The Gap Between Recruitment and Reality in Adoption: A Parent’s Perspective

The post below was written by one of our members, based on their own experience of adoptive parenting.

A lot of families in our community resonate with what’s being described. It may not be comfortable reading for some, and that’s part of the point. It reflects the gap between how adoption is often presented and what it can actually feel like when you’re living it day to day with a child who has experienced significant trauma.

We’re sharing it because it says something real about that experience. It’s not meant to speak for every family, and it’s not a dismissal of the many professionals who are trying to do good work within a stretched system.

But if we want things to improve for children and families, we have to be able to hear accounts like this. It’s one parent’s perspective, but it won’t feel like a one-off to many people reading it.

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Fellow adopters! Do you remember that recruitment phase? The coffee mornings, the glossy brochures, the posters of famous adopted people, the friendly social workers asking you all about your "support network," and the beautiful promise of "completing your family" with “children waiting for a loving home.” All we missed was the faint whiff of desperation in the air.

They were selling us a mission of healing. What they didn’t mention was the little detail that, once the Adoption Order is signed, you are effectively signed up as an unpaid, 24/7 trauma specialist, crisis negotiator, and domestic security guard for the Local Authority. All wrapped up in your desire to be a parent.

For too many of us, the "parenting" we imagined would happen has been replaced by the most gruelling and unforgiving emotional endurance test you will ever face. You’re not just making school lunches; you are managing complex PTSD, de-escalating violent outbursts, constantly advocating for your child, filling in forms, going to meetings, all while constantly trying to step carefully around a youngster's’s deep-seated blocked trust. To put it bluntly, you’re performing the high-level clinical work of a specialist residential therapeutic unit, but you’re doing it in your own living room, without a shift pattern, without a team of colleagues and without any form of clinical supervision…and without a salary of course.

The uncomfortable truth is that you’ve been recruited into what looks disturbingly like a cost-saving exercise. The UK adoption system doesn't just find families for children; it offloads the State’s most complex and costly responsibilities into private homes. By moving a trauma-impacted child from the care system to your font room, the State and Local Authority have saved themselves millions in professional intervention costs alone. They didn't just give you a child, they outsourced a whole funding crisis onto your family without telling you—and then they stopped answering the phone.

When you do finally break and ask for help, the System’s response is an absolute masterclass in gaslighting. They suggest some sort of "nurturing foundations" webinar or they tell you that you “need to put in boundaries” or "work on regulating yourself." They treat your burnout as some sort of personal failing rather than the predictable result of being exploited in this way. They need you to believe that the burden is yours to carry alone, because if they accepted the full scale of the trauma, they’d have to pay for the support you were promised. Kind of defeats the object of the exercise, no?

It's time to stop feeling guilty for being traumatized and exhausted. You aren't a failing parent; you are an exploited worker in a system that thrives on your silence and your sacrifice. You were asked to heal a child, but you were never given the budget, the staff, or the systemic power to succeed.

The "failure" is absolutely not in your house. It’s in the offices of the agencies that recruited you in the first place, and then walked away.

Fred Ehresmann