Week 15 - Issues of contact and smacking

I felt much more comfortable this week with the assessment, knowing that most of the issues around the infertility had been covered.

I felt a lot of the pressure had been taken off me, and more relaxed during the visit. I knew what topics we were going to discuss this week, too, so we had had a bit of homework to think about before she arrived.

Contact issues were the first to be discussed. There are two types of contact - indirect abd direct.

Indirect contact is a social services 'letter box' scheme in which letters or photos can pass between adoptive and birth families via social services so that the birth family does not know the whereabouts of the child. The scheme could be used annually, or six monthly, or what ever the various parties agree on at the time.

Indirect contact is just as important as direct contact, in that the letters and photos can be saved to put in the child's 'life book'.

This is a book that has all sorts of things about the child and their family such as photos, letters drawings, and other items that the child holds dear to them. It is a 'piece of the past'...memories for the child and is there for the child to see whenever the need arises.

Direct contact speaks for itself. It is usually supervised by a social worker and you can opt to be there with the child or not to be there.

In our case we both feel that we would like to have contact with the birth parents or siblings.

Rob was split up as a child from his siblings. We feel it is very important that some form of contact is kept going between family members.

We feel no one has the right to take away every single person a child has ever known, and that, if possible, contact should be kept with siblings at least. The child has a right to be able to see a brother or sister.

And also, if the circumstances allow, to be able to see birth parents. To stop contact would be like trying to deny the child has a past. To us, contact is extremely important to an adopted child - as is supporting the child when the visit happens.

A child may feel confused. Who is the mummy and daddy? Why do I have two mummies and daddies? They may get upset when the visit ends. It is important that support from the adoptive family is available at the time of contact.

Sometimes, it is not possible for contact to happen, due to various circumstances. In this case it is important not to let the child feel it is their fault that they are no longer seeing family members. And to try and explain why without the blame falling on them or on the birth mum and dad.

We were asked about what discipline we would use on a child. Our social services has an anti-smacking policy. We explained we would send then to their room for 'time out', explain what they have done wrong, and that when they calm down they may come back downstairs.

We would not smack our child. We do not believe in that at all.

All children have tantrums at some point. How we handle it will remain to be seen. But we tried to explain the best we could, how we thought we would handle it, without using violence against the child.

Next week we will be going over various forms of abuse. Sexual, physical and emotional abuse and neglect. We have already covered this in the training, but we are to briefly go over it again next week.

It is a hard subject to cover, but one that has to be talked about.

E-mail Ann and Rob

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