‘I’m a healthier person now that she’s gone but I feel sad and guilty. I couldn’t help her recover’
It should mean the start of a bright new family future – but the reality is sometimes unbearably traumatic. Adoptive parents tell Anna Moore about the shame and despair of admitting they can’t cope – and what led them to breaking point
Life has been much easier for Becca* since her adopted daughter returned to care. Becca, 51, no longer wakes with a knot in her stomach. ‘When Amber lived here, just the sound of her moving around would bring on palpitations,’ says Becca. ‘I’d shake, I’d sweat – it was a trauma response.’
Amber had been adopted by Becca and her husband ten years ago when she was almost five. She was born in a women’s refuge, and then spent several years in care, before arriving in Becca’s home a traumatised child. Last year, she left, a traumatised teen. Ultimately, Amber’s rages, her violence and as she got older, her substance abuse, sexual activity and constant running away were too much for the family to safely manage.
After years of therapy, the family is in pieces, but in some ways – Becca has to admit – it’s a relief. ‘I’m a healthier person now that she’s gone,’ says Becca, ‘but I feel sad and guilty. I couldn’t do the right thing to help her recover. I was totally naive – I’d never have imagined that it would end like this.’
Adoption has been earmarked as a priority for our government. At the end of last year, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced new funding for an ‘adopter recruitment’ drive to focus on finding families for children who are some of the most difficult to place – such as older children who have spent years in care or ones with special needs. Adoption, said Williamson, can ‘transform the lives of children’. He urged social workers ‘not to shy away’ from putting children forward.
Adoption breakdown, on the other hand, has a far lower profile – it’s a heartbreak that few parents wish to share, partly for fear of being blamed. Earlier this year though, the world caught a glimpse when American YouTube couple Myka and James Stauffer admitted they had ‘rehomed’ their four-year-old adopted son to another family ‘who could better care for his needs’. The Stauffers had adopted Huxley, who was autistic, in 2017 and documented their journey on YouTube, picking up over 700,000 followers and a mass of sponsorship deals along the way. (‘Do I feel like a failure as a mom? 500 per cent,’ said Myka in a tearful video.)
They were met with a fierce backlash. Furious comments were left on their social media and sponsorship deals were dropped. Watching from her home in Southwest England, Becca was less quick to judge. ‘Something has gone on in their life that has been quite horrific – and for that, I have empathy.’
Although there are no official UK statistics – local authorities and adoption agencies often don’t keep track once adoption orders are signed and children leave their care – it’s believed that around three per cent of UK adoptions end in breakdown. (For context, 3,570 children were adopted from care last year ending 31 March: three percent of that would be about 107 children.) Many more come close but teeter along on the very edge. Research by Adoption UK suggests about a third of adoptions encounter no significant problems, a third encounter problems but manage to resolve them, while the final third have challenges that are severe and ongoing. The most in-depth research into adoption breakdown, carried out by Bristol University, found that cases typically involved a significant degree of child-to-parent violence, running away and serious criminal behaviour.
Though most breakdowns occur during the secondary school years, the vast majority will have begun experiencing problems years earlier and their root causes can be traced even further back, to the period before the adoption took place. ‘Adoptions come from the care system when children are unable to stay with their birth families, often because of neglect and abuse,’ says Sue Armstrong Brown, CEO of charity Adoption UK. ‘Even though adoption is designed to put a child into a safe and loving environment, it doesn’t erase the past or early childhood trauma. Babies’ brains are wired to attach to a primary caregiver – a parent – and that attachment allows them to find out about the world from a safe space.’ When that healthy bond isn’t there, when basic needs for love and comfort aren’t met, it can cause a lifetime of mental health challenges.
When Becca and her husband adopted Amber, they had no idea of the path ahead. ‘We were a solid, mature, successful couple,’ says Becca – both she and her husband held corporate directorships. ‘My husband had three children who’d lived with us in their teens. I thought we could do anything. I was wrong.
We understood that Amber had been through all these experiences before she came to us, but we didn’t have a deep understanding of what that might mean and it was never discussed. No one ever tells you the truth, so you’re in the dark about what’s going to happen and how to manage.’
When US YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer admitted to handing back their four-year-old adopted son Huxley, they were met with an enormous backlash and even death threats. Huxley, who has autism, had showed ‘severe aggression’ to the couple’s other four children
The first three months went well. ‘At first, Amber was a happy little soul,’ says Becca. ‘She loved eating and baking and being read to.’ But when she returned to school – Becca had been advised that Amber needed her routine and to ‘make friends’ – the magic ended. ‘She’d scream and punch and kick the whole way there,’ says Becca. ‘I’d come home and cry for two hours. I spent so much time trying to find out what was happening to this child and trying to apply what I’d learnt, but her rages got worse and more frightening.
‘I often turned to my local authority for help. In the end, funding was found for therapy and respite care, but they let you fail first,’ says Becca. ‘You have to say, “I don’t think I can care for this child any more” before they help. If it was understood from the beginning that your child would need support and there was a pre-agreed budget and parenting plan already in place, then you wouldn’t have to wait for each crisis to happen.’
Jeanie, another adoptive mum, agrees. In 2007, she and her husband adopted three siblings: a girl aged 18 months and boys aged three and four. Their birth mother was a teenager. ‘I knew they’d been neglected and that was it,’ says Jeanie. ‘It felt like they were drop-kicked though the door and the social workers ran for the hills. They probably thought, “We’ve found people stupid enough to take them on. Let’s leave them to it and hope for the best.”’
The middle child, Callum, was a challenge from the beginning. ‘He was practically mute when he moved in, with no awareness of space or other people,’ she says. ‘He’d cause his siblings pain – like trapping fingers in the door – but seemed unaware of it.’ As he got older, the violence escalated. ‘We had years of fights between him and his younger brother, with knives being involved, stamping on each other’s heads,’ she says.
‘I reported all this to the adoption social worker but nothing was done. I said that my worst fear was that one would end up dead and the other would be the cause. Still nothing!’
At times Jeanie felt suicidal, at others, she fantasised about divorce simply in order to share 50/50 parenting and have whole days away from the children. ‘I had regular, tearful conversations with the adoption social worker, but was always told we were doing our best and to keep trying.’
It was only 18 months ago, when Jeanie called her adoption social worker and threatened to repeatedly hit her son, that doors were opened. They were offered respite, with Callum spending one night a week with a foster carer. ‘It has been a godsend,’ she says. ‘The whole family can breathe knowing there will be no conflict and the bond Callum has with his carer is fantastic.’ Jeanie was also given funding for a therapist as she is suffering secondary trauma. For her, it’s a lifeline. ‘There are fewer bad days,’ she says.
There is some funding available for struggling adoptive parents. In 2015, the Adoption Support Fund was created to finance therapy and other support, such as respite care, although it is capped at £5,000 each year per child. In April, £8 million of this fund was freed to make access easier during lockdown, when many adopters would be suffering the same problems as other families – isolation, disruption to routine, challenging behaviours – magnified tenfold.
But Nigel Priestley, a lawyer with decades of experience in supporting adopting parents at the Adoption Legal Centre, says the fund is nowhere near enough. ‘We’re only now becoming more aware of the interplay between genetics, what goes on in the womb, factors like foetal alcohol syndrome and witnessing domestic violence at a young age,’ he says. ‘Often, the £5,000 only covers the initial assessment.’ The problem isn’t just funding. There is also a fundamental lack of understanding, says Priestley. ‘These parents set off on a journey in good faith,’ he continues. ‘They recognise it will be challenging but want to provide that forever home and are racked with guilt when things aren’t working out. Yet they quickly feel judged by their local authority, and are accused of bad parenting.’
For families who have been through it, the trauma lasts a lifetime. Anne and her husband Philip adopted their daughter Jemma 26 years ago – although at 16, she returned to a care home and now lives in a secure psychiatric unit.
‘We wanted a family like everybody else,’ says Philip, who has written an account of their experience, Inside Adoption: a Parent’s Story. ‘You just want to be normal, like all the other families in the community – but you never can be “normal”.’
Though the couple weren’t given much information about Jemma’s history – they were once told her records had been burnt in a fire and another time that they were lost in a flood – they did know that Jemma had been with six different carers before them. ‘We knew she had “developmental delay” which would apparently work itself out when she had a long-term home,’ says Anne. ‘It didn’t. Jemma would scream for eight hours a day. We were told “all two-year-olds have tempers”.
Not like that, they don’t. In her teens, she once tried to strangle me; another time she tried to push me downstairs. She’d often attack us with knives – in the end, they were all locked in a high cupboard.’
‘She once tried to strangle me; another time she tried to push me downstairs’
For Philip and Anne, the lack of support was almost harder to bear. ‘We were desperately trying to get help from our local authority, from the school and social services,’ says Anne. ‘We were told all she needed was love. You’re giving 100 per cent of your energy to this incredibly traumatised child, and then you have to give 100 per cent to fight battles to get people to allocate some resources, while all the time, the behaviour is becoming so much more ingrained. No one has 200 per cent to give.’
This latest recruitment drive to find adopters must come with funds to support families after the adoption order is signed, says Philip. ‘The public perception is that when you adopt, you’re gifted this child and everything is showered in love and fairy dust – but for a third of adopters, it’s nothing like that. The support needs to be in place from the start while everything is still OK, instead of waiting until you’re fire-fighting and it’s too late. Otherwise, it’s family finding – not family making.’
For adoption support, call the Adoption UK helpline on 0300 666 0006 or visit its website adoptionuk.org
* Some names have been changed