Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / July 2009

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6675966.ece

From The Times
July 10, 2009
Number of adopted children returned to care has doubled in five years
(comments 3)

Rosemary Bennett
The number of adopted children who have been returned to care homes
because their new parents cannot cope with them has doubled in the
past five years.

Data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the
number has increased by a third in the past year alone as parents
struggle with often challenging children who have suffered years of
neglect or abuse in their natural families.

Going back into care after living with an adoptive family is a
traumatic experience for children, and for the adoptive parents who
have to accept their only chance of having a family has gone. It is
also a huge cost to an already over-stretched system with the children
likely to need expensive specialist care.

The increase in breakdowns comes despite a fall in the number of
children being adopted. Only 4,637 children were adopted in 2007, the
lowest number since 1999.

Experts say the figures show that many children are being left to
suffer at the hands of dysfunctional natural parents for too long
before being taken into care by social workers. By the time they are
adopted, many have severe emotional or behavioural problems.

Local authorities are not obliged to keep any data on adoption
breakdowns and the vast majority of those contacted by More4 News had
no figures or only partial records. However, according to the numbers
kept by 92 out of 450 local authorities in England, Scotland and
Wales, 57 children were returned to care in 2008-09 compared with 26
in 2004-05. If the pattern is repeated across the country, it means
more than 250 children were returned to the care system last year.

The Adoption Act of 2002 was supposed to speed up adoption so that
children do not have to languish in the care system for too long.
However, the bigger problem may be that they are allowed to stay with
their natural parents for too long before social workers remove them
from their home.

Lord Laming, Britain’s foremost expert on child protection,
highlighted this issue in the wake of the Baby P tragedy. He urged
social workers to be far more realistic about parents’ ability to turn
their lives around and to act more decisively when there are problems.

The figures are also a reflection of the changing face of adoption.
Before the 1970s, most adopted children were babies born to single
mothers, but today more than three quarters have been removed from
their homes because of abuse or neglect. The increase in alcohol and
drug abuse among parents is also a growing factor in care proceedings,
with parents often being given several chances to break their habit
before children are removed.

According to data provided to More4 News by the local authorities,
last year only four per cent of adopted children were babies, with the
majority aged between one and four. A quarter were aged between five
and nine.

Adoption UK, the charity which supports adoptive families, said not
enough was being done to help parents to care for a challenging child.

Jonathan Pearce, of Adoption UK, said: “The figures starkly illustrate
the difficulties and complexity of modern-day adoptions from care and
also highlight the lack of support for adoptive families in their
challenging task of being therapeutic parents for traumatised
children.”

The charity says the system is still too preoccupied with the intense
and lengthy approvals process for would-be adoptive parents, rather
than preparing them in advance and helping them afterwards.

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Case study
‘I had naively believed in love’

Initially, the adoption seemed to be going well. But Kate discovered
that Alex, whom she had adopted when the child was four, had an
attachment disorder and heard voices.

“She never left my side, ever,” Kate says. “She couldn’t watch
television, she couldn’t play, she didn’t want to play with other
children. There was nothing that she could do by herself.”

Alex’s behaviour deteriorated rapidly and she began to torture the
family cat. She tried to kill her rabbit. Social services had warned
Kate that her daughter’s background was “as bad as it gets”. Alex’s
natural mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

“I naively believed that with enough love and enough attention and
security we could make it all better for her,” Kate says. “But it
became a nightmare caring for a child who isn’t attached to you.”