Real brothers and sisters
Hedi Argent is an independent family placement consultant, trainer and author. In this article, she talks about the impact on birth children of adoptive or foster siblings joining the family, and stresses the importance of good preparation for adults and children alike…
All children have mixed feelings when the anticipated arrival of a new baby is announced, and the reality of this new little person often doesn’t live up to expectations. Children have to learn their first hard lesson in how to share their parents, their space and their belongings. When their initial curiosity has been satisfied, and the excitement has given way to not getting the attention they have been used to, many an older child has asked their mother to take the baby ‘back to the shop’.
Whatever the family structure, however many children, and whichever culture they adhere to, most biological siblings share lifelong relationships that may range from intimate and loving to distant and resentful. But how are sibling relationships formed and affected when children are added to the family not by birth but by adoption or permanent foster care?
Most children profiled in Be My Parent are well past infancy and have had negative experiences quite unlike what their soon-to-be new siblings have known. These children most probably come with a distorted understanding of the world, a confused sense of identity and low self-esteem. They will certainly have accumulated many losses along the way if they have been separated from parents, friends and family. If they are to be placed together with some or all of their siblings, they may bring their own ‘united front’ or troubled relationships with them. It is a fallacy that children who go through adversity together will necessarily forge strong bonds; they are just as likely to scrap like puppies over a bone, if this is all that they have been metaphorically used to.
It can be very hard for birth children to welcome siblings with a pre-existing relationship into their home. Sometimes it is easier if brothers and sisters are placed one by one, in order to mimic the biological way of building a family. When children are placed on their own, they may transfer familiar patterns of sibling behaviour to their new sisters and brothers. A boy, who was always picked on by his birth brothers, may provoke his adoptive or foster brother to become the aggressor; a girl who was praised for spying on her older birth sisters, may tell tales about her new sister in order to gain favour from the adults. It can be distressing for the birth children of adopters and permanent foster carers to become embroiled in behaviour that they cannot understand, especially if this includes sexually inappropriate behaviour.
Prospective adoptive and foster siblings, relative to their age and understanding, need as much preparation and support as their parents do. It is generally accepted that good training and preparation for permanent carers are the cornerstones of good placements, and that the birth children play an important part in this process. Most agencies include them in at least some of the group and home study sessions, and encourage the parents to share and discuss the adoption plan with their children even before they make an application.
Too often, parents hope that an adopted child will be a companion for their only birth child, and that the nearer they are in age, the closer they will become. But children who have not had enough love, attention, food or protection, are rarely ready to share, to be loyal or to give and take; they may not even know how to play or to understand what is theirs and what belongs to another child. They may need to learn how to attach securely to an adult, before they can relate appropriately to their own age group. This can cause added difficulties for birth children.
Preparing birth children for the reception of a specific child or sibling group requires skilled direct work. It is not a one-off interview or a chat when they come home from school. It should be a planned programme of work, with the aims and content agreed by the parents. Some sessions could include all the children as well as their parents, but each child ought to have the opportunity to be heard on his or her own. Birth children are not “a package deal”, as one boy said after the family placement worker had seen three children together and assumed that they all shared the positive opinions of the assertive older sister.
There can be no format for this work. Every circumstance will be unique and require individual attention. The lengths and frequency of sessions will vary according to the number and ages of the children in the permanent family, the number and ages of the children to be placed, and the previous experiences of all concerned. Like all direct work with children, it should involve more than talking. Family circles are a good way to start: who is in them and how do you open them up to include a newcomer? Why do some children need new families? How can children belong to two families and how can two family trees grow together?
Making lists of rules that children should abide by, naming emotions, and using role play to practice dealing with situations, will all give some idea of a child’s deeper feelings and of their resilience. What do you say to your friends about getting a new brother ‘half grown’? What is different and what is the same about building a family by adoption? What kind of problems might there be? What do you expect, wish for, fear or pretend? How does love grow?
Adult children, who no longer live at home, should not be excluded either: on the one hand, they can have strong views about being replaced by a ‘second family’ or about having unwelcome responsibilities foisted upon them; on the other, they may offer an invaluable contribution to making a placement succeed.
No matter how hard we try, it is not possible to prepare everyone for everything. Adopters repeatedly tell us that they didn’t know how it would really be until they were actually doing it so how could children know? Good support and a forum for children to express their views must follow good preparation. The work with birth children should not be a frill added on to an adoption or fostering package, but an integral part of the process. A number of permanent placements disrupt because that work has been perfunctory. Clearly, to work with birth children properly is both costly and time consuming, but it should never be a question of ‘Can we afford the resources?’ It should always be a question of ‘Can we afford not to find the resources?’
Hedi Argent
This article is taken from Ten top tips for placing siblings, published by BAAF.
Originally published in the Be My Parent newspaper in May 2008.
This article is published with the kind permission of the people involved. You may download it for your own reference but if you wish to use it for any other purpose, please contact Be My Parent for authorisation: Be My Parent, BAAF, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Telephone: 020 7421 2666/5/4.
Last updated: 28 April 10
