Love Is Not a Therapy: Why Adopted Children Deserve a Therapeutic Support Guarantee

I am a parent. I became a parent through adoption.

That distinction in language matters to me. I don't particularly like the term "adoptive parent", because adoption describes how our family came together; it doesn't describe a different or lesser category of parenthood.

But becoming a parent through adoption does bring with it some particular realities that I think we need to become much more honest about.

Children are not placed for adoption because everything that happened to them before was okay. By the very nature of needing to be removed from their birth family and ultimately placed for adoption, our children have experienced loss. Many will also have experienced neglect, abuse, exposure to substances before birth, disrupted attachments, multiple carers or moves, and other significant early adversity.

And then we place these children with families and, far too often, expect love to do the rest.

Love matters enormously. But love is not a therapy.

I adore my children. The love, laughter and joy they have brought into our lives is immeasurable. Becoming their mum is one of the greatest privileges of my life.

But loving them cannot undo what happened before I knew them.

For years there has been a comforting narrative around adoption that a safe home, stability, love and enough time will allow children to recover. We know better now.

We know much more about early trauma. We understand more about attachment and disrupted relationships. We know more about neurodevelopment, emotional regulation and the impact that adverse early experiences can have throughout childhood and beyond.

And once we know better, surely we have a responsibility to do better.

Wales already acknowledges the problem

This isn't simply the opinion of a frustrated parent. Welsh Government's national practice guidance on therapeutic support for care-experienced children and young people explicitly acknowledges a gap in provision for children whose emotional and behavioural needs result from trauma and adverse childhood experiences.

Importantly, it also recognises a group of children who may desperately need therapeutic support but who don't necessarily have a mental-health diagnosis or meet the criteria for clinical intervention through CAMHS.

Adopted children are specifically included within the children the guidance is intended to support.

This is important progress.

But there is a problem.

The guidance also makes clear that it does not itself provide a funding commitment to create or procure new services.

So we increasingly know what children need.

We increasingly understand how support should be delivered.

The question is whether we are prepared to fund and provide it consistently.

Training parents is not the same as providing therapy

There is some excellent support available to parents through adoption.

I've attended training. I've learned about trauma, attachment, regulation and therapeutic parenting. I've learned to think differently about behaviour. I've learned strategies for supporting children experiencing enormous emotions and, at times, violence and aggression.

That knowledge has been invaluable.

Parents absolutely should be helped to understand what may be happening underneath their child's behaviour and how they can create safety around them.

But we need to stop confusing helping parents to become more therapeutic in their parenting with providing children with therapy.

They are not the same thing.

I can learn therapeutic parenting.

I cannot — and should not — be expected to become my child's therapist.

There is an extraordinary burden placed on parents when we recognise that a child has experienced significant trauma, acknowledge that this may have lifelong consequences, teach their parents how trauma works and then effectively send the family home to manage it.

And all of this happens while those same parents are trying to navigate education, health, social care and mental-health systems that can already be extraordinarily difficult to access.

Eventually families become exhausted.

Relationships become strained.

Children struggle.

Sometimes things reach crisis.

And only then does more intensive support become available.

Why are we waiting?

What I would like to see

I would like Wales to make a simple commitment:

Every child who becomes part of a family through adoption should have a clear, continuing pathway to appropriate, trauma-informed therapeutic support throughout childhood and into young adulthood, according to their individual needs.

That doesn't mean putting every adopted child into weekly therapy from the moment they arrive with their family.

Children are individuals. Their experiences, strengths and needs are different. Therapy itself needs to be appropriate, evidence-informed and delivered at the right time.

What it means is that access to specialist therapeutic support should be built into the system from the beginning.

Families should know where to go.

Children should not have to acquire another diagnosis simply to demonstrate that the consequences of their early experiences are real.

Parents should not have to wait until family life is approaching crisis.

And families should not repeatedly have to tell painful stories and prove that their child is struggling enough to deserve help.

Support should be proactive, responsive and capable of increasing and decreasing as a child's needs change.

This is about children, not rescuing parents

Better therapeutic support would undoubtedly help parents.

But ultimately this isn't about making parenting easier.

It's about children's rights and children's futures.

When the state intervenes in a child's life to the extent that it decides they cannot safely remain within their birth family, I believe there is a continuing responsibility to that child.

An adoption order may change who holds parental responsibility.

It doesn't erase the experiences that made that order necessary.

Our children deserve more than a system that finds them a permanent family and then waits to see whether that family can cope.

They deserve us to be ambitious about what recovery, wellbeing and belonging might look like for them.

Love and something more

There are lots of things I wish I could change for my children.

There are experiences I wish they had never had.

There are things I would take away in a heartbeat if loving them fiercely enough could somehow do it.

It can't.

But that isn't a failure of love.

Perhaps recognising its limits is actually an important expression of love.

Our children need parents who will love them, advocate for them, learn about them, repair with them, laugh with them, fight for them and keep showing up.

But sometimes they also need specialist help from somebody whose job, expertise and relationship with them is entirely different from ours.

Love matters enormously.

But love is not a therapy.

Children who come to their families through adoption deserve both.