Archived Forums

Have sent you a private message

HiI'm white, my DH is mixed race, he didn't have any contact with the black side of his family between the ages of 2 and 26, and now the contact is sporadic. We have the final adoption hearing for our all black little boy on Thursday.So we are not an identical match to him, in fact we were in a competitive match situation with a couple that were. We looked at all sorts of different mixed ethnicity children during our journey, well we were contacted by family finders of all sorts of mixed ethnicity children.During HS we had to show that we understood how children of mixed or different ethnicity could feel growing up in our household. We had to show we had different ethnicities in our support network. In fact our approval panel was delayed by two months as the powers that be didn't believe we had thought about it enough. My DH was livid as he didn't feel that they had heard what he had to say about growing up in a rural village in the SW of England as the only black face (his mum and step dad are white). Especially since the people telling him we weren't prepared enough were white!We wrote a document about how we understood and answered their questions. If you pm me your email address I can send them to you.The most common comment we had from three different sws as an example of a child's behaviour was 'How would you react if you came in to find your child scrubbing their skin as they wanted to be white like you?' It seemed that that was the only example they could use!I bought a book off Amazon - I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla. It's American but it relates to the uk very well too as it's really just about children.Good luck with your journey and search, I love my little boy (who is currently being a little tinker in his cot and not sleeping) so much. We met him 6 days after his 1st birthday and brought him home 10 days later. He's been home 6 months now and he is almost officially ours! It's 2 years almost to te day that we called Action for Children and started this journey.Take careSelg

Hi Selg,Thanks so much for your reply. I just called Action for Children but they said they only do exact matches and as we as a family are technically 3/4 British then they would not be able to help us. It's interesting that you had a different experience with them though. Even though I thought there were new 'rules' about not trying to find the exact match from my many enquiries it seems as if it's something SW's are still looking for.It's great that you were contacted with all sorts of ethnicities.That must have been so traumatic for you to have been told that you hadn't thought about it enough. I can totally understand DH being livid. It's blood boiling stuff.It would be fantastic if you could send me the document, I'll pm you. Then it would be starting point for what we could write about ourselves.Is that how they test you then by asking probing questions about possible situations that might come up.I'm so happy you've got lovely LO at home, and it's also wonderful that in the end the SW's were prepared to be flexible so that he could have a home too.

HiHis SW has moved on to a new job but means she is controlling the contact for him and his birth family so we are still in touch and I send her pictures of him all the time. She still says she's glad she chose us as his parents, must be such a huge responsibility to be the one making the choices for families.I've sent you the email including a couple of photos of all the books we bought to show how we would support his ethnicity.CheersSelg