The developmental case for adopting children from care

Abstract

The October issue of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry begins with a special section of seven articles on children adopted from statutory care and their adoptive families. This editorial sets out some social policy and political context to adoption from care and presents the developmental case for it and other permanent orders. The special section is particularly timely for clinicians working in England. With the Adoption Support Fund (ASF) now being available to adoptive and special guardianship families through local authorities, the English government is looking more closely at the evidence base for ASF-funded therapeutic interventions. This has inevitably provoked discussion about what constitutes evidence-based treatment for a population that includes a sizeable number of children with complex, poorly conceptualised, attachmentand traumarelated disorders (Stock, Spielhofer, & Gieve, 2016; Tarren-Sweeney, 2014). It is also fitting that our journal should honour Professor David Quinton within this special section, so soon after his passing. David pioneered psychosocial research with looked after and adopted children in the United Kingdom through the 1980s and 1990s, before establishing the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies at Bristol University, with Julie Selwyn. We are grateful for Alan Rushton’s warm tribute to his colleague and friend, written at very short notice. This journal’s readership has varied opportunities for working clinically with children adopted from care. Those of you in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom will be familiar with the practice of families adopting children from state care. This includes children adopted by unrelated parents; by long-term foster parents; and, in the United States, by grandparents or other relatives. In most other jurisdictions in the developed world, adoption from care is either not sanctioned, or is impractical. A notable exception is the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), which recently amended legislation to prioritise adoption from care for non-indigenous children above long-term foster care. This was a bold move in a country that holds painful memories of forced and/or secret adoptions of children born to unwed mothers and of the stolen generations of indigenous children. How this unfolds in NSW will be closely watched by the other Australian states. Some jurisdictions that do not allow adoption from care instead have ‘guardianship orders’, which are designed to achieve relational permanence with an alternate family or with kin while retaining a child’s legal connection to their birth parents. The United Kingdom has both adoption and Special Guardianship orders, with the latter mainly being used for permanent care by relatives or the permanent care of older children and young people. Adoption, guardianship and parental responsibility (e.g. custody, residence) orders provide a legal framework for children to grow up in the permanent care of their relatives or family friends, their former foster carers or new adoptive parents, where restoration to their birth parents is not safe or achievable within developmentally critical timeframes. While these orders provide for legal permanence, we should be mindful that their ultimate purpose is to facilitate relational permanence. 670277 CCP0010.1177/1359104516670277Clinical Child Psychology and PsychiatryEditorial research-article2016