Discover the unique challenges adoptive families face and why long-term support is essential to building healthy relationships and thriving as a family.
Why is Post-Adoption Support Essential?
Adopting a child is a rewarding and life-changing experience; however, many children who are adopted are living with trauma. When you adopt, their trauma doesn’t disappear overnight, and you may need long-term holistic support to aid their recovery and grow as a family.
What is Trauma?
Trauma is the emotional struggle to process one-off or prolonged distressing experiences, such as a death of a family member, abuse and neglect. It can be difficult for individuals living with trauma to manage their emotions and cope with everyday life.
Children’s brains are constantly evolving, so when they experience trauma through continued abuse or neglect, the impacts are more profound. It can affect their view of the world and lead them to build survival strategies to cope, impacting their behaviour. But with a loving home and long-term therapeutic support, we can help adopted children recover from their trauma and feel safe.
Trauma’s Impact on Everyday Life
Trauma can impact every area of a child’s life now and in the future. Each transition brings with it new challenges, so long-term support is vital to the well-being of the whole family.
Behaviour
Children living with trauma may display behaviours that you, as an adoptive parent, don’t understand and find problematic. These behaviours are the survival strategies children develop to survive abuse and neglect. When they move into their forever home, they won’t immediately stop using these strategies. It takes time, patience and consistency to help a child feel safe enough to let go of their survival strategies.
That’s why, at AFA, you’ll receive preparatory training on trauma that teaches you to look beyond your child’s behaviour to identify the root cause. By learning to recognise your child’s triggers, you can provide the appropriate support and seek specialist input from experts, such as therapists.
Recovery from trauma, however, is a marathon, not a sprint, and transitions can lead to new complex behaviours as your child becomes more aware of themselves and the world around them. As your child enters their teenage years, without long-term support, they may struggle with their trauma and turn to alcohol, drugs and other risky behaviours to cope or experience poor mental health.
You don’t have to do it alone; the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund is available for adoptive parents to help pay for therapy services up to a value of £5000 per year per adopted child. From Psychotherapy to Theraplay and Creative Therapy, your local authority will assess your family’s needs before recommending services and applying to the fund on your behalf.
Education
When you adopt a child, you may contemplate their future, hoping they’ll achieve at school and have a fulfilling career. Trauma, however, can significantly impact children’s education, and school settings can be triggering. Obstacles a child living with trauma could face at school:
- Hypervigilance – children who’ve survived abuse and neglect may become hyperaware of their surroundings, using all their senses to ensure their safety. It could cause them to become overstimulated in the classroom as they absorb and become overloaded with sensory information, making concentrating difficult.
- Cognitive Function – trauma can impact memory, decision making and problem-solving skills, making it difficult to learn new things and remember crucial information for exams.
- Trusting Adults – children living with trauma may struggle to trust teachers due to their experiences of being let down by adults in the past. This can make it difficult for them to ask for help when needed, impacting their studies.
- Disciplinary Procedures – some teachers use harsh disciplinary practices in the classroom. This can be triggering for a child with trauma; they may choose to skip class or miss school altogether to avoid an altercation.
- Emotional Dysregulation – sometimes, children living with trauma can struggle to regulate their emotions. They may express big emotions in the classrooms that disrupt the class and impact friendships.
Although education can be challenging for children living with trauma, there is long-term support available to help turn learning into an enjoyable experience so they can excel. Long-term support includes:
- Priority access – adopted children get priority access to schools, so you can decide which school will be most beneficial to them.
- Early Years Pupil Premium – this funding helps early years providers access additional support and training for staff to help children with specialist needs.
- Pupil Premium – this funding helps schools provide specialist support for adopted children. Schools may use it to provide one-to-one tuition or trauma-informed training to staff.
- Adoption UK – provides a range of regional resources to help you choose your child’s school, support your child’s learning, and more. When you adopt with Adopters for Adoption, you’ll receive a free 12-month subscription to their services, which include support and training for adoptive families.
- Schools – you can work with your child’s school to ensure they make reasonable adjustments to aid your child’s learning, creating a plan to support their needs.
Relationships
As children, our first relationships build our expectations for future attachments. If children receive loving care from a caregiver who consistently meets their needs, they’ll be more likely to feel secure in future relationships. If children receive inconsistent, abusive or neglectful care, they may feel insecure and use survival strategies they had to develop to have their needs met in future relationships. These are known as attachment styles.
Children adopted from care may have an insecure attachment style that makes it difficult for them to form healthy relationships. Insecure attachment styles can cause children to exhibit varying behaviours on different ends of the spectrum. For example, they may be clingy, reject comfort or sometimes switch between extremes. It’s vital to be mindful that their behaviour towards you and others isn’t personal but a reflection of their early experiences.
Attachment styles evolve over time, and long-term support is crucial to helping children develop secure attachment styles. At Adopters for Adoption, we will help you access any support your child needs to begin building healthy attachments, including therapy, support groups and counselling. The Adoption and Special Guardianship fund can also help you pay for attachment-specific therapy such as Sensory Attachment Therapy.
Identity
At Adopters for Adoption, we encourage you to be open with your child about why they were adopted so that they can form a stronger sense of identity. You’ll receive a life story book that contains details, photos, pictures and documents about your child’s history that can help aid discussion about their early life; this is called life story work.
During the adoption process, we will support you in making decisions about remaining in contact with members of your child’s birth family. You may decide to use letterbox contact, where you and your child’s birth family write annual letters with updates to each other. The idea of letterbox contact is to maintain relationships that are in the best interest of the child and their development.
As your child reaches their teenage years, they will begin exploring their identity in more depth to develop a sense of who they are and where they belong in the world. Long-term support is crucial to helping them process emotions that may surface as they build a better understanding of their history. Without proper support, adopted children may blame themselves for their adoption or experience poor mental health if they struggle to form a sense of identity.
The Adoption and Special Guardianship fund can help pay for Therapeutic life story work. Therapeutic life story work allows children to work through their feelings about their history as they become more conscious of what adoption means. If your child wishes to see members of their birth family, we can help you assess whether this is in their best interests.
Further Adoption Support Services
We’ve discussed how long-term post-adoption support can enhance relationships, improve mental health, promote child development, help children recover from trauma and support identity formation. There are also additional post-adoption services available to adoptive families to support the whole family’s well-being, including:
- Adoption support groups – at Adopters for Adoption, we run bi-monthly support groups for adoptive families that allow you to connect with people from similar circumstances and build long-lasting friendships. Adoption UK also organises support groups delivered by volunteers with adoption experience in many regions.
- Training – we deliver online training and workshops that help broaden your knowledge on topics, such as attachment, trauma and life story work. You can also book live training courses with Adoption UK that cover diverse parenting issues.
- Membership – when you adopt with us, you receive a free 12-month membership to Adoption UK, and LGBTQIA+ adoptive parents will benefit from free membership to New Family Social.
- Discounts – when you adopt with us, you’ll receive access to our online portal that provides helpful information and discounts on your weekly shop, holidays and more.
First 4 Adoption is also a brilliant resource for adoptive families, offering valuable advice, guidance and support on a range of issues, including funding, training, housing and more.
Adoptive Families Testimonials
At Adopters for Adoption, we have been providing long-term support to adoptive families for over ten years. Here is what our families have to say:
“Thank you for all the support you have provided over the years. All your hard efforts are greatly appreciated. We wouldn’t be the happy family we are without you.”
“We feel very fortunate to have found AFA in the first place and for your continued support across our journey”
“[AFA has been] very responsive and aware of our needs. The training has been great, and we feel we have built great connections with these professionals such that we are able and confident to reach out for support.”
Whether you are considering adoption or have already welcomed your child and would like to learn more about long-term support for adoptive families, we’d love to hear from you.
