Barnardo's Fostering & Adoption NI

BARNARDO'S BITESIZE: How Two Dads Found Their Family Through Adoption

• Barnardo's Fostering & Adoption NI

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Two dads, Lee and Bobby, share their journey adopting siblings, from the validation of being approved as parents to navigating their sons' unique personalities and trauma responses. Their story highlights the importance of maintaining connections with foster carers while developing therapeutic approaches to parenting children who've experienced neglect.

• Equal treatment in the adoption process regardless of being a same-sex couple
• Building productive relationships with the foster carer who had cared for the boys for 18 months
• Honoring children's life stories and past experiences rather than seeing foster care as just "a holding room"
• Understanding and supporting different trauma responses
• Accessing post-adoption support including play therapy and life story work
• Learning therapeutic parenting techniques that help disarm fight-or-flight responses
• Creating support networks through extended family and professional resources

If you'd like to hear more from the Barnardo's fostering and adoption NI podcast, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about fostering adoption with us, search for Barnardo's online or find the link in our program description.


Learn more about fostering and adoption with Barnardo’s:
https://www.barnardos.org.uk/get-support/fostering-and-adoption

To learn more about fostering and adoption in NI, visit our Linktr.ee:
https://linktr.ee/barnardosfosteringni

To ask a question, give us some feedback or make a topic request, email us at:
BFANI@barnardos.org.uk

Foster belonging with us!

Lee:

It was that whole thing that we weren't treated any different. Because we're a gay couple, you know, there were single adopters, there were gay men, lesbian sexual couples, old, young, old and young, and actually we weren't treated any different. We were treated as potential parents through, we were treated as potential parents and and I think that was kind of eye-opening in a way um, on the basis that you know it was still, it's still relatively new the same sex couples can adopt. So to have to walk in and actually be in that position where it was just, it was just normal, yes, everything was just exactly the same for everybody and that was fantastic. But making the connection with that particular couple that we spoke to actually opened my eyes to a realm of possibility, all of the you know.

Lee:

So you go through various stages of adoption and some are harder than others, some can be quite intrusive, but all that pales into insignific to when you get to the point of. Well, there's two major points. First, obviously, when the panel turns around to you and says, yeah, you're an approved adopter. You know that that's a huge one. Somebody else who doesn't know me thinks that I can be a parent. Yeah, you know, that's a huge thing, and then obviously the big one when you get matched with the children, and then it's just a whirlwind, whirlwind from then on did you always know you're going to go for siblings?

Lee:

was that we did when we?

Ness:

when we went, we we decided actually we hadn't decided how many children or what we said.

Bobby:

We said we wanted couple, didn't we, I want, I was, I was more thinking boy and girl.

Lee:

Yeah, and I didn't have any sort of preference as such, but in the back of my mind I was thinking two boys. It just sort of fell into place the fact that the social worker knew who we were. She had already actually earmarked the boys for us. She wanted to show us those boys because she'd already read our profile and said that they we would match, and then everything from then on moved incredibly quickly. It did, yes, incredibly quickly to the point, as as Bob's already said, about getting to the matching panel, but we, you know we reached out. We were introduced to the foster carer relatively quickly.

Ness:

How

Ness:

do you bring two children into your home at the same time and forge your individual relationships with both of them and deal with the competing needs that either is likely to have? How did you find that?

Bobby:

Oh, competing for needs one first. I don't think you ever can do that. We're still doing that now, to be fair, you're doing something with another one and the other child, other boy, wants you, or you've just dealt with one situation and another situation.

Bobby:

You've just got to deal with it as they come up

Lee:

are yeah, our boys are, um, are like chalk and cheese, so they are biological siblings, um, but they are completely different. We've got one that's very laid back and we've got one that's very hyper aware, and it takes time to learn what those needs are you know you can read it on paper.

Lee:

You can read it on paper, but until you actually meet them and spend time with them and actually get to understand the way that they think as well, do you actually start to work out what their needs are

Ness:

tell me a bit more about the relationship you have with the foster carer, because it's it's a very complicated ask, isn't it for a child to understand what is happening when they're going from fostering family to adoptive parents?

Bobby:

We were very lucky. The foster carer the boys foster carer is a lovely lady and she's very experienced. She took it all in her stride and she managed the whole thing. We were very lucky she'd done it. If you say she, she, we went with it up, I'm gonna say you're my friend. So that eased the boys into knowing us, you know. So we met them and then we went down to see her and she was very enthusiastic. Look, these two lovely men have come to visit you, my friend, do you remember my friend? And welcomed us. So that disarmed the boys straight off. She still FaceTimed the boys. We spoke to her on a regular basis, so the boys were still having that contact, you know.

Lee:

And she created a relationship with us, yeah, very early on in the process. One thing, though she turned to us very early on, didn't she? And said how much contact do you want me to have? And I think that's a really important conversation to have.

Ness:

Yeah

Lee:

Because I can. I think we were slightly different because she'd had such a long placement with them and we got on so well and we got on so well with her that we had that bond with her very, very early on. You know she'd text us and go you never guess what your boys have been up to today, type of thing, and sending us random pictures and stuff like that, and she was really encouraging us and we had a really good relationship with her.

Lee:

But she was very honest with us as well yeah she turned around and says um, so when, when the boys came to us, the youngest wasn't potty trained and she'd been trying for months and months and months and you know she was being very honest with us about all of the difficulties Our oldest had behavioural issues with food.

Lee:

So she was telling us about everything that she was doing to try and address that. So we could carry on.

Bobby:

She's a great source of information for the boys. We wasn't there at that time, so asking her even now. Wasn't there at that time, so asking her even now. So our eldest has it in his head as a boy, in his private, in his a nursery nursery that bullied him and he gets quite annoyed by that. And our eldest being so, we thought we don't know. So he kept going on and he's a real co-op thing. Every now and then it would come up and the boy's name will get mentioned. He gets a bit. What is his, what? Uh, what? Five, six years ago?

Bobby:

Now, when he was there and still to today. He gets a bit fraught, so when the social worker came to visit this time, we asked her about it and she was a foster carer and the foster carer was like no to our son, you were equally as bad as he was.

Bobby:

He may have done this to you, but you did back to him. And you see our eldest get a bit confused by that because he hadn't remembered what he had done. He was remembering what the other child had done to him and that we haven't heard that name since. That's what good six months ago now. And it's kind of. That gives him the reassurance that he needed. There's information out there, helps him fill in those gaps. We used her a lot of the time when somebody said well, I used to do this, oh, did you? We'll go back and find out. And we always used because we was able to keep that line of communication open. So did this happen? No, it happened like that. So we're always able to use her as a source of information. She helped fill in that. Well, the long gap 18 months gap she helped us fill in. She gave us some background story of birth parents that we hadn't had, you know, because she'd experienced it with the contact and stuff like that. So that was nice to help us build up an image there as well.

Ness:

It sounds like you've got a really good productive relationship with the former foster carer. So she's giving you a bit of history. She's also helping you seamlessly take on the parenting duties of your two sons, and that transition is really important because obviously any child in the care system has experienced the trauma of loss already. So you two being able to be on the same page as the foster carer for your children is also really important because it means you, as the adults, know what really happened and you're able to reframe things in a way that helps calm calm them as well yeah,

Lee:

because it was such a long placement. Because when they first went, uh they, there was supposed to be an emergency placement, two weeks, two weeks, and then it ended up 18 months. But we acknowledge and we acknowledge with the boys because we're very open and honest with the boys about their past, their life story, all of the major milestones that happened in their lives, whether it be positive or negative. We're all very honest, we're always very honest and we discuss that with the boys and actually we do accept that actually, while they were in foster care, that was a big chunk of their lives and that is actually part of their life story. It wasn't just a holding room until they found a family. It was actually their lives and we were, you know. So we want to keep those doors open as long as we can.

Ness:

I really like how you phrase that, Lee. I think that's really important. It's not a holding room, it is very much part of their lives.

Bobby:

It's a big part of their lives our youngest when developing a slower man and your neurotypical child. So when we got him, although he was verbal, he used to roar a lot. He, that was his defense mechanism. He was a. He was a gorilla or he was anything spiky.

Bobby:

So he became a hedgehog. He'd curl up once he was a pineapple in our washing basket because it was all spiky and prickly, so that was his defense mechanism and that took him a little while to get out of it. She embraced that, didn't she, and that was just part of who he was. And we love it when you, every now and then, we go well, you were a pineapple and to this day he would still do the pineapple, he would, he doesn't. He does a very good banana, to be fair and now my imagination's going wild.

Bobby:

I want to know what a pineapple looks like he's got his hands on his head. Like that I love it just like this and he does a string of fruit and animals. But that's his defense mechanism when something gets tough for him, it becomes something spiky or an animal that's quite strong and that'll help him get through.

Lee:

The roaring was a really big thing, wasn't it?

Bobby:

It really was. All the time you'd speak to him and he'd just roar at you like a dinosaur

Lee:

You know, and it was his way of saying. I'm processing, I'm processing, let me process.

Ness:

You know, having gone from not being a parent, not necessarily being experienced around children and children can be challenging sometimes. I mean what support has been there for you when you're dealing with behaviours that have been really difficult?

Lee:

So both of our boys have a background of basically trauma neglect. I won't go into too much detail, but they both manifest in very different ways. So our oldest, that comes out in behaviour, in behaviours, and our youngest, unfortunately, that becomes much more internalised in behaviours. And our youngest, unfortunately, that becomes much more internalised, which is actually harder to work work with when somebody just takes that in. But we have we've had to call out the support a couple of times from social workers and so the post-adoption support team. So we actually managed to get some funding from the adoption support fund for our oldest to do some Play Therapy and we're just going and we're just going through that process again right now to see if we can get some Life Story work with him as well so he can sort of do some more processing at a at a higher understanding level than that Play Therapy looks at.

Bobby:

But I don't think it's just about we're also very lucky that my family I was just about to say that all live very close. They all now live within a 10 minute drive of where we are. So we've got a very supportive family who will come out if we need them. My mum and dad will have the kids overnight for us so we can have some us time. They love to go and play with our cousins. We have a sister's house, so that's nice, so that's our support. But also we have friends that we can speak to. But we're also very lucky where we went through this process.

Bobby:

Our social worker was a therapeutic pair, a therapeutic social worker, so she did lots of work with us around therapeutic parenting techniques, so like have a gossip with each other. I wonder if that child's up doing that, because, oh yeah, that one is amazing, you know, because actually the kids, like they know what I'm up to. You know we use that one and she gave us a whole range of different techniques that at a time we were like we don't really get, that don't really seem. But now we use and we put something into place. It does help sometimes, especially with our eldest, when he goes on the attack, fight or flight mode. Our eldest only has the fight mode. He won't, but when we start using it, disarms him kind of. It's like oh, you know, it's. So. We were lucky.

Bobby:

We got a therapeutic social worker, yeah, who I can't praise enough, who embedded all these different techniques into us, session after session...

Ness:

if you'd like to hear more from the Barnardo's fostering and adoption ni podcast, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to learn more about fostering adoption with us, search for Barnardo's online or find the link in our program description.