Here Is What I Wish Others Knew About Adopting…

Here Is What I Wish Others Knew About Adopting…

IT IS NOT NORMAL PARENTING.

I'm going to be firm here, because two things have been consistently true in my life.

If I'd had a pound for every time I told someone I was unable to conceive and they replied, "Just adopt," I'd have been a millionaire.

And now, déjà vu.

If I had a pound for every time somebody said to me, "That's normal childhood behaviour," I'd be rich all over again.

So I'm going to say something that might sound uncomfortable:

Adoptive parenting is not simply parenting a child who happens to have different biological parents.

And love, however enormous that love might be, is not enough.

Love Is Not Enough

If I were opening every preparation course for prospective adopters, those would probably be my first four words.

Love is not enough.

That doesn't mean love isn't incredibly important. It doesn't mean children can't heal, thrive, form wonderful relationships or have happy childhoods.

It means love cannot erase history.

Children don't begin development on the day they arrive in their permanent family.

Their development began before birth.

Their brains have already been developing in response to their experiences, relationships and environment.

Some children entering adoption, foster care or Special Guardianship will have experienced neglect, frightening or inconsistent caregiving, domestic abuse, parental substance misuse or other adversity. There may also be uncertainty around prenatal development and exposure to alcohol, drugs or smoking.

And then there is separation itself.

Every adopted child has experienced separation.

That doesn't mean every adopted child is automatically neurologically traumatised simply because they were separated from their birth parent. The science is far more complicated than that.

But separation and loss matter.

A very young child doesn't need the language to say, "I've lost someone," for their body and developing attachment system to experience a major change in caregiver, environment, smells, voices, routines and everything that has previously represented their world.

The impact will be different for every child.

Their age matters.

What happened before separation matters.

The relationship with their caregiver matters.

The number of subsequent moves matters.

Their individual temperament matters.

And what happens afterwards matters enormously.

Safe, stable and responsive relationships can buffer children's stress responses and support healthy development.

Early adversity increases risk.

It does not write a child's future in permanent ink.

That distinction matters.

I Thought I Understood Child Development

Before becoming a parent, I had a professional background working with children.

I understood development holistically.

Children don't simply acquire isolated skills from a checklist. Development builds upon development.

Babbling and experimenting with sounds contribute to first words, then combinations of words and increasingly complex language.

Postural control contributes to sitting, standing and eventually walking.

Grasping and releasing objects develops into increasingly precise fine-motor skills.

I could observe children and think about what they might need next.

Maybe I'd provide an activity that allowed them to practise a physical skill. Maybe they needed repetition and feedback to build confidence. Maybe I'd extend their knowledge through a particular theme or play experience.

Then I became a parent.

And I discovered just how much repetition child development actually involves.

The hundredth spill.

Reading the same book thirty times.

Showing them again.

Answering the same question again.

Helping with something you were absolutely convinced they'd mastered yesterday.

And yes, it can wear you down.

Parenthood pulls you into a world governed largely by the needs of little people. There's the physical wear and tear of keeping up with them and that strange loss of adult freedom where you can no longer simply decide what you fancy doing and do it.

That is normal parenting.

Children need repetition.

Children develop at different rates.

Children struggle with emotional regulation.

Children have tantrums.

Children behave impulsively.

Children become jealous.

Children find friendships difficult.

Children don't always want to go to school.

Children become overwhelmed at parties.

And I have felt enormously privileged to inhabit that world for the past six years.

Which brings me to the problem with the sentence:

"All children do that."

Because yes.

They do.

The Same Behaviour Doesn't Always Have the Same Thing Underneath It

This is probably one of the most important distinctions I want people to understand.

I'm not claiming that the behaviours we see in adopted children are behaviours other children never display.

I'm saying that sometimes the same behaviour can have something completely different underneath it.

And that matters.

When we understand trauma-informed parenting, we become less interested in simply asking:

"How do I stop this behaviour?"

and more interested in:

"What is this behaviour communicating?"

Behaviour is the bit we can see.

The frightened, overwhelmed or dysregulated nervous system underneath it is much harder to see.

What Happens Early Really Does Matter

Early childhood experiences help shape developing brain architecture and stress-response systems.

This doesn't mean one frightening experience permanently damages a child's brain.

Stress is a normal part of development.

With supportive adults around them, children can experience even significant stress and recover.

The concern is when adversity is severe, frequent or prolonged and there isn't sufficient responsive adult support available to buffer that stress.

This is sometimes described as toxic stress.

It can affect developing systems involved in things such as attention, learning, emotional regulation and responding to perceived threat.

This is also where you may hear people talking about ACEs — Adverse Childhood Experiences.

ACEs are potentially traumatic experiences during childhood, including things such as abuse, neglect, exposure to violence and instability within the home.

Research has found that, across populations, greater exposure to adversity is associated with increased risks of difficulties with health and wellbeing later in life.

But an ACE score is not a prediction of an individual child's future.

It doesn't measure every protective relationship.

It doesn't measure resilience.

It doesn't tell you who that child will become.

It tells us something much simpler but enormously important:

What happens to children matters.

And what happens afterwards matters too.

So What Does This Actually Look Like When You're Parenting?

Here's where writing this becomes tricky.

I've never done "normal" parenting.

I've only ever been an adoptive parent.

So I cannot tell you that birth parents don't experience the things I experience.

Of course they do.

What I can tell you about is the additional layer.

Adoption means navigating the wishes, feelings, choices and histories of birth parents alongside the needs of your child.

It means working out what a relationship with a child's first family will look like.

That may involve direct contact.

It may involve letters.

It may involve very little communication.

Sometimes there may be no communication.

Whatever the arrangement, you are holding relationships and information that are incredibly significant to another human being.

You know parts of somebody else's history that you have a responsibility to hold safely until your child is developmentally able to understand them.

You have to be truthful.

But you also have to work out how much truth a small child can carry.

And that's an enormous responsibility.

Even an Ordinary Doctor's Appointment Can Become About Adoption

Recently we went to the doctor for something as ordinary as a urine infection.

Suddenly, birth history and family history became a significant part of the conversation.

From the doctor's perspective, I understand it.

She was gathering information to assess my child properly.

But my child was sitting beside me.

She is now at a point where she is increasingly aware of her story and increasingly sensitive about it being discussed.

So you're sitting there performing this strange balancing act.

You need to tell the doctor whatever is medically relevant.

You don't want to appear evasive and inadvertently raise concerns when a professional is simply trying to understand what is happening.

But simultaneously there's a little person beside you listening to adults discuss some of the most intimate details of their existence.

That is the additional layer.

The medical appointment isn't extraordinary.

Parenting while holding your child's history is.

And Then There Is Everyday Life

Friendships can be difficult when another child appears able to regulate more easily and yours is struggling with insecurity or jealousy.

A birthday party can become completely overwhelming.

Instead of joining in, a child might fiddle endlessly with the blinds because their body needs to do something.

There can be busy, chaotic energy.

There can be the irresistible impulse to investigate the nail varnish in someone's bathroom.

And suddenly there's nail varnish everywhere.

There can be crying because something feels frightening.

Hiding when something feels threatening.

Desperately wanting to join a club and then discovering that actually being there feels too much.

There can be enormous rage inside a very small body.

Furniture can be thrown because impulse control and emotional regulation haven't caught up with the strength of the feeling.

And once again:

Yes. Other children do these things.

The difference isn't simply whether the behaviour exists.

It's the frequency.

The intensity.

The trigger.

The developmental context.

How long it lasts.

How difficult it is for the child to recover.

And most importantly:

What is happening underneath it?

Trauma Isn't the Answer to Everything Either

This is another complication I wish people understood.

Developmental trauma can present with difficulties that overlap with those seen in neurodevelopmental conditions.

But an adopted child can also actually be autistic.

They can have ADHD.

They may have FASD.

They may have learning difficulties, sensory differences, speech and language needs or any number of additional needs that exist throughout the wider population.

Trauma doesn't exclude neurodivergence, and neurodivergence doesn't exclude trauma.

Sometimes they coexist.

And for parents trying to understand their child, teasing those things apart can be incredibly difficult.

You reach out for help because something doesn't feel right.

Trauma needs considering.

Attachment needs considering.

Development needs considering.

Neurodevelopment needs considering.

Prenatal history may need considering.

And while everybody considers it…

you parent.

And While You Wait, You Parent

There are promises of post-adoption support.

There are specialist services.

There is funding.

There are assessments.

There are therapies.

And there are waiting lists.

You can wait months to find somebody who really understands your child.

And when you finally find that person who gets it, perhaps you get an appointment once a week.

Which is wonderful.

But there is an awful lot of parenting between Tuesday and Tuesday.

So while you wait, you parent.

When the appointment finishes, you parent.

At 3am, you parent.

During the school refusal, you parent.

At the birthday party, you parent.

In the doctor's surgery, you parent.

While filling in another form explaining the same history again, you parent.

And very often, you're trying to do something called therapeutic parenting.

What Is Therapeutic Parenting?

Therapeutic parenting isn't parenting without boundaries.

It isn't allowing children to do whatever they like because they've experienced difficult things.

And it certainly isn't ordinary parenting with extra cuddles.

It is an attachment-aware, trauma-informed way of caring for a child that recognises that behaviour can communicate an unmet need, overwhelming emotion or response to something the child perceives as threatening.

It means sometimes parenting according to developmental and emotional need, rather than expecting chronological age automatically to tell us what a child should be able to manage.

It means predictability.

Repetition.

Connection.

Co-regulation.

Clear boundaries without shame.

Looking for triggers.

Helping a child return to regulation rather than simply punishing what happened while they were dysregulated.

Sometimes it means lending your child your calm when you have very little calm left to lend.

It is trying to ask:

"What happened to you?"

or:

"What do you need from me right now?"

before automatically reaching for:

"What is wrong with you?"

And some days that's incredibly hard.

Because sometimes your own nervous system is screaming:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST PUT YOUR SHOES ON.

And you're simultaneously trying to work out why putting on shoes has suddenly become an insurmountable task today.

That is therapeutic parenting in the real world.

And Then There's the Future

This is perhaps one of the hardest things to write about.

Because my child is still young.

And when you're raising a young child who has experienced early adversity, somewhere in the background sits uncertainty about what adolescence might bring.

You meet adoptive families further along the road.

You hear experiences that are incredibly difficult.

There are adoptive parents who have needed to form support communities because family life has become extraordinarily challenging. For some families, dysregulation and behaviour can become so extreme that relationships fracture or members of the family may no longer feel safe.

Those aren't the stories of every adopted teenager.

They aren't predictions of our children's futures.

And I don't believe we should look at a small child and assume difficulty is waiting for them.

Early adversity is risk, not destiny.

But once you know those possibilities exist, you cannot completely unknow them either.

So sometimes you look at your little person and wonder.

Will we be okay?

Will everything we're doing now help?

Will therapy help?

Will understanding help?

Will connection help?

What will she think about adoption when she's thirteen?

Eighteen?

Thirty?

And that leads me to something else I have changed my mind about.

I No Longer Believe in the Adoption Saviour Story

Before adopting, I read the trauma books.

But somewhere underneath all that learning I think I still carried two assumptions.

The first was that adoption was essentially rescue.

The second was that trauma would be an additional layer of difficulty on top of otherwise ordinary parenting.

Six years later, my understanding is much more complicated.

Separating a child from their biological family is profound.

Sometimes children absolutely cannot safely remain with their birth parents.

Acknowledging the loss involved doesn't change that.

Safety and loss can both be true.

A decision can be necessary and still involve grief.

As adopted people grow older, some question decisions that were made for them.

Some feel angry about losing connections to their original family or identity.

Some feel adoption was absolutely the right thing for them.

Some hold gratitude and grief simultaneously.

And adoptive parents have to be prepared to listen to all of those voices, including the uncomfortable ones.

I've tried to help my own child understand that connection to an adoptive family doesn't have to erase connection to a birth family.

But I've also learned how incredibly complicated that idea can be for a young child.

Because young children are simultaneously working out:

Who are my people?

Where do I belong?

Who keeps me safe?

Who am I?

Sometimes the things adults believe should provide reassurance can create enormous questions for a child who, developmentally, simply wants certainty and complete belonging.

And their understanding won't remain the same.

A four-year-old doesn't understand adoption as an eight-year-old does.

An eight-year-old won't understand it as they will at thirteen.

And the adult adoptee may look back at exactly the same story through another lens entirely.

**The facts of their story may stay the same.

Their capacity to understand what those facts mean will continue to grow.**

So, How Much Can One Person Hold?

And here we are.

This is perhaps the question that concerns me most.

It's the thought that sometimes keeps me awake at night when I sit on adoption panels or speak to prospective adopters:

How much can one person hold?

Can we know all of this and still open our hearts fully to adoption or fostering?

Can we understand the trauma, uncertainty, complexity of identity and possibility that our children may one day understand their story very differently from us — and still put our whole selves into loving them?

Can we give unconditional love while accepting that unconditional love doesn't entitle us to a particular outcome?

Because that's frightening.

We don't know what our relationships with our children will look like when they're adults.

Our children may grow up and revisit their childhood, their adoption and the decisions made for them in ways we cannot possibly predict while they're small.

They may have questions we can't answer.

They may disagree with decisions we made.

They may need distance.

They may desperately want greater connection with their birth family.

They may feel completely differently.

We don't get a guarantee.

And perhaps that's one of the hardest truths of parenting anyway — adoption simply makes some of those uncertainties impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, the world around us isn't particularly reassuring.

There are wars and threats of wars.

There are financial difficulties.

Services are stretched.

The future can feel incredibly uncertain.

And right in the middle of all of that are vulnerable children.

Children who need somewhere safe to live.

Children who need stability.

Children who need kindness.

Children who need somebody willing to keep showing up.

Children who deserve the opportunity to experience the ordinary warmth of family life.

So after everything I've written in this article, here comes my conclusion.

Yes, our parenting may look different sometimes.

But look at what we get to be part of.

We Get an Extraordinary Honour

We get the extraordinary honour of supporting another human being through their life.

We get to witness their journey through childhood.

We get the moments of connection.

The laughter.

The ridiculous conversations.

The happiness.

 

We get to laugh with them, talk with them, be vulnerable with them and learn alongside them.

We get to watch a little person discover who they are.

And adoption also introduces us to an extraordinary community.

We meet people who are fiercely child-focused.

Foster carers.

Adopters.

Social workers.

Teachers.

Therapists.

Charities.

Authors.

Professionals who dedicate enormous parts of their lives to supporting some of our most vulnerable children through adversity.

We discover books and resources created because somebody, somewhere, understood that our children needed something different.

We witness therapeutic work that slowly helps children make sense of experiences that were never theirs to carry.

And, in my own small corner of that community, I've had the privilege of creating Wild Hearts Creative — exploration tools born from that same desire to give children another way to express the things that aren't always easy to put into words.

But perhaps one of the most unexpected things adoption does is change us.

To Therapeutically Parent, We Have to Look Inwards

Therapeutic parenting doesn't only ask us to understand our children's triggers.

It forces us to discover our own.

We have to become vulnerable.

We have to look at our own wounds, our own reactions and the things we learned about parenting, behaviour, obedience, success and failure.

Sometimes we have to heal parts of ourselves so that we don't ask our children to carry them for us.

We learn to talk about the hard stuff because our children need us to show them that the hard stuff can be spoken about.

We learn that connection doesn't require perfection.

We learn about our children's resilience.

And then, somewhere along the way, we discover our own.

We begin to understand that some of the behaviours that frighten or frustrate us most may have their roots in another person's history — in experiences, adaptations and ways of surviving that existed long before we arrived.

And occasionally, we are lucky enough to witness some of the darkest days turn into the brightest moments.

Not because love magically erased everything that happened.

But because somebody stayed alongside them while they found their way through it.

Perhaps that's what I've been trying to say all along.

When I said at the beginning of this article:

LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

I didn't mean love wasn't necessary.

I meant love isn't the whole job.

Love has to be accompanied by curiosity.

Patience.

Learning.

Humility.

Boundaries.

Advocacy.

Repair.

Support.

The willingness to ask for help.

And the courage to keep looking at the world through our child's eyes when doing so is uncomfortable.

Adoption has made me view the world differently.

It has made me stronger in some places and much softer in others.

It has shown me how complicated human beings are and how much our earliest experiences can matter.

It has shown me that family, identity, belonging and love don't always fit into the simple boxes I once thought they did.

And despite everything I've written here — the trauma, the uncertainty, the waiting lists, the appointments, the therapeutic parenting, the fear about adolescence and the questions about the future — we also get to arrive at something incredibly certain.

We are our children's parents.

That statement doesn't compete with birth parents.

It doesn't erase biology, history or the relationships that existed before us.

There is room for all of those truths.

But acknowledging the importance of a child's birth family does not make adoptive parenthood somehow less real.

We are there for the ordinary Tuesday mornings and the extraordinary moments.

We know which cup they want without asking.

We sit beside the bed when they're frightened.

We do the school runs, the appointments, the advocating, the celebrations, the boundaries, the repair and the thousands of completely forgettable moments that quietly make up a childhood.

We worry about them when they're asleep.

We wonder about their future.

We get things wrong.

We learn.

We repair.

We keep showing up.

And through that role, through that relationship, through the thousands upon thousands of moments of parenting another human being, something becomes completely unquestionable within ourselves:

We are strong.

We are blessed.

And we are, without a doubt, our children's parents.

Not instead of their history.

Not in competition with anybody.

Simply because we parent them.

So when I say:

IT IS NOT NORMAL PARENTING

I'm not saying my child isn't normal.

I'm not saying birth parents have easy children.

I'm not saying every difficult behaviour is trauma.

I'm not saying adoption condemns children to a lifetime of difficulty.

I'm saying that adoptive parenting asks us to parent the child standing in front of us while simultaneously holding their history, their first relationships, their losses, their identity, their development and an unknowable future.

There are ordinary childhood behaviours.

There are ordinary parenting frustrations.

There is laughter and silliness and school runs and lost shoes and bedtime stories and arguments about brushing teeth.

There is an enormous amount of completely ordinary family life.

But there is another layer.

And that's the bit I wish other people understood.

So when I tell you that something is difficult and you instinctively want to reassure me by saying:

"All children do that."

Please know that I know.

I'm not asking whether other children do it.

I'm asking you to understand why my child might be doing it.

And if I could go back to the woman who was once told, "Just adopt," as though adoption were the simple alternative to giving birth, I think I would tell her this:

There is nothing "just" about adoption.

It will ask more of you than you understand right now.

It will challenge some of the things you think you know about children, parenting, family and even yourself.

Love won't be enough.

But you will learn what else love needs you to become.