Staying Connected: Managing contact in adoption
Edited by Hedi Argent

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 book are involved in making, sustaining or evaluating contact arrangements. 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. Not everything works for them but a great deal does and they illuminate all that can be said about managing contact arrangements.

This new book is available from BAAF and costs £12.95 + £2.50 p&p