Adopt North East know that navigating the support landscape available for adopted children and young people is not always easy or straightforward. We acknowledge that this can be frustrating. It is the case that there is no single organisation which provides all the support that adopted children, young people and their families may need. This is because the needs of adopted children, young people and their families are diverse and as a result, services established to meet these needs have to be equally diverse. This guide seeks to explain some of the key support services that are available.

What is adoption support?

Parenting any child through to adulthood is an extraordinary journey. It can be rewarding, frustrating, exhilarating and exhausting – all in a single day. As children grow, they change and develop and this means that parents need to adapt and adjust. It can mean that what worked previously might no longer work and what didn’t work, just might. And of course, for all parents, there is plenty of advice out there – sometimes helpful, sometimes less so – as well as that nagging sense that somewhere, someone else is doing it better. Parenting, in short, can be tough. If parenting is tough for all parents, for a parent of an adopted child it can be especially so. This is because an adopted child will have experienced the trauma of separation from their birth family and may have been exposed to substances as an unborn child or harmful behaviours in their early years. Furthermore, some adopted children will also have experienced a number of different carers, homes, communities and even parenting styles prior to adoption. For these reasons, adopted children need more than just good parenting – they need trauma-informed parenting. This is the ambition at the very heart of adoption support - equipping adoptive parents with the skills necessary to parent in a way that meets the needs of a child resulting from their experiences prior to adoption.

Finally, some adopted children may also need specialist support to help them recover from the effects of trauma. As a result, adoption support also includes a range of therapies that have been shown to help.

Lastly, the proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ helpfully emphasises the role of others – friends, family, neighbours, schools and clubs - in helping a family to thrive. This is a particularly important insight for the parents of adopted children – professional adoption support can only ever be a small part of the wider network of support needed to parent. Those with wide and diverse support are far more likely to navigate the parenting journey to adulthood successfully.