Staying in touch – Changing our approach to contact after adoption

A recent report by the Public Law Working Group (PLWG) into adoption argues that there needs to be a ‘sea change’ in the approach to face-to-face contact in adoption.

Although the Adoption and Children Act 2002 requires the question of birth family contact to be considered for every adopted child, the resulting contact plan for the majority of adopted children is letterbox contact once or twice a year. We have therefore been delighted to launch a new resource hub that contains a range of materials that practitioners can use at all stages of considering contact.

Unlike children who remain in foster or kinship care, adopted children typically do not see anyone in their birth family once they are adopted. The impact of having, or not having, contact with birth family members after adoption is highly significant for adopted people, as this short introductory video shows.

This approach to contact is inconsistent with a range of studies that show good quality direct contact can benefit children in the long-run. For example, in the University of East Anglia (UEA) longitudinal Contact after Adoption study, we found that adopted young people who had maintained contact with someone in their birth family were more likely to have a good sense of their life story and the reasons they needed to be adopted, and they were more at ease about their adoption.

Direct contact proved easier for families to keep up over time than letterbox contact which, in many cases, was beset with numerous problems, often not lasting beyond a few years after the adoption order. Importantly, direct contact did not confuse children or stop them feeling part of their adoptive family - if anything, they appreciated their adoptive parents’ openness and efforts to help them navigate birth family relationships. 

But as the PLWG argues, decisions need to be made on a case-by-case basis. Risk and protective factors must be weighed up, plans should be flexible and well-supported, and direct contact will not be appropriate for all children. Contact needs to feel emotionally safe for children, and it’s important that children are not re-traumatised through staying in touch with unsafe birth relatives. On the other hand, it’s important to minimise losses and identify challenges for adopted people, and losing touch with caring and loved birth family members can in itself be traumatising.

The need for an individualised approach to planning and supporting contact is challenging for practitioners. There is no simple formula or algorithm that can tell us which child should have what type of contact and with whom. The right decisions can only be reached through a careful understanding of the child’s history, relationships, wishes and feelings, as well as the strengths and challenges in the birth family and the adopted parents.

Research such as the contact after adoption study and the supporting direct contact in adoption study have been helpful in identifying the factors that make post-adoption contact work or not work. This new website draws on this research base to produce a range of materials that practitioners can use at all stages of considering contact.

Research in Practice and the University of East Anglia first collaborated to build the website in 2017, working with a group of adoption practitioners to understand what was needed. Now, seven years on, the website was due for a refresh. There is now a much wider acceptance of the need for a different approach to contact in adoption, this often being reflected in the language that practitioners use, for example preferring ‘staying in touch’ (which is what families do) to ‘contact’ (which is what social workers organise).

There have also been developments in the range of options for staying in touch, such as digital platforms for indirect contact, as well as communicating through video calls or other internet mediated methods (about which we learned much through researching contact during lockdown). So, it was time to both refresh the content and align it with new thinking.

The work was jointly funded by Adoption England (who have made ‘maintaining relationships’ in adoption as one of their key priorities), the University of East Anglia Impact fund and Research in Practice. The work builds not just on the research carried out at UEA and elsewhere, but it has been richly informed by the contribution of people with lived experience of adoption who helped develop a ‘theory of change’ around modernising the approach to post-adoption contact - and who have been involved in producing many of the video and audio resources on the website. Practitioners have also fed into this theory of change, and we have learned much from working closely with practitioners who are acting as ‘staying in touch champions’ in their agencies.

The website is organised around three key areas of professional practice: preparing for contact and thinking about the purpose of contact; planning contact; and supporting contact. The resources on the website include:

• Things to read (such as research and practice briefings for professionals; practice tools to share with birth parents and adoptive parents).
• Things to watch or listen to (video and audio materials highlighting the lived experience of adoptees, birth family members, and adoptive parents).
• Things to do (exercises for professionals and/or for adoptive parents; a tool for communicating with adopted children about their wishes and feelings; a contact planning tool to inform individualised contact planning).

Although there are promising signs that a shift in the culture of adoption is happening, the changes needed to break free from entrenched views about adoption being a clean break are significant. However the need for the adoption system to centre more on lifelong challenges for adopted people is overdue.

As adult adoptee respondents to a PAC-UK survey argued, maintaining relationships in adoption should be a priority with the adopted persons’ needs at the centre of decision-making:

Adoptees do not arrive as a blank slate. They/we have our own history and family tree no matter the circumstances of how we came to be adopted.