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HI Marcy,

Please if you would like to contact our Helpline team and one of our skilled advisors will be happy to discuss your situation and answer your questions in more detail. You can email them on [email protected] or call them on 0300 666 0006 available Mon - Fri: 10.00 – 14.30. Out of Hours Service: Mondays 19.00 - 21.00. (excluding bank holidays).

Hope this helps.

Hi Marcy

Firstly, congratulations on being approved as an adopter. I have had some months waiting since being approved and I share some of your frustration, as I’ve also found the matching process disheartening. Our SW had an initial match in mind but it wasn’t right so we went in linkmaker. It’s hard when you feel connected to a child’s profile and receive the “discussion not started” reply. It’s difficult not to take it personally but I try to remember it could be for any number of reasons as the child’s SW wants the best match for the child, and only they know what’s a good match. A lot of prospective adopters don’t use linkmaker because it’s emotionally difficult, you could opt out of direct communication on linkmaker and ask for your SW to deal with it all if that feels easier.

I was feeling very discouraged a couple of weeks ago. Some things that have been helpful for me include keeping busy with webinars and reading about adoption and therapeutic parenting, getting fit and preparing the home. The “Adoption adventures” podcast had a helpful suggestion of writing down what you hope to do with your child once they are placed, your hopes and wishes. This can help you reconnect to that excitement and remember positives. Talking things through with someone who understands is really important, I feel for you as a single adopter as I have a partner, but do use your support network. I also talked to a friend who is an adoptive parent, and I’ve also used the AUK helpline. I suggest you arrange a meeting with your SW and discuss your feelings with them, and think together if there is anything else you can do to help matching. I asked her to review our linkmaker profile to see if we could improve it, and discuss potential profiles with them.

Good luck with finding a match, hold on in there! There’s lots of children waiting too.

It is not you. Matching and taking your child home are the two most difficult parts of the journey (apart from the actual parenting of course :-) ).

We had a lot going for us and it still took us quite a while during a time where there were tons of children waiting. We had a number of rejections, some of which even our sw struggled to understand. Ines is giving very good practical advise.

Matching is highly complex. There are a lot of considerations, if it is done well. We ended up with a fantastic match and that has been hugely helpful.

Your child is out there. Don't be disheartened.

Hi Marcy

I was so glad to see your post just now, I can totally understand your thoughts - don’t worry you are not alone. I too was recently approved and am finding the matching process quite frustrating. Only today I received a ‘discussion not started’ for a little one I was really excited and hopeful about. They said they had been overwhelmed with interest - what exactly that means I don’t know.

I am quite an analytical person so not being able to get stats and facts to help me understand the matching process as a whole doesn’t help my frustrations. If they were overwhelmed with interest how can they have made such a quick decision about a discussion with one family only in about 24 hrs?

My SW is great and she lets me vent and pose all my questions but I really do wonder how long I will have to wait to even get a discussion started. As you mentioned we are full of excitement and enthusiasm after the months of home study and final approval and then really it now feels like my life is just on hold - things could happen really quickly or could take months and months. I was talking with one person who was approved a year ago and still unfortunately not matched - is this normal?

I am only a couple of months in so am still totally positive and do believe there is a perfect match for all parties involved but today was tough and I can see it getting harder if this happens time and time again.

Absolutely agree with Ines, keep visualising and if you want to chat further feel free to drop me a direct chat.

You all are very kind people and I appreciate your time and response.

After going through such a long, lonely and intrusive process. Then getting on LinkMaker only to have SW reply with one line - ‘exploring better matches’ having registered my interest a month before is like a punch in the gut.

It’s incredibly sad to have no clue what is wrong with you.

But hey-ho, again gratitude to all who took the time to sympathise and advise.

I wish you all the best.

Try not to think of it as what’s wrong with you - hard I know but it’s not that - it’s what’s right with the other person / couple - and unfortunately you’ll never know. Neither will stats etc help as it’s all about what seems to be the best match for the particular child concerned amongst those who express an interest. Good luck - you will find your child and then it’ll all move so quickly your feet will hardly touch the ground!

Hi Macy

matching is the worst part and you had a spectacularly insensitive response from that social worker.

There is nothing wrong with you. The SW is focused on the child, not you. Profiles only give you snippets of information, the SW knows what she is looking for and often its just not ‘you’. Sometimes someone else is a better fit for that particular child.

It could be any number of things that tip the balance in favour of one family and away from another.

But if you hang on in there, one day you will be the best fit, the best option, the balance will swing in your favour.

Hi Marcy, I agree with Safia and Serrakunda, it’s not about what’s wrong with you; it’s about what’s right for the child. Maybe the child in the profile you expressed an interest in is passionate about Labradors (just as a random example, say) and person x or couple x have written in their profile that they have a chocolate brown Labrador, then, bingo, that’s a starting point for the family finding SW (although I really wish I hadn’t gone down the dog analogy route as I fear I’m leaving myself exposed to criticisms on health and safety grounds.)

Fiona, please don’t get too hung up on statistics and facts; in the nicest possible way, it’s really not a numbers game. There may be x number of children waiting for families and x number of available approved adopters - but if, admittedly in the very subjective opinion of social workers, you’re not the right fit for their child, then they won’t match you. It really isn’t a case of supply or demand. They’re children, not commodities. This is all about the rest of a child’s life and social workers want to be assured that they are sending their children onto adulthood via the happiest/best/most resilient/economically stable family they are able to select. It’s their wish list for this very important child on their caseload.

Have faith, it will happen, but it will take time. The waiting is hideous but we have all been there, some longer than others. Use the time productively to read, read, read, learn, learn, learn and plan ahead for your post-placement future, be it stockpiling loo rolls or squirrelling extra contributions into your pension fund.

Please don’t lose heart; every adopted child needs at least one adult who will dig in and hold fast when times are really hard.

Marcy that’s terrible they took a month to reply. We had one similar delay because the child’s circumstances changed in the meantime, but the SW had told us this. Not all the information the SW has will be on the child’s profile.It’s certainly not anything wrong about you, the child’s SW have a criteria they are looking for which I think may include things like what needs you have said you’d support for children on your profile, geography, birth children, pets etc. It sounds like a poor agency that would keep you hanging with no explanation of the wait. Makes me wonder what their post adoption support would have been like.

Serrakunda, ‘exploring better matches’ is a standard response on linkmaker, it is a drop down box to chose a reason why a discussion is not started about a child. Very rarely IME the SW will write a longer response as to why the discussion was not started. I imagine they are massively busy and at expressing interest stage I assume the reasons are quite non specific.

Fiona, like you I’m quite analytical and an information seeker, and some ideas of numbers and how matches are “good” would be helpful to normalise it. I only know that half of my prep group are matched at six months and that due to coronavirus court dates are delayed in orders being made for children.