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Hi Jessicapaige

First thing - Don't get your hopes up.

We entered the adoption journey hoping for the same.

It will be your SW and panel that will decide the age group. We started our adoption journey 5 years ago ..approved for 0-4 yrs... We have a 3 bedroom house too. You don't say what age range you are in, as this WILL also be used against you too. Can't say anything about foster to adopt as we didn't want to experience the possible loss of a child if the birth parents were to change their lifestyle and get them back.

We are waiting to go back to panel to be deregistered as adopters after 5 heart breaking years we weren't getting anywhere... constantly being over looked for younger family's.

Push for a FULL TIME SW. We had a part time SW so EVERY step of the process took 3 times longer.

firstly remember that when you post on a forum, the responses you get are coloured by that person's experience, me included.

i have no experience of foster to adopt so I can't comment. But if course you get a say in the child you adopt, be it age, sex, needs, no SW can force you to adopt a particular child. Being approved for 0 to 4 does not mean you would not be able to adopt a baby, it just widens your options. The narrower you are in your search, the less choice you have, thats not a difficult concept to understand.

The bottom line in this is that the children who are available to adopt at any one time are those that are available. Your agency might not have any babies to place at that time. So if you are looking for a new born you may have to wait. Same if you said I want a sibling pair, a boy and a girk aged under 3. If you are going to be that specific then you wait.

My understsnding is that if you want a new born is that you will have to do FTA. The legal processes to remove children, decide if they cannot be with birth family and free them for adoption take months. So a new born at risk goes to foster care, not an adopter.

I have known very young babies and children go to older adopters, SWs work with what they have at the time.

I very much doubt that you will be able to insist on a full time SW, agsin if you did, you would have to wait until one became available.

I agree with the above re a newborn - the only option would be foster to adopt with its inherent risks - but many people have done that you just have to think it through carefully and whether you felt able to do that. The baby would only be returned to its birth family if that was thought to be the best option for the baby after considering all the evidence and doing a thorough assessment. That could be seen as a positive accomplishment by someone looking after the baby if they have been able to give it the best possible start in life and most foster carers would think that way. It is an easier path too when you have no other children to consider. My son was taken into care at birth but only came to us at 14mths because of all the legal steps that had to be taken. They did not need to look for a family for him as his sister was with us but they had been in separate foster placements in different LAs and had different legal processes to go through. My daughter was taken into care at 8 weeks old but only came to us at 2 1/4. Both had 2 foster families and we were their 4th family. They were still very young of course although toddlers. The best thing to do would be to contact a couple of agencies and talk it through

I don't have any experience of foster to adopt, but like others have said if you specifically want a very young baby this is probably the most realistic route. But our experience was that we had a huge input into the age rage we wanted and gender etc, this was all discussed in the approval process and matching stage. We were approved for 0-4. As Serrakunda27 said, the narrow you are in what you want the longer you are likely to have to wait.

I just wanted to add that we didn't foster to adopt and our youngest was 9 months old when placed with us. I would say she was still very young when she came to us and we have been with her through her major milestones. I don't know how common this is though.

Good luck xx

How does your partner view adoption? Is s/he on board?

May I ask what your reasons are for this age range? Are you trying to replicate a birth family? Do you think a very young baby will have less problems and they will be easier to parent?
You need to be aware that you will never be the same as a birth family (and be fine with that). Your child will not have your DNA and that matters - to you and your child. You will live with your child's birth family through your child. It is something I did not think much about it when we adopted. I certainly did not anticipate how much the birth family would be part of my life. They feel like distant relatives whom I know a lot about but whom I have never met. Not sharing DNA does not make you less of your child's parent or less of a family though.

However, your child might have inherited health problems from their birth family, be they physical or mental. The risks for these are much higher in adopted children. If you adopt a baby, you are adopting a child whose potential problems are unknown. Babies are too young to be diagnosed with anything else than severe disabilities. They are risky in a different way from older children. Your child will be traumatised. No matter how young children are, loosing their birth family is a huge lifelong loss.

My advise would be to talk to adopters of children of different ages and read up. When my husband and I started our journey we first thought we wanted a baby and a sibling or very young children. We signed up to two magazines which featured children. In the first edition, the child I felt most drawn to was 13 years old. In the second issue, I was interested in an 8 year old. So we sat down, thought hard and came to the conclusion that we would go for older children. I think adoption is a journey on which you will surprise yourself more than once.

Good luck!

Yes it is possible - my three were all under 12 months (still very much babies) when they came home. There are many variables.

How much do you understand about adoption and what it entails? Adopting younger doesn’t equate to that child being easier. Often what it will mean is that their future issues - and there will be problems ahead - have not yet materialised or been diagnosed. That will be a long and often painful road for you to navigate.

Do you understand your motives for adopting a newborn? I’m not asking you to explain here but you will be questioned by your social worker. It won’t be simply an alternative route to parenthood ... it’s an entirely different parenting experience.

And, with f2a there will be an element of ongoing contact and uncertainty. Some children will go back to birth parents. It’s definitely not an easy route to parenthood

Just to clarify something: you can choose an age range and most likely you will be approved for that. Eg. we said we could parent 2 children aged 0-8 yrs and were approved for that. It is rare that panel does not go along with what you (together with your sw) have decided you could handle.

Hi JessicaPaige - As others have said, probably the most likely route to adopting a very young child is through early permanence. There are two routes to early permanence in England - concurrency and foster for adoption. With concurrency, you would be dual-approved as foster carers and adopters from the outset, and children will be placed for whom the outcome is not yet known. They tend to use concurrency for children where there is a some possibility that they might return to birth family, so relinquished infants etc., although not if they think there's a very strong possibility of return. In some cases concurrent carers are able to bring a child home from the hospital soon after birth (I used to be a foster carer, and was once down to foster a newborn who instead actually went to a concurrent placement). So, with concurrency, it's often the case that assessments etc. on birth family members are not yet complete, and the outcome of these may mean the child returns to birth family. If you think you can take the uncertainty and you have no other children, it's worth considering. Concurrency moves the 'risk' from the child to the adults involved, minimising the number of moves a child might have to make, while obviously increasing the uncertainty for the adults.

With foster for adoption, the adopters are temporarily approved as foster carers for a particular child with whom they have been matched, so that the child can move in with them before care proceedings are completed. This is usually used in cases where a return to birth family members is extremely unlikely, so perhaps assessments have already been carried out etc. and therefore the chance of the child returning to birth family members is lower. I would say, anecdotally, that F4A placements are less likely to happen as first placements - often the child will be in a foster placement while initial assessments are made, and then moved to pre-adoptive F4A placement when it looks likely that adoption will be the outcome, but moved earlier than they would otherwise. I see this used a lot where a family is adopting a younger sibling of a previously adopted child. In both routes, it is possible that the child would still be having some contact with birth family members so that's something you would have to bear in mind - with infants where the outcome is not yet known, this contact can be as often as 3-5 times per week.

Part of the reason that few very young infants are adopted is because of the timescales involved in the court and social work processes. Once a child is removed from birth parents, LAs have 26 weeks to finalise their care plan. When I was fostering very young children, I never experienced it taking less time than that, and sometimes it overran and took quite a bit longer. Where birth parents are willing to engage with the process, there will often be a period of assessments, opportunities to attend courses, counselling etc., so the 26 weeks gives some time for that to take place, and also for wider family members to be assessed so that children are not being adopted when a relative could have cared for them. After the 26 weeks, there is of course family finding and matching to be done. The youngest foster child I moved on to adoption was 9 months old and she had come to me at 3 days old - that was a straightforward adoptive placement after care proceedings were completed uncontested.

In terms of whether it's more desirable to adopt a very young child or a slightly older child, well that's very much down to you as an individual. As others have said, with infants, there is no guarantee that there won't be difficulties ahead, and you will have very little information about what those difficulties might be. FASD, for instance, can't be diagnosed until a child is much older, unless there are very obvious facial features present. Lots to think about!