My little one is now 4 years old, he came home at 19 months and I can’t believe how much time has passed and how life has changed since then.  One of the things that took me by surprise was his incredible ability to guide us in what he needs and how to create the mother to baby neural pathways that we didn’t have through experiences we hadn’t had together. When he’d been home a while we visited his foster parents who we’d formed a strong relationship with. We were incredibly nervous about what his reaction might be to going back to the only home he could remember before ours. As soo ..read more

In my first year of teaching, having seen the positive impact fostering had on one of my students, I decided that I would one day foster and adopt from the UK care system. I knew there were hundreds of children waiting to find safety and love in their forever families. I foster. I love watching the changes in attitude, supporting the forming of attachments, and broadening their horizons; I love that Christmas Day is without fail a day of celebration and catching up with my first two foster children, now in their early 20s. I love that my eldest foster daughter occasionally comes shopping ..read more

March 2023 The Government recently released its strategy for implementing reforms to children’s social care, following 3 separate independent reviews. We Are Family contributed to one of these reviews – conducted by Josh MacAlister – and you can read more on our contribution here. In our letter to the review we highlighted the crucial importance of including adoption, and the lived experiences of adopted children and their families, within the scope of the review in order to truly achieve the “whole-system approach” to which the review was committed. We were hopeful that such an approach woul ..read more

Support We Are Family via The Big Give Christmas Challenge, and have your donation doubled between Tuesday 29 Nov – Tuesday 6 December Dear members and supporters of We Are Family, As we approach the end of 2022, we celebrate that we now have over 1,300 We Are Family members, who have the opportunity to come together to support each other through the challenges of being adoptive parents, and also to share the joys that it brings. Day by day, we are continuing to grow, and as an adoption community by adopters and for adopters, we want to ensure that there are no barriers to acce ..read more

We are playing with dolls in her room. We are both mums and Angel is changing baby Annabel. She tells me she adopted baby Annabel because she was ‘too much for her birth parents’. ‘Really?’, I say, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t that she was ‘too much’. She was just a baby and babies really only sleep, eat and poo.’ She giggles at the poo word (still!). ‘I’m sure it was more about where they were at in their lives rather than anything baby Annabel did.’ ‘Ummm’ she says. We carry on playing.    Hubby goes with Angel on a school trip to a farm. He is alarmed to see her breakdown sobbin ..read more

Here we are, it’s now 2022 and slowly things around the world are starting to get back to a bit more normality after all the covid restrictions of the last 2 years. With only a few weeks till our Adoption Prep Training course we were determined to make this year a positive one!  Our prep course was split over 4 days, but not in a row. It was 09:30-15:30 on a Monday & Tuesday on two consecutive weeks via Teams. This was the first time, apart from information evenings, that we were going to properly meet other potential adopters who were in the same situation as us. So many questi ..read more

You know when you just have a random conversation with your partner that suddenly turns into something bigger and unexpected? Well that’s how our journey into adoption started.  One sunny afternoon in March 2021 my husband picked me up from work and on the car journey home we started talking about if we should get a third dog as one of our dogs was getting on in age and we didn’t want the younger one to be left alone suddenly. I randomly commented ‘What if we adopted a child now that we have a nicer flat?’ and to my surprise my husband didn’t even seem to hesitate or question me and ..read more

Following in the successful footsteps of our existing London based support groups, we are delighted to share with you the news that We Are Family is expanding into the South East! We have been commissioned by Adoption Partnership South East to develop adoption-led support groups across Bexley, Kent and Medway.  Adoptive parents living within the region are invited to join We Are Family to benefit from our support community including access to: Online Talks and Workshops via WAF Talks, Member-led Blogs and Podcasts, and exclusive Member Hub Resources. PLUS the opportunity, support an ..read more

I used to be a teacher and then trained as a forest school leader. Since then I have learned more and more about the impact of being outdoors on our mental health and wellbeing. Before adopting for the second time I was running intervention and nurture groups for children outdoors following the forest school ethos but adding extra wellbeing and connection activities. The change in many of the children’s behaviours was startling. The relationships the children built with each other were more robust as we had the time and space to listen to each other and they had a lot more freedom of expr ..read more

Real. A word that in the world of adoption can have a strong impact. This is because it directly points to the biological connection between children and their parents. In adoption we speak of a triad which includes the adoptee, the biological parents and the adoptive parent/s. All those involved in this triangle have a different link to this biological connection, they may all well understand each other and work hard to do so, yet their needs, experiences and feelings will be vastly different. The word ‘real’ is used to clarify and specify a biological connection, it is seen as inoffensi ..read more