Adopted children need to maintain some degree of contact with their birth families in order to help them make lasting new connections. But making and managing contact arrangements with birth parents, wider birth family members and other people who are significant to the child is a hugely complex and challenging task.
How is this best achieved? Who should have contact? How often, when and where? Should contact arrangements be face-to-face or indirect? Supervised, supported or independent? What does it feel like for all those involved? Arrangements must be driven by the child’s needs, wishes and feelings - what happens when these inevitably change?
All the contributors to this anthology are involved in making, sustaining or evaluating contact arrangements, either as social workers, academics or adoptive parents. They offer examples of varied practice to explore what works and what does not and why. They describe many ways of remaining in touch but they all emphasise the same essential aspects of managing arrangements: flexibility and the opportunity to review arrangements as time goes on and circumstances change.
They all stress the importance of keeping the interests of the child in the forefront at all times. At the heart of the book, adopted children and young people and their families give their own opinions and share their own experiences, illuminating all that can be said about managing contact arrangements. No practitioner making contact plans for children can afford to be without this book!
Contents and contributors:
Introduction - Hedi Argent
Managing face to face contact for young adopted children - Elsbeth Neill
Through the letterbox: indirect contact arrangements - Alison Vincent & Alyson Graham
Post-adoption contact through mediation - Sally Sales
‘Is mummy coming today?’ contact arrangements in kinship placements - David Pitcher
Contact arrangements in black kinship placements - Hilary Galloway & Fiona Wallace
Split up but not cut off: contact between siblings - Shelagh Beckett
Contact in placements which match children’s race, religion and culture - Pauline Hoggan, Aminah Husain Sumpton & Wendy Ellis
What they say and how it feels - Pat Swanton
Supervised contact; taking the risk out of problematic contact arrangements - Alan Slade
Contact with contesting birth families - Maureen Crank
Arrangements for children with severe learning difficulties - Catherine Macaskill
Intercountry adoptions, and A view from Scotland - Paula Bell & Margaret Bell
