The Initial Enquiry Form

Ok, so this is not supposed to be a blog (just) dedicated to debating matching. Time to get back to discussing our experience of the process.Over the weekend we leisurely filled out the initial enquiry form. This is just a two and a half pager that elicits information from us prior to our first visit  from a social worker.

Three sections are of interest:

1. What experience do you have of parenting?
2. What experience do you have of looking after children?
3. How many children are you interested in adopting? Of what age? and why?

The first two questions reminded me of a job application form. It is a common joke that competency based interviews select for those that are best suited to lying. Whilst the joke is not often true in a literal sense, living in a job market that constantly exerts you to sell what "you have done" what "you have contributed" certainly has a framing effect. The first question is however not spin-able. We are not parents, merely aspirational parents and the none left bleakly on the dotted lines after this question embarrassing attested to this.

On the second question we do not have much. It was a question of selling our limited experience of looking after relatives children and child-minding. In this case selling meant not mentioning the exact number of years that have passed since this experience....

On the number of children question, we are constrained by our housing situation. We own (well have a long leasehold on) a two bed flat and our council has specified that every adoptive child should have its own room. This makes an interesting juxtaposition against Government policy which encourages the less well off to make their children share. This is however only of interest to us academically as we are only looking for one. I understand that having one child (to start with) will be very daunting and there is no way we could cope with more (yet).

The age range question is a fine balance of supply. There are apparently lots of prospective adopters looking to adopt babies and young toddlers whilst the majority of children put forward for adoption are between 3 and 8. We decided to select a range of 0-4, so the upper end of this age range is likely to be the binding constraint.

Lots of thinking about a short form.... makes me apprehensive about the much longer formal one that comes further down the process.

AUP