We recently asked our team to write about a topic close to their heart. Whilst many shows, documentaries and news reports highlight some of the broader areas of adoption, the nuances of complex family life often function without public recognition, as the families and social workers navigate these complexities together. Probably one of the lesser knowns of modern adoption is birth family and adopter meetings prior to placement, and on-going contact.
Almost all children whose care plan becomes adoption will now have a plan for ongoing contact with birth family. This is most often through letterbox contact; a format of sending update letters via the adoption agency. What’s maybe lesser known is that for many more this also includes in-person contact. This can look like meeting at a contact centre or neutral location to see adult birth family relatives including parents, siblings, and extended family such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles etc. It can also look like meeting up on a regular basis with younger siblings living in other adoptive homes, foster care, or kinship carers.
In cases where it’s safe and responsible to do so, even if ongoing, in-person contact isn’t the current recommendation, both birth family and adoptive family will be asked to consider meeting for the first time. This can also be done retroactively after an adoption has taken place.
One of our Social Workers, Emily has supported several families over the years to meet each other, also known as ‘first meetings’. It’s something that she feels passionate about because she has seen the impact that these meeting can have for not only the adopted person but also the birth and adoptive parents. In Emily’s own words these meetings are "immeasurably important and powerful”.
In this blog, she shares in her own thoughts and the thoughts of the families she has worked with about the importance of engaging in this form of contact. Our hope is that this blog will encourage and empower you to explore more about this vital area of adoption.
First Meetings: Emily's Story:
With the dawn of Welsh Early Permanence (WEP) in Wales, where there is an expectation that prospective adopters meet a child’s birth family members quite frequently whilst being the foster carer for a child that they may go on to adopt, I found myself wondering how this new way of practicing was going to evolve in Wales and change practice more widely in terms of attitudes towards arranging for adopters to meet with children’s birth parents when following the more traditional adoption route.
Just over a year ago I had the professional privilege to support some of my adopters to meet the birth mother of the child they were going to be adopting. The meeting went incredibly well; so much so that I felt compelled to write about it, to share with prospective adopters, birth family and with fellow social workers, who are for a range of reasons, often very nervous about taking part in/organising these meetings.
These meetings do not happen as often as I believe they should. For perspective, I have worked as an Adoption Social Worker for nearly seven years now and a Children’s Social Worker for seven years before this. In this time, I’ve only ever been involved in four birth family and adopter meetings. Each time these were emotional, intense but enormously positive and impactful. None of the adopters or birth relatives who took part have ever had any regrets for doing these meetings.
In one of my most recent meetings the adoptive couple were a very kind, considerate heterosexual couple who were unable to conceive naturally and who chose to pursue becoming parents by adoption after a difficult, painful fertility journey. A story which will be familiar to lots of people who adopt. The birth mother of their daughter is a care leaver, with an enormously sad background of trauma in her childhood, which has followed into a difficult adulthood where the burden of her trauma translates into a range of challenges, which have meant that she would struggle to consistently provide good care and safety to a child.
Often, when this decision is made, many birth parents find continuing to engage positively with services about their child too painful, too emotionally hard to cope with, because the most unimaginably painful thing of losing their child is happening and most birth parents are not emotionally prepared to cope with this news, let alone find the courage to agree to meeting with the future adopters of their child.
But when birth parents or birth relatives do agree to this, and it can be managed safely, it often does not go ahead because either adopters are too worried about it, or the child’s social workers are too concerned about perceived risks or indeed the emotional wellbeing of the birth relatives. The difficulty is that the child’s social workers often have very adversarial relationships with birth families through court proceedings, and consequently they often see the most challenging side to people. I have carried out countless birth parent counselling sessions with parents, many of whom have had very difficult relationships with their child’s social worker. More often than not, they have managed extremely emotionally challenging conversations with me (yes, a social worker but not the one who has removed their child from them) about their child’s future prospective adoption and they have remained calm and in many cases, feel comfortable to show more vulnerable emotions and share thoughts and wishes about what they would want for their child, in the event that they are adopted. From my experience these are not easy discussions; especially considering the natural emotional volatility experienced by birth families who often feel particularly vulnerable during this time. This is heightened further as these meetings usually happen during care proceedings; before the final decision has been made about if the plan will be adoption.
The birth mother in the case I’ve mentioned above showed a level of resilience that can only really come from a place of trauma. Crudely, it was the freeze of ‘fight, flight, freeze’. She was so used to adversity she presented as emotionally, either surprisingly composed or passive. Every person reacts to and manages trauma differently, but we see plenty of the fight, plenty of the flight and freeze from our birth relatives in adoption cases; often the fight is directed at child protection professionals, not the adopters or anyone else and many parents will run away from engaging entirely - flight. This birth Mum completely blew us all away with her compassion towards the adopters, her willingness to be open and her astounding bravery. It was a very moving couple of hours.
Everyone felt emotional and, after being asked if they would love her child, when the male adopter cried, the birth mother got up from her seat, moved around the table and pushed tissues over to the adopter. Her kindness in such a difficult situation was overwhelming and something beautiful her child’s adopters were able to see about her.
Her potential as a person was clear to see, as were her struggles. The greatest sadness about the meeting was that despite how much potential it was clear this mother had, and despite how kind she innately is as a person, her barriers and burdens in life are too great for her to safely parent a child.
I could see how nervous she was, and she was using breathing techniques at points to ground herself and keep her anxiety at bay. She was utterly determined to do this meeting; she wanted to be sure the adopters had important information about her, and information about her family’s medical history. She wanted to hear in person how these people were going to love her child, how they would keep her safe. Regardless of how positive her working relationship may be with social workers involved in her child’s case, it would be very hard for her to believe them when they say, the adopters are lovely people.
She was wonderful. She agreed to a photo with the adopters for them to be able to share with their future child, and she gave everyone a hug.
She spoke articulately about her life, her pregnancy, the birth, her feelings, and she asked important and profound questions. She listened carefully to the adopters too and showed an ability to empathise with them and their journey to becoming parents, whilst sat in front of them talking about the fact that she was going to lose her child.
The adopters saw the light in the darkness surrounding this birth mother; it can be hard to convey this side of birth relatives on paper and whilst some social workers are quite good at being balanced about birth relatives personalities and strengths amongst their issues, many can find this hard when they are so often faced with the more difficult side of the birth families during care proceedings; where the focus is quite naturally on the more negative side of these people’s natures. Meeting someone in person is the most powerful way for adopters to see that in amongst all that negativity, birth parents and relatives are just humans, who have feelings and have a good side.
I have always found my job emotional. For all sorts of reason. But since becoming a Mum myself in the last couple of years I am undoubtedly feeling more powerful emotions when I find myself in situations like this. The thought of losing my own child, physically hurts me, and I can now appreciate on a different level a little of what this birth mother must have been feeling and will probably always feel to some extent. My respect for this mother is immeasurably huge; she has been courageous enough to come and talk about her hopes and wishes for her child, to check that she felt the people who were adopting her child were nice people, who will love and cherish the child she dearly wants to care for herself.
During the meeting the birth mother was able to express how she felt the adopters were obviously very nice people and what she liked about what they were saying. After leaving she expressed to her child’s social worker that she was not prepared for how lovely the adopters were going to be and how, whilst still very painful, she felt some level of reassurance.
Crucially, she also spoke during the meeting about how she felt more confident about writing an annual letterbox letter contact now that she had met the adopters. This can only be a positive thing for the child. It can be hard to get positive letterbox contact engagement for a range of reasons and if these meetings can help set up positive, meaningful letterbox exchanges in more cases, that is just one of several positives gains from these meetings.
More recently I supported another adopter to meet the birth parents of his daughter, who had already been in his care for a while before it was possible to arrange the meeting. He and his wife were very nervous about the idea of meeting them, having not done this with their first adopted child. However, he recognised the benefits of being able to tell his daughter he had met her birth parents and decided he wanted to go ahead, whilst remaining very nervous about it. His wife simply felt too anxious to take part, fearful of being recognised in public one day and worrying that her anxiety would make her come across badly and ruin the meeting. She was also really nervous about her husband taking part, and it took them a long time to decide what to do. After lots of discussion, we agreed to go ahead without her, and the birth parents accepted her absence without question, and in fact simply expressed kindness and understanding about how nervous she must have been, respecting her decision to not attend.
As with the other example shared, this meeting was overwhelmingly positive. My adopter showed the birth parents (both care leavers with difficult backgrounds) a great deal of respect and kindness and was quickly put at ease by the unexpected kindness and humble natures of his child’s birth parents. Like the previous example, the potential of these two young parents shone through in that hour. They asked relevant, sensible questions and listened keenly as the adopter spoke about their daughter and his family. They spoke about letterbox and agreed what they were all comfortable with being in the letters, which will hopefully contribute to a positive letterbox experience for everyone. They posed together for a photo which will go into a life journey book for the child, and they exchanged hugs and handshakes.
As the adopter and I walked to my car afterwards, my usually very talkative adopter was stunned into silence. The experience was enlightening, positive, intense, emotional, and so much more than he expected it was going to be. After the meeting he was able to express so much more empathy towards his child’s birth parents than ever before and shared his frustration that these two young people could not parent. He wanted to “shake sense into them”, whilst also recognising they too needed supportive parenting. He also started to root for them to be able to parent their next child, who was in foster care at the time with a possible plan for adoption at the end of the care proceedings. He left the experience seeing that they were good people, who had no support, a poor start and little on their side to help them make positive choices. He was going into his life parenting his daughter, now truly believing that her birth parents were not bad people, and he did not feel badly towards them, which is a feeling he can pass down to his daughter as she learns more about her birth parents. All the way back to his car he sat stunned, his leg bouncing nervously, taking in the experience. Once at his car, he said goodbye and he was obviously not quite sure what to do with himself after what we had just experienced together. I could tell he was feeling emotional and a bit overwhelmed, so I offered him a hug, which he took gladly, squeezing tightly and thanking me for ‘forcing’ him to do the meeting. You do some intensely bonding stuff when working closely with adopters, these meetings are amongst the most amazing, shared experiences I have had in my entire career to date.
At the most recent 2023 National Adoption Service and Adoption UK
conference we had discussions around the increasing recognition in adoption research and practice that transparency with adopted children about their histories is vital to their longer-term wellbeing and how significant various kinds of ongoing contact with birth relatives and foster families plays a vital role in this. We discussed this in the context of the challenges of social media being a mechanism for adopted children and birth relatives to search for one another, a very real and unavoidable challenge for adopters and one that is more likely to become problematic in cases where openness and transparency are not as good as they could be. It’s thought that if adopters grasp opportunities such as in person (or maybe virtual video) birth relative meetings and put effort into contact such as letterbox, this will minimise the risk of their adopted child feeling the need to secretly use social media to search for potentially risky birth relatives, which invariably opens up a can of worms they may not yet be ready to deal with fully. If birth relative meetings can help establish more successful letterbox contact, it facilitates a safe and carefully managed dialogue between adopters, adopted child and birth relatives which is likely to reduce the curiosity on both sides to use social media to search for one another and enter into potentially problematic contact. Of course, these sort of in person meetings between birth relatives and adopters will not always be safe or appropriate, but I am certain they could happen more often than they do.
I’m fortunate to work with a social work colleague who is also an adopter to two boys and who met her children’s birth family. I asked her for her views on birth relative meetings from both perspectives and she shared:
“As a childcare social worker, when I think about why these meetings are important, I begin to think about the child’s developing sense of identity throughout their childhood and the need to balance positive information about their background and family history, alongside the often difficult or saddening story of why they were adopted. For adopters and birth parents it’s a chance to ask questions which may bring to life the other party and make them more real and personable. Learning about a birth parents’ interests, personality or hearing their memories of time they spent with their child cannot be read in a report and can be more impactful for a child in the future as their understanding of their identity and their adoption journey grows. For birth parents I hope that these meetings offer a sense of reassurance in knowing a bit more about the people that will go on to adopt their child, I think every birth parent deserves to know their child is loved, wanted, and cared for by their adoptive family. When these initial meeting do take place, it feels like we are bridging the gap between a child’ past, present and future. Almost laying the foundation for future information sharing and the development of contact which will inevitably change as the child grows.”
“Understandably there’ll be times when risk prevents these meetings from happening and sometimes, we need to think outside the box i.e. when it’s unsafe for a birth parent meeting are there other relatives within the birth family who have also played a significant role in the child’s live such as grandparents, aunts, or uncles, because that connection is so, so important.”
“When we became adoptive parents, we really wanted to meet our children’s birth parents. Initially, I think this was because we wanted to offer them some reassurance that the boys would be loved, cared for, safe and happy. It felt like we knew everything about them, and they knew nothing about us and that did not seem fair. When it came to it, we were only able to meet Mum but even that gave us so much information we would not otherwise have known. She talked to us about her pregnancy and their birth stories and what they were like as babies, special moments she had shared with them that we could never have known or shared with them without having met her.”
"The meeting itself was highly emotional but to see and speak to Mum was so worth it. It was a moment that really shaped our understanding of her and our empathy towards her. I often think of her now at milestone moments and like to think she would feel as proud as we do. It has definitely improved the quality of our letterbox contact because we’re writing to someone who we’ve met rather than a stranger. As parents we know there’ll be a time when letterbox contact may not meet our children’s needs and having met Mum, it makes us more hopeful that changes to contact can be done in a supported way at the right time for our children. So, whilst initially we felt the need to offer reassurance, what we took away from the meeting was much greater; a better sense understanding of our children’s life journey, empathy and value for their birth family and a feeling of more preparedness to support them in the future.”
To all the adopters out there:
I appreciate it’s scary to think of meeting people who all you know of them is the often negative and worrying information written within formal paperwork. However, despite their circumstances, mistakes, negative decisions and sometimes the dreadful actions or inactions, I think birth parents/relatives have often been unlucky. They’re often vulnerable and disadvantaged people who have had little in the way of real love, useful guidance, and consistent support in their own lives. They usually have the same stories behind them as your future child, only they may not have had the chance to feel safe, feel loved and learn how to be a happy, stable people who understand healthy, loving relationships. They’re humans, with feelings, who are having the most unimaginably painful thing happen to them.
Don’t be scared. I urge you to push to have a birth family meeting if you can. Becoming a parent introduces so many wonderful things into your life but sometimes, the right thing for your child, will feel challenging to you as a parent and I think that sometimes that is truer for adopters.
Reasons I have commonly heard cited for not having these meetings include fear, anxiety about being recognised by birth relatives afterwards and shame or concern about the birth family’s loss and the adopters gain, making people feel too worried to face those people’s pain in person.
Just as you’ll stand watching your child wobbling at the top of a slide and try to suppress your anxiety about them falling to stop yourself grabbing them; just as you watch them walk down the road to play out alone for the first time; just as you hand them the keys to their first car and watch them drive away or meet that first boyfriend or girlfriend you are not sure about; just as you talk to them about the birds and bees, you know that your child needs to learn from mistakes. They need freedom and space to grow and you as their parent have to go through those difficult feelings and experiences in their best interest. Just like all these examples and many others in between, pushing through that anxiety and fear around meeting your child’s birth relatives is worthwhile because it is not something you will regret.
I’m not minimising how much of an emotional challenge this sort of meeting will be for everyone; it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s a big ask. However, you’re approved to adopt and the expectation that comes with this is that you should have the emotional strength and resilience that will make you strong enough to cope with such an emotionally challenging event. I promise you, it will never be as bad as your mind is telling you it will be. If anything, it'll more likely be massively emotional but ultimately a positive experience.
Please be assured that these meetings are carefully planned to be safe. Ground rules are set, adopters real names are often not used, identifying information about where adopters live is avoided, questions from both sides are sought in advance of meetings and shared, birth relatives are not allowed to take photos, a neutral, safe venue is picked, social workers are present and support the flow of conversation, arrivals and departures are staggered and adopters may be accompanied by a social worker from another location to avoid them arriving and leaving in their cars at the meeting venue.
If you have already adopted and didn’t get the chance to have a birth relative meeting, there are no hard and fast rules about how or when these meetings take place. I have supported them to happen both during the pre-placement matching process and after a child has moved to their adoptive home. There is no harm in making enquiries about arranging such a meeting, even if your child is now living with you and the Adoption Order is in place.
If you’re an existing prospective adopter then do ask your Social Worker about birth relative meetings and we may be able to put you in touch with other adopters who have experienced this, if you feel this will help you decide about going ahead with a meeting or not.
To my fellow Social Workers
Try and step back from the relationship you have with birth relatives, which may not always be a very positive one and consider, “what are these people like with other professionals or in public”. Don’t assume that because the birth family may fiercely dislike you, that they’ll be this way with everyone else.
Recently I was working with a child’s social worker, childcare support worker and our adoption birth parent worker (who knew birth mum already), to organise a birth parent and adopter meeting. Together, we had carefully considered all the risk factors, and decided we could support a birth parent meeting safely. Birth mum has borderline learning needs and complex mental health diagnosis, which make her exceptionally vulnerable, and at times, volatile. Much of her volatility has been towards Social Workers when she has felt challenged and out of her depth. After the decision was made to go ahead, a social worker who was also working on the case queried in a review meeting how sensible the decision to go ahead with the meeting was, based on her own experiences with the birth mother. I was disappointed by this because I felt that it undermined the careful thought we had put into if this was safe and sensible, and with some adopters, would have scared them and resulted in the meeting not going ahead. As it happened, the adopters in this case are both very strong and unflappable and they went ahead regardless of this doubt being cast over the meeting.
The meeting was really positive; Mum had her grandmother come along, which we knew would help keep her calm. We had also done a lot of preparation with Mum and Gran in advance, to enable them to come into the meeting with the right focus. Mum was very nervous and was extremely quiet for most of the meeting and asked me to read her questions. Both Gran, Mum and the adopter left this meeting feeling it was worthwhile; the adopter feels he has some more personal snippets of information to share with his adoptive child one day, and Mum and Gran both expressed how reassured they felt after meeting the adopter, who they felt was a ‘nice, kind, caring’ man who was clearly going to love and look after the child. We provided feedback to the social worker after the meeting, and she reflected that perhaps Mum’s volatility in other meetings was from feeling confused, scared and not listened to but as the adopter meeting was something Mum had really wanted to do, the fact that she felt listened to for the first time, helped make the meeting positive. I think this example should be food for thought for other social workers trying to decide if it would be sensible for a birth parent meeting to take place.
I hope this narrative of my own experiences gives some insight into why birth relative meetings can be valuable, what to expect and give you the confidence to explore this area of adoption further.