Preparing Birth Children for Panel

This is a three part blog based on our experiences of preparing our birth children at each stage of the adoption process.

Introducing adoption to your birth children can be a daunting yet exciting experience. It takes careful consideration and their thoughts and feelings can change significantly over time. It is vital that they feel valued and loved throughout the process and beyond.

When considering what might be best for our family when first our future family plans, (our boys were 5 and 7) we felt that adoption rather than fostering or early permanence was the right choice for our family.  

If you’ve read our adoption story - Waiting - Our Adoption Story - You’ll see that our journey from start to finish took a few years. This is an important and difficult thing to balance with birth children. Our journey started back in 2020, I had not long taken on a new role at work and felt that it wasn’t the right time to apply, therefore we pushed our application back to June/July time 2021. This gave my husband and I time to prepare ourselves, discuss our thoughts with close family and friends and really consider what the right choice was for our family.

During this time, we also started to prepare our children without any mention of our plans for our family. We would introduce themes of discussing different families, such as why some children lived with other family members, or why children might not be able to live with their birth families at all and needed to become part of new families. We don’t know any children personally where this was the case, therefore would use elements of the news, stories or just talking about different scenarios as we could. This went on for weeks with us dropping in the occasional conversation before we sat them down to actually discuss our plans. When we did they were prepared in the sense of knowing that this was real, this was important and had real value. They could begin to understand how we too could change a child’s life, but it would also change ours.

From that point onwards they were fully involved. We explained the process as we went, informing them of visits, seeking their thoughts and feelings and helping them be as involved as possible. We wanted to know how they felt and believed that this wasn’t possible without them being kept up to date with what was happening. As part of the process, we needed to complete a video tour of our house and this was exactly what we needed to keep them involved in the process and they loved it! Hosting the short video, they gave detail of the things important to them around our home. Every local authority appraoches the assessment differently, but usually involves some element of information about your home, so it is a good tool to use to help them feel part of the process.

During stage 2 of the process, now aged 6 and 8, our social worker completed visits with us as a family including a discussion just with them. At the time our eldest had been a little unsure, he had verbalised that he liked our family as it was and was finding it a little more difficult to get his head around. This is one of those moments where as their parents you have to consider every potential outcome – what if this builds to resentment? What if they don’t bond? What if this makes him feel less valued? Or what if it enhances his life in a way he just can’t see yet? My husband and I were just as committed to our decision, we could see a bigger picture that we knew was right for our family and we knew that while we couldn’t change how he felt, we could support him through it and ensure he continued to feel valued and loved by us. Our social worker couldn’t have been more supportive and gave us lots of advice and opportunities to talk this through.

We continued to pursue adoption and supported the boys along the way. Part of our process was to ensure we continued to read around the subject of adoption and we found ways to do this with the boys too, watching films such as The Good Dinosaur, or taking a library trip to see what books they had on adoption. It is such a delicate balance, ensuring it is a topic that is talked about regularly enough that you are preparing them, while also ensuring it does not become the centre of your conversation or focus so that they continue to feel valued too.

We made sure to utilise our support network too, ensuring the children knew which adults we had told and that they could talk to them at any point. We asked close friends and grandparents to occasionally check in with them. We wanted them to have the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings openly with safe people if they were holding anything back with us.

Fast forward to our panel day, we were camping at a Christian Conference at the time and the boys were looked after by close friends while we joined the panel. Our children were fully aware that 'some grown ups' were talking to us and our social worker to decide if we would one day adopt. We tried to stay as calm and level headed as we could - while we had hopes that it would be a yes, it is of course completely out of our control and we didn't want to raise theirs unnecessarily if it didn't go to plan. It was a unanimous yes.

We found our friends and children and took our children to a quite space. It was going to impact on them the most, therefore we wanted to make sure they were the first to know. All four of us celebrated the news, our eldest was becoming more open to the idea as his understanding grew and our youngest continuing to be very excited about the whole thing.

It was a life changing day, we could now look to what the future might hold for us as a family.

Follow on with part two - Supporting Birth Children Waiting for an Adoptive Sibling