Permanence

Abstract

This chapter considers how far the Barnardos adoptees achieved legal, residential and emotional permanence after adoption. It draws on minimal follow-up data, available for 124 adoptees (59% of the original cohort); extensive data collected through responses to an online survey concerning 93 adoptees (44% of the cohort) 5–37 years after placement; and interviews focusing on 24 adult adoptees. Ages at follow-up ranged from 5 to 44. All adoptees had achieved legal permanence. Many had achieved residential permanence after numerous placements in care: 34% of those aged 18 or over were still living with their adoptive parents. Twelve (13%) placements had disrupted, but all except eight (9%) adoptees had achieved psychological permanence. Relationships between adoptees and adoptive parents were twice as likely to persist as those between care leavers and foster parents.

Introduction

A wide body of research has identified a sense of ‘stability’, ‘permanence’ and ‘belonging’ as significant factors in the development of a child’s ability to form the nurturing relationships that are essential to healthy development (for summary, see National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2004). The importance of promoting permanence for children in out-of-home care is reflected in child welfare legislation in England and Wales (Children Act 1989, Guidance and Regulations, Volume II), the USA (Adoption and Safe Families Act 1997) and much of Australia (Wise, 2017). There are, however, a number of ways in which the concept can be understood. Brodzinsky and Livingston Smith (2019) argue that ‘permanence’ has three components:

Legal permanence, either with the child’s biological parents or with other caregivers such as adoptive parents or guardians, affirms the authority and responsibility of these individuals to make all relevant decisions and to take all appropriate actions in raising a child. Residential permanence, often referred to as placement stability, emphasizes the importance of supporting continuity of care in a designated home. Finally, psychologicalpermanence, often referred to as relational permanence, prioritizes maintaining children’s connections to significant attachment figures and supports a felt sense of connection, continuity, nurturance, security, trust, and safety in relationships with caregivers. (Brodzinsky & Livingston Smith, 2019, p. 185; our emphasis)

All three aspects of permanence need to be achieved if children’s long-term wellbeing is to be adequately supported.

Adoption is thought to offer the best chance of achieving permanence for children in out-of-home care who cannot safely return to birth parents. It provides the legislative support for creating permanent family links between adopted children and their adoptive parents (legal permanence), in a way that foster care does not. It may be more beneficial to vulnerable children than long-term foster care because it provides greater stability (residential permanence): research on the outcomes of adoption indicates that breakdown rates are lower than for other types of permanency arrangements (Selwyn et al., 2014). Adoption also appears to offer a more enduring relationship with carers (psychological permanence) (Biehal et al., 2010). The compressed and accelerated transitions to adulthood experienced by care leavers have been well documented (e.g. Stein & Munro, 2008): adoption placements are not time-limited in the way that foster placements are, and although there is little comparative research, there are indications that adoptees are more likely to receive ongoing support as they make the transition to independence (Selwyn et al., 2014). We would, therefore, expect the Barnardos adoptees to have achieved greater stability and more durable relationships when they moved to their adoptive homes in comparison with their own previous experience, as well as that of other children who remained in out-of-home care. An exploration of the data¹ collected through the survey, the minimal follow-up with some of those who did not participate, and the interviews undertaken with about one in four of the core follow-up sample and/or their adoptive parents help us to understand the extent to which this objective was achieved.

Legal and Residential Permanence

The 124 adoptees for whom at least minimum follow-up data are available ranged in age from 5 to 44 years on 31 October 2016 (the cut-off point for responses to the survey). Figure 5.1 sets out the length of time since they were first placed with their adoptive families; the average length of time was 18 years, with a range of between 5 and 37 years.² The largest group (46 adoptees) had been placed more than 20 years previously, including three who were placed more than 30 years before follow-up.

Fig. 5.1

Length of time in years since placed with adoptive family (full follow-up sample N = 124)

As Table 5.1 shows, the whereabouts of 121 (58%) of the adoptees were known at follow-up. Three adoptees whose parents responded to the survey had died in their teens. Over half (67/121: 55%) of the adoptees for whom we have follow-up information were still living with their adoptive parents. As would be expected, all but three of the adoptees aged under 18 years old were at home, but so too were 34% (26/76) of those aged 18 or over. This latter group included three adoptees who were in their 30s, one of whom was living in the family home with his spouse. The other two were sisters, living with the same adoptive parents; one of them had moderate learning disabilities and the other had a chronic health condition.

Table 5.1 Number of adoptees living at home by age at follow-up (full follow-up sample N = 124)

The 67 adoptees who were still at home had been living with their adoptive parents for an average of 13 years.³ This is a strong indicator of residential permanence, particularly given the evidence about these young people’s previous experience:

So when he came to us, he had already been in nine different homes – some fostered, some homes for children – nine before he came to us. (Adoptive parent of young man, aged 9 when permanently placed)

Well, I can’t give you a number on how many homes I lived in before I moved here. (Young woman aged 10 when permanently placed, aged 21 when interviewed)

Thirteen (19%) of the adoptees who were still living at home had had four or more previous placements and 48 (72%) had experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). They include one adoptee who had been sexually abused by ten perpetrators including both birth parents, as well as experiencing seven other ACEs before being placed in out-of-home care at the age of five. She then had 12 different placements before entering her adoptive home at the age of nine. At the time of the survey she was 26 and had remained with her adoptive mother for 17 years.

Adoptees No Longer Living at Home

The majority of those adoptees who were no longer living at home (36/51: 72%) had moved away to study, to live independently or to be with a partner. They, too, had often experienced a lengthy period of stability in an adoptive home following an unstable care experience. For instance, one young woman, who had had eight previous placements in out-of-home care before entering her adoptive home at the age of eight, had remained there until she moved out to live independently when she was 26. In her view:

[adoption] will literally change your life, mostly for the better. Although there is a lot of emotional stress and confusion there is also a sense ofstabilityin your life. You feel like you belong to someone and are part of a family, as though you are worth being cared for. (Young woman aged 8 when permanently placed, aged 35 when interviewed)

Research on leaving care in many Western societies shows that care leavers are often required to move from foster homes and residential units into independent living at a much earlier age than most of their peers would expect to leave the parental home (Stein & Munro, 2008). Cashmore and Paxman’s (2007) study of WardsLeaving Care in the same Australian state (New South Wales), and over a timespan (1992–1998) that overlapped with the adoptees’ experience, found that 83% (34/45) left their final placements to live independently between the ages of 18 and 19 years old. In comparison, the average age at which the adoptees had left home to live independently was 21⁴—two to three years later. Moreover, as we have seen, 26 of those aged 18 years or older (34% of adoptees in this age group) were still living at home. The average age of these young adults who had not left home was 22, indicating that the age at which the cohort as a whole would leave might be considerably older. Although we do not know the ages at which 23 (45%) adoptees left home, the data that are available do appear to show that most adoptees achieved greater residential permanence and had more extensive, long-term support as they made the transition to adulthood than they would have been likely to receive had they remained in long-term foster care.

Comparison with Normative Australian Population

There have been significant societal changes over the long timeframe of the study, and young people now leave home at a much older age than they did in the 1990s, when the first adoptees reached adulthood. Australian population data are categorised slightly differently from the Wards LeavingCare data. The population data indicate that in 2015 in Australia, 86% of women and 81% of men aged 18–21 and 48% of women and 60% of men aged 22–25 were still living in their parental home (Wilkins, 2017). Of the 20 adoptees aged 18–21, 13 (65%) were still living with their adoptive parents, as were 7/9 (78%) of those aged 22–25. The data are insufficient to provide reliable evidence but suggest that, while more adoptees than young people in the general population leave home in their teens, at least as many or more continue to live with their parents in their early twenties.

Disrupted, Interrupted and Unstable Placements

The data appear to indicate that the adoptees had a better chance of remaining in a stable home until they were ready to move on as independent adults in comparison with children in foster care. However, not all the adoptive placements were stable: some of them ended prematurely and relationships between adoptees and adoptive parents did not always endure. Data that enable us to explore these issues further come from the smaller group of adoptees and adoptive parents who responded to the survey (the core follow-up sample) and the subset of this group who were interviewed. At the time of the survey, 48 (52%) of the 93 adoptees for whom we have responses were still living with their adoptive parents and 45 (48%) had left. Three of those who had left had since died. Table 5.2 shows the reasons why these 45 adoptees had left home. As with the full follow-up sample, the majority of adoptees in the core follow-up sample had left home to study or to live independently. However, 13 (29%) had left home for non-normative reasons: because of conflict with their adoptive family; because they had decided to move back to their birth families; or because of problems such as illness or divorce within their adoptive families.

Table 5.2 What was the main reason you left your adoptive parents on the last occasion? (Core follow-up sample N = 93)

Legal Permanence

Each year, about 4% of children in Britain return to care after an adoption order has been made (Triseliotis, 2002); in the USA, 1–10% of adopted children return to out-of-home care (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2012), and the rate of adoption dissolution (formal ending of the adoption) has been calculated at 2.2% (Smith, 2014). All of the 93 children in the Barnardos core follow-up sample achieved legal permanence in that there were no formal dissolutions; responses to the questionnaires also give no evidence that any adoptees returned to out-of-home care.⁵ However, a number of placements disrupted.

Disruption Rate

Both the terminology and the definition as to what constitutes an adoption disruption (or ‘displacement’ (Rolock & White, 2016)) vary, making comparisons difficult (Palacios et al., 2019). The definition used by Selwyn et al. (2014) in their seminal study on this issue was: ‘legally adopted children who left their families under the age of 18 years old’ (p. 16). Responses to the survey give the ages at which 29 of the 45 adoptees who were no longer living with their adoptive families had moved out. At least 12 had left their parents’ home before their eighteenth birthday (see Table 5.3).⁶ These 12 placements would therefore have met this criterion. If this definition is used, the rate of disruption in the Barnardos study (at least 13% (12/93) premature endings) is substantially higher than the 3.2% over ten years found in Selwyn and colleagues’ analysis of data on 37,335 adoptions made in England. However, that study covered all adoptions, while the Barnardos adoptees were relatively old at placement and many had been selected specifically because they were hard to place and therefore posed additional challenges (see Chap. 3). They were closer to the samples of older children adopted following troubled trajectories in out-of-home care in the UK, studied by Selwyn et al. (2006) and Rushton and Dance (2006). Selwyn et al. (2006) identified a disruption rate of 17%, but this included children whose placements broke down before the order was made, when disruptions are more common. Only 6% of their sample disrupted post order; however, the children were followed up for a shorter period than the Barnardos sample (6–11 years vs 3–29 years). Rushton and Dance (2006) undertook a prospective study of children placed for adoption from out-of-home care at 5–11 years old. They found a disruption rate of 23% and suggest that this is broadly in line with other studies of older children placed from care with non-relative adopters. However, it is not clear how many of these disruptions occurred after the order had been made. The Barnardos sample only included children who already had adoption orders; we do not know how many other children had adoptive placements that disrupted before the courts heard the application for an order.

Table 5.3 Age at leaving adoptive parents’ home (core follow-up sample N = 93)

Many studies have found that placements of older children are more likely to disrupt. Selwyn et al. (2014) found that disruptions are significantly more likely to occur if children are aged four or more when they enter their adoptive homes: 10 of the 12 Barnardos adoptees whose placements disrupted were aged over four at entry and 6 were aged eight or more, suggesting that age may also have been a factor for these children.

The Barnardos study also has the benefit of sufficiently fine-grained data to explore further why some placements apparently ended prematurely, the reason the adoptee left the adoptive home, and the extent to which the relationship appeared to be ruptured. These data make it possible to identify those placements which ended permanently before adulthood with an apparent breakdown of the relationship between the adoptee and adoptive parents (full-scale disruptions), and those which may have gone through, or have been going through, a period of turbulence during which the adoptee sometimes left the home, but later returned, or at least re-established a relationship (interrupted placements).

Table 5.4 shows the reasons why the 12 young people identified above left their adoptive homes before they were 18. Only one of them moved to live with another member of the adoptive family.

Table 5.4 Reason for leaving home and age when last left (N = 12)

How many of these placements had genuinely broken down? Two adoptees had left their adoptive parents’ home before they were 18, had no communication with their adoptive parents and received no ongoing support from them at the time of the study. These appear to be full-scale disruptions, with the relationship, as well as the living arrangements, having apparently terminated.

Two other adoptees who had left home early died when they were teenagers: one from a drug overdose and the other as a result of a car accident. It is unclear how far they had continued to be supported by their adoptive parents after they moved out. However, others, who had left as a result of conflict with their adoptive parents or to return to their birth parents, nevertheless continued to be in regular communication with their adoptive parents and/or to receive support from them, as did many of those who had moved at an early age to live independently. The extent to which the placements had disrupted appear to be on a continuum, ranging from one young woman, who had left home at the age of 16 to return to her birth family and now, 15 years later, never communicated with her adoptive family and received no support from them, to another who had left at 17 to live with a partner her adoptive parents disapproved of, briefly moved back to her birth parents and at the time of the survey, aged 32, communicated with her adoptive parents ‘most days or at least once a week’ and also relied on them emotionally.

Unstable and Interrupted Adoptions

Data collected from the core follow-up sample through the survey and subsequent interviews reveal an underlying pattern of instability in about a quarter of the adoptions that endured, as well as in those that ended prematurely. The survey asked whether the adoptee had ever run away or moved temporarily out of the adoptive home: 22 (26%) of the 85 adoptees for whom there were responses had run away or temporarily left home at least once and then returned; 9 (11%) of these young people were reported to have left multiple times. All 12 young people who had left the adoptive home before the age of 18 were reported to have left and returned on at least one previous occasion; 2 had done so more frequently. Three of those who had left before they were 18, and four of those who had left a few years later, were unsure whether they had permanently left home or whether they might yet return.

Temporary forays into independence are a well-established feature of transitions to adulthood in normative populations, as is conflict between adolescents and parents (Agllias, 2016). One of the issues that make the transition to adulthood more problematic for young people leaving foster care is that once they have left a placement, it may be much harder for them to return: beds may no longer be available in foster homes or residential units, and even if they have not been filled, resources to support a care leaver who tries to return may not be forthcoming (Munro et al., 2012; Stein & Munro, 2008). A small number of care leavers in the Cashmore and Paxmanstudy expressed their hurt at the discovery that after they had left home, their former foster carers no longer appeared to be fully committed to them as family members (Cashmore & Paxman, 2007). The experiences of the Barnardos adoptees provide a very different picture. Not only, as we have already seen, was it relatively common for them to leave home and then return, but almost all those who had left continued to communicate with, and to receive support from, their adoptive parents.

Sarah

Before Entering Her Adoptive Home

Sarah was ten when she and her sisters were removed from their birth parents’ home following evidence of sexual abuse by multiple perpetrators. They had three placements in out-of-home care before entering their adoptive home when Sarah was 12. At this time, Sarah was described as an angry child who was given to temper tantrums:

I used to chuck mentals. I used to break everything. I used to barricade myself in my room.

These tended to occur after contact with her birth mother, who had not accepted that her relationships with paedophiles had been harmful to her children, and they were now permanently placed away from her.

Progress During Adolescence

Sarah’s behavioural problems began to diminish after she became settled in her adoptive placement. With intensive support from her adoptive parents, she was able to move into mainstream school and began to make academic progress. When she was 15, she finally felt able to call her adoptive parents Mum and Dad.

I started calling them Mum and Dad. I think when I started to realise that, oh, Jeez, you know, they’re more like Mum and Dad to me than my real parents ever were in any way.

However, she became increasingly concerned about her younger siblings who had remained with her birth parents at continuing risk of harm and, at 15, she returned to her birth family in order to try to protect them. After one brief return to her adoptive parents, Sarah and her boyfriend moved ‘permanently’ to her birth family and settled near them. Although the placement had apparently broken down, Sarah’s adoptive parents tried to make sure ‘that if she wanted to come back the door was always open’.

As an Adult

Both Sarah and her adoptive parents were interviewed when she was 33. After a period during which there had been no communication, her adoptive parents had re-established contact when they were about to move to another state. At the time of the interview, Sarah was in close communication with her adoptive parents, telephoning them once or twice a week; she and her partner and children had recently spent a week’s holiday with them. She spoke very positively about her relationship with them. From the adoptive parents’ point of view, Sarah had never ceased to be one of the family: ‘She’s our daughter, you know. We try and support her.’

Psychological Permanence

Continuing Support from Adoptive Parents

Sarah’s case study demonstrates how psychological permanence may be achieved, even if residential permanence does not persist. Most of the adoptees who had left home and whose adoptive parents were still alive reported that they communicated with them regularly, either ‘most days or at least once a week’ (14/41: 34%) or ‘less than once a week but at least once a month’ (10/41: 24%).⁷ Many of these adoptees were now in their 30s or 40s, and at least 14 had left home more than ten years ago.⁸ Only five adoptees (12%) reported never communicating with their adoptive parents and one (2%) was in touch less than once a year. In contrast, Cashmore and Paxman (2007) found that less than a third of state wards (12/41: 29%) had ‘regular and frequent contact with their former carers’ four to five years after they had left care.

Adoptive parents reported providing a wide range of continuing support to adopted adults who had left home, as is shown in Table 5.5.⁹ The most commonly offered support was emotional (29/41: 71%), then financial (15/41: 37%), including one adoptee (aged 32) who also stated elsewhere that their main source of income was their adoptive parents. A handful of adoptive parents also offered practical support (7/41: 17%) and help with childcare (4/41: 10%). Only six adoptees received no form of continued support (6/41: 15%).

Table 5.5 Type of support adoptive parents were giving to adoptees at time of the survey (N = 41)

Failed and Fragile Relationships

At the time of the survey, three adoptees were no longer in communication with their adoptive families and received no ongoing support from them (or there was no evidence of support), and one received no support and was in contact less than once a year. These four adoptees appear to have had no ongoing relationship with their adoptive families. Four other adoptees claimed to have either no contact with their adoptive parents or no ongoing support from them. The relationship between them and their adoptive parents might be regarded as fragile. Adoption had not enabled these eight young people to achieve psychological permanence, although only four of them had left their adoptive homes before they were 18 and therefore failed to achieve residential permanence.

The number of failed or fragile adoptions is too small for much meaningful statistical analysis. However, age is likely to have been a factor in these outcomes: all eight of these adoptees were more than a year old before abuse was identified (mean age = 7 years 3 months);¹⁰ six (75%) of them had had their second birthday before they were separated from their birth parents (mean age = 7 years 6 months);¹¹ and seven (88%) had had their fourth birthday before entering their adoptive homes (mean age = 8 years 4 months).¹² These timescales have all been identified as related to poor outcomes in adulthood (Rousseau et al., 2015; Selwyn et al., 2014; Zeanah et al., 2011). They also indicate considerably more delay than the timescales for the children in the follow-up group who did achieve psychological permanence, of whom 59% were identified before their first birthday (mean = 19 months),¹³ 55% were separated from birth parents before they were two (mean = 2 years 8 months)¹⁴ and 45% entered their adoptive homes before they were four (mean = 4 years 9 months).¹⁵

It is, however, also worth noting that this group of eight adoptees showed considerable diversity on a number of other key variables such as numbers of adverse childhood experiences, the types of abuse experienced, the extent of polyvictimisation and numbers of placements in out-of-home care. Five had been placed in our low vulnerabilitygroup (Chap. 3), suggesting that although this classification was based on research evidence concerning outcomes of adoption, it was a poor predictor of psychological permanence.

The group were also similar to the adoptees who achieved psychological permanence in terms of gender split, number of placements in out-of-home care and behavioural problems at entry to the placement. Considerably fewer of them had had contact with birth parents since entering their adoptive home (63% (5/8) vs 90% (71/79)), and it is possible that this may have made it easier to fantasise about their birth families and harder to commit to a new relationship with adoptive parents (see Chap. 6). The only other distinguishing feature was that the adoptive parents of seven (88%) of these children had reported that their primary motivation was infertility (as compared with 69% of adoptive parents of other children) and none had stated that they were motivated by a desire to help a child. Some of these parents may have been inappropriately matched with children with particularly challenging needs.

Comparisons with Normative Australian Population

Disruptions do occur in the general population and are not the exclusive experience of adoptive families. It is, therefore, worth considering how far the adoptees’ experiences differed from those of the normative Australian population. The proportion of adoptees who had left home and who were in contact with their adoptive parents at least once a week (37%) was substantially lower than that of other Australians (57%) who took part in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey, Wave 8, which asked specific questions on proximity to and contact with non-resident siblings and parents (Wilkins et al., 2011).

The HILDA survey also found that 4% of Australians had no contact with their parents or were in touch less than once a year; almost four times as many adoptees (15%) had lost contact or were only minimally in touch with their adoptive parents. The adoptees were therefore less likely to maintain very close relationships with their adoptive parents after they had left home and they were more likely to have become estranged from them. However, as we have seen, the relationship between adoptees and adoptive parents was almost twice as likely to persist after they had left home than that between care leavers and former foster carers.

Commitment of Adoptive Parents

Given the adoptees’ experiences before entering their adoptive homes (Chap. 3), it is not surprising that, after they left home, they were less likely to have sustained a relationship with their adoptive parents than the normative population. Nevertheless, the extent to which adoptive parents were committed to their adopted children, even when the relationship became difficult, is noteworthy. One of the seven adoptees who had left home because of conflict with adoptive parents or because they ‘did not like living in a family’ had since died. Four of the others were still in contact at least once a month and three of them continued to receive financial and/or emotional support from adoptive parents, one of them while in prison. Two of the four adoptees who had returned to live with their birth parents were still in regular contact with their adoptive parents. Both were receiving support from them—one of them received ‘accommodation, financial, emotional and practical support’. One other adoptee in this group had died.

It is also clear from the interviews that almost all adoptive parents regarded themselves as having made a life-long commitment that would be honoured, regardless of the challenges some of them faced in trying to provide a ‘forever family’ for children whose previous experiences had often been intensely damaging. Adoptive parents continued to show extensive parental commitment to adoptees who had become drug addicts or prostitutes, who had developed schizophrenia and were unlikely ever to be fully independent, or who had walked out on them and then reappeared, sometimes after years of silence.

Never give up…. When you make the commitment, it’s got to be for life. (Adoptive parent of a young woman, aged 6 when permanently placed)

Once he was with us as a forever family, we couldn’t give up on him but it led us to nearly destruct ourselves!! (Adoptive parent of a young man, aged 10 when permanently placed)

Integration into the Adoptive Family

Adoption is qualitatively different from foster care in that the adoptee becomes not only psychologically, but also legally, a member of their new family. A number of studies of adoption (e.g. de Rosnay et al., 2015; Triseliotis, 1973) have found that the change in legal status is valued by adopted children because it marks the point at which they fully belong to their adoptive family and is therefore of symbolic importance. We have already seen that the adoptive parents were fully committed to their role as parents for life. Data collected through the survey and the interviews shed further light on the relationship between adoptive parents and adoptees; the evidence also indicates how far they perceived themselves as belonging to one another as members of the same family unit.

Belonging

It was clear that most adoptive parents regarded the children as family members. They talked of them as ‘my son’ or ‘my daughter’, and some emphasised that they saw no distinction between their adopted children and their birth children:

But I wouldn’t want that word [adoption] to define her role in the family. Her role is that she’s our daughter. And in a sense, why does that need to be distinguished between her and [birth children], right? So we wouldn’t ever – I would never say, “This is [name], our adopted daughter”. (Adoptive parent of a young woman, aged 6 when permanently placed)

All the adoptees had the opportunity to change their surname to that of their adoptive parents, and many did so before the order was made. Moreover, some adoptive parents made additional efforts to ensure that their adoptees felt fully integrated into their families. One adoptee was given the middle names of the adoptive parents’ birth children; another took the adoptive mother’s sister’s name as her middle name and another helped choose the names of the adoptive parents’ baby, born after she was placed with them. Tellingly, one of the few young people whose adoption failed bitterly regretted changing his name.

Most adoptees also regarded themselves as members of their adoptive families. They referred to their adoptive parents as ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and their birth children as their brothers and sisters. Some adoptees objected when birth parents expected to have their genetic relationship acknowledged, as in this example:

If anything, the bit that really annoys me at the moment is since Dad, [adoptive father], passed away, I feel like he [birth father] is playing – he’s more trying to play the role of the dad and there are little references to, particularly from my grandmother, she refers to [birthfather] as, “Your Dad”, and I just ignore it, and let it slide. However, I never acknowledge it, and that irks me a bit. (Young man, aged 2 when permanently placed, aged 41 when interviewed)

Again, it is significant that the only adoptees who continued to refer to their birth parents as ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ were those with fragile or disrupted placements.

Given the extent to which most adoptees felt integrated into their adoptive families, it is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that the majority of those who responded to the survey (45/54: 83%) considered that their adoptive family had been the greatest influence in their lives (see Table 5.6).

Table 5.6 Who do you think has been the greatest influence on who you are today, how you feel about yourself and how you see the world?^*(Core follow-up sample N = 54)

Those interviewed were also asked how often they talked, or thought about, the adoption nowadays. The majority of adoptive parents (18/21: 86%) ‘never’ or ‘hardly ever’ thought about it. The same was true of the adoptees, although slightly more of them (6/20: 30%) thought about adoption ‘sometimes, frequently or all the time’. This last point is further supported by the evidence from the 17 interviews with dyads (interviews with adoptee and their adoptive parent, held separately). This shows that while their experience was generally congruent, adoption tended to be more of a live issue for adoptees than for their adoptive parents.

Although some of them still thought about being adopted, almost all adoptees felt that they were genuinely part of their adoptive families. Table 5.7 shows how they felt they fitted in when they first arrived compared with how they fitted in at the time of the survey.¹⁶ Almost half of those who answered this question indicated that they felt they fitted in well at first with their adoptive family (20/43: 47%); this had increased to over two-thirds by the time of the survey (30/43: 70%). Only five (12%) adoptees indicated that they did not fit in at the time of the survey, one of whom had never felt he belonged, and four whose sense of being part of the family deteriorated over time. All but one of these adoptees were aged 4 or more when they entered their adoptive homes; one was 14, and the others were aged between 3 and 10. Two of them were in the group of eight adoptees discussed above, whose relationship with their adoptive parents appeared to be fragile and who appeared not to have achieved psychological permanence.

Table 5.7 How did/do you fit in with your adoptive family?^*(Core follow-up sample N = 46)

Adoptees were also asked whether their relationship with their adoptive family had changed since they were adopted.¹⁷ Four (10%) thought it had deteriorated, but all the others thought that it had improved (25/39: 64%) or stayed the same (10/39: 26%).

Finally, adoptees were asked whether social workers had made a good match between them and their adoptive families (see Table 5.8). The two who disagreed both felt that they did not fit in with their adoptive families, that the relationship had deteriorated as they had grown older and that adoption might not have been the right decision for them. All other adoptees who were asked thought that adoption had always (30/43: 70%) or mostly (11/43: 26%) been the right decision for them.¹⁸

Table 5.8 Do you think social workers made a good match between you and your adoptive family? (Core follow-up sample N = 44)^*

Adoptees’ perceptions of psychological permanence were, perhaps unsurprisingly, related to their perceptions of sensitive parenting. While about three-quarters of the adult adoptees thought that their adoptive parents ‘always’ or ‘often’ praised them for doing well; helped if they had a problem; spent time just talking to them; listened to them; gave them presents; and helped them feel part of the family, about one in four felt that this had only ‘sometimes’, or ‘never’ been the case. When their responses to these questions were combined into a composite variable,¹⁹ 57% (21/37) adoptees appeared ‘always’ to have experienced sensitive parenting, 38% (14/37) ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’, and 5% (2/37) ‘never’. Adoptees who had ‘always’ experienced sensitive parenting were significantly more likely to regard themselves as fitting in well²⁰ and to think that social workers had made a good match between them and their adoptive families.²¹

Conclusion

There is substantial evidence to show that achieving legal, residential and psychological permanence (Brodzinsky & Livingston Smith, 2019) provides a positive context within which vulnerable children are most likely to achieve successful outcomes in adulthood. The 93 Barnardos adoptees in the core follow-up sample all achieved legal permanence through their adoption orders, none of which were subsequently dissolved. The evidence from the study shows that the majority also achieved residential permanence: 56% of them were still living with their adoptive parents on average 13 years after they had been placed with them; the average age for leaving home was 21 years and the majority (72%) left for normative reasons (to study or to live independently or with a partner). Although at least 12 adoptions (13%) had broken down according to the definition utilised by other adoption research, and a number of others were unstable, the evidence suggests that the majority of adoptees had also achieved a degree of psychological permanence, shown in the extent to which they appeared to be integrated into their adoptive families and continued to communicate with them and receive support from adoptive parents after they had left home. On the measure utilised by this study, only eight (8/93: 9%) adoptees appeared to be poorly integrated, with no enduring relationship, or only a minimal relationship with their adoptive parents. When we come to consider the extent to which the adoptees had achieved satisfactory wellbeing in adulthood, attention will be given to the ways in which this sense of permanence had served to strengthen their resilience and mitigate the extensive vulnerability they had shown at entry to the placement.

Key Points

• On 31 October 2016 (the cut-off point for the follow-up period), the adoptees ranged in age from 5 to 44 years: more than one in three (37%) had been placed more than 20 years before.

• The whereabouts of 121 (58%) of the adoptees were known at follow-up. All but three of those who were under 18 were still living with their adoptive parents, as were 34% (26/76) of those who had reached adulthood.

• The 67 adoptees who were still at home had been living with their adoptive parents for an average of 13 years. Given their previous experiences, the findings show strong evidence of residential permanence post-adoption.

• The average age at which the adoptees had left home to live independently was 21, two to three years older than the care leavers followed by Cashmore and Paxman (2007).

• All the 93 Barnardos adoptees in the core follow-up sample achieved legal permanence: there were no dissolutions and no child returned to out-of-home care.

• Data concerning the core follow-up sample indicate that 13 (29%) of those who had left home had done so for non-normative reasons

• Twelve adoptees left their adoptive placements after the adoption order had been made but before they were 18 years old, indicating a disruption rate of 13% (12/93). Selwyn et al.’s (2006) comparable study of late adopted children found a 6% post-order disruption rate, but within a shorter timeframe.

• About a quarter (26%) of the adoptions showed an underlying fragility in that the adoptees had run away or temporarily left home at least once and then returned; 11% of adoptees had left multiple times. However, being able to return home after leaving was a factor that distinguished adoptees from care leavers.

• Almost all adoptive parents continued to offer emotional, financial or practical support to adoptees who had left home. Even after a disruption, most adoptees continued to have a relationship with their adoptive parents. Only eight adoptees appear not to have achieved psychological permanence in that they had no contact with their adoptive parents and/or received no continuing support from them.

• In comparison with young people in the general population, the adoptees were four times as likely to have lost contact or be only minimally in touch with their parents. However, the relationship was almost twice as likely to persist as that between care leavers and foster carers.

• Adoptive parents regarded the adoptees as fully integrated members of their families, as did most adoptees. Most rarely thought about the adoption.

• Over two-thirds (70%) of the adoptees thought that they fitted in well with their adoptive families. Four (10%) reported that their relationship with their adoptive family had deteriorated since they were adopted, whereas all the others thought that it had improved (64%) or stayed the same (26%).

• Two adoptees thought that social workers had not made a good match between them and their adoptive parents. All others ‘always’ or ‘mostly’ thought that adoption had been the right decision for them.