in his new family, came from, he can find out. If he wants to know how many uncles and aunts he has, he can find out. He doesn’t have to rely on third-hand and possibly corrupted information. Rarely, contact can make kidney or bone marrow donations possible where other donors can’t be found. Most especially, he gets the reassurance that he was not rejected, and is still loved by his first family. Contact can also be a corrective for the tendency of adopted children to have unrealistic fantasies about their birth parents, such as that they are famous film stars or royalty, and one day they will take them back to live with them in Hollywood.
• You benefit from the knowledge that the birth parents support your position. They may even explicitly tell your child that. You also get access to knowledge about family and medical history which can sometimes be very important.

A study carried out for the government estimated conservatively that fully a third of all adoptees either have received or will receive their original birth certificate information - and that only applies to those adopted before the age of 10 and adopted outside their extended families. No one knows the full figures for sure, because, especially since the 1970s there have been both official and unofficial channels for that information. No one knows how many of those people will go on to trace their birth families, either. What is known is that the reaction to the opening up of access to birth record in England and Wales (Scotland has always had open access) in 1976 opened the floodgates to many more applications for those records than had been anticipated, and that women request their birth certificates in substantially greater numbers than men do.

Tracing is the process of using whatever information is available, often only the original birth certificate and the agency’s contemporary records as a starting point, to find out where someone in the birth family is now. Adoptees who trace generally look for the mother first, both because her name is often the only one on the birth certificate, but also because mothers have a special significance for them. Tracing can extend beyond the birth parents, especially if they have died, disappeared or are unavailable for contact, to include other members of the birth family. Where there has been continuing contact between the families during childhood, tracing in adulthood is either unnecessary or much easier.

Tracing the birth family can be done independently, using the information supplied by the birth certificate and any additional information available. It can be done using the services of a private investigator or organisation which specialises in this is the most prominent), by advertising in the press or on the Internet, or by using one of several contact registers set up for that purpose.

Tracing is overwhelmingly done by an adult adoptee, but it can be done by the adoptive parents while the adoptee is still under age, or, rarely, by the birth family. Successful tracing (and not all attempts result in a relative being found) usually results in contact with someone in the birth family, but not necessarily: the birth family may refuse contact, or the adoptee may be satisfied with simply knowing where they are and that they are well, without going on to make contact. Tracing can take place at any age; even middle-aged adoptees trace and may be reunited with aged relatives.