Supporting letter and digital contact

This section will help in supporting those who exchange letters post-adoption. Letter contact between adoptive parents and birth relatives can be valuable for the child, adoptive parents and birth relatives. Letters can help reassure birth relatives about how the child is getting on and provide an opportunity for them to try and ease the child’s sense of loss or rejection. Successful letter contact can also help to prepare everybody involved for future meetings during childhood or in adulthood.

But letter contact is not always straight forward and often falters quite early on after placement. Birth relatives may have poor literacy, learning difficulties or little experience of writing letters. They may worry about getting it wrong and losing contact; or feel anxious that sharing good news makes it seem as if they have forgotten the child; sometimes there is not much good news to share and they don’t know what to put in. Birth relatives can feel uncertain about what is expected of them or what their role is. They may not know what to call themselves or how to start or end the letters. 

There is a lot that practitioners can do to help.  Writing letters to a stranger is not easy and both birth relatives and adopters often need support with this.

Vanessa is a birth mum who has worked with Pause, a national charity that works to improve the lives of women who have had, or at risk of having, more than one child removed from their care. She has been part of Pause’s Advisory Group and continues to be involved in the charity’s campaigning and influencing work. She wrote this letter to the adopters to share her feelings about the challenges with letterbox contact, and how she sees the birth and adoptive families as an extended blended family united by their shared love for the child.

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