Maintaining relationships: Information for adoptive families

Modern adoption recognises the importance of helping adopted children stay connected to their birth relatives, making sure decisions made about maintaining connections plans are carefully assessed and with your child’s needs at the heart of the decisions being made. These connections can support a child’s emotional wellbeing and help them understand their identity and life story.

Once an Adoption Order is granted, yourselves as adoptive parents hold full legal parental responsibility. This means you make decisions about your child’s care, including how maintaining relationships with birth relatives is continued and managed. Prior to the Adoption Order being made, the plans around Maintaining Relationships should already be established and tried and tested to support the continuation of this after the Adoption Order.

A maintaining connections plan will be created when your child initially has a plan of adoption and is confirmed when your child is matched with you as their adoptive family. This plan is shaped by who is important to the child now and who may be important to them in the future. Because adoption is lifelong, and children grow and change, these plans may also need to change over time.

There are different types of staying in touch:

• Direct contact: Face-to-face visits, phone calls, or video chats.
• Indirect contact: Letters, photos, videos and voice notes or updates shared through a secure system.

Children’s social workers and adoption social workers will work closely with adoptive families, birth relatives, and the child to review and support these plans. The goal is always to meet the child’s emotional needs and help them feel safe, understood, and connected. These needs may change over time, as your child grows and understands more about their adoption, so the arrangements for maintaining relationships can change in line with these needs.

If you would like to review your child’s Maintaining Connexions Plan, please speak to your Maintaining Connexions Coordinator to start these discussions.

Indirect ways of maintaining relationships in adoption

Indirect contact is the most common way adopted children stay connected with their birth relatives. It is expected that there will always been some form of indirect exchanges in place.

Indirect contact can include:

• Letters or emails
• Photographs
• Drawings or crafts made by the child
• Personalised items, such as a string showing how tall the child has grown
• Pre recorded videos or voice notes

These exchanges help children feel remembered and valued and allow birth relatives to stay connected in a meaningful way.

ACE have a dedicated team to support these exchanges called the Maintaining Connexions Team. This team work alongside the Family Connexions workers who provide birth family support to birth relatives affected by adoption. They act as a secure point of contact, helping protect everyone’s privacy and ensuring that exchanges are handled safely and respectfully.

Having empathy and understanding for birth relatives can help these exchanges grow in a positive way. Meeting birth relatives can also support the exchange of information and strengthen relationships, ACE will help guide and support this process for our adoptive families, birth families and children.

Direct contact in adoption

While most staying in touch plans involve indirect contact as a minimum, some adopted children benefit from direct contact, often called family time or meet-ups, with their birth relatives.

These meet-ups usually take place in a neutral and safe setting and may be supported by professionals to help everyone feel comfortable. The aim is to give children the chance to spend quality time with birth relatives who are important to them.

As with all maintaining relationships plans, direct contact must be guided by what is safe and right for the child at that point of their life, taking into account their needs, wishes, and feelings.

There are many benefits to children having direct contact with appropriate birth relatives, such as:

• Helping them make sense of being part of two families
• Reducing the emotional challenges of searching for birth relatives later in life
• Supporting their understanding of why they were adopted
• Allowing them to explore their story with the security of their adoptive family

Relationships with siblings and wider birth family

Adopted children often have other family members, such as siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, who are important to them. Being separated from siblings can be especially difficult and confusing and may cause emotional distress if children don’t understand why it happened.

Where it is assessed to be right for your child, your child’s Local Authority and ACE will support maintaining connections plans that include siblings and wider birth relatives. These relationships can help your child:

• Feel more connected to their life story and heritage
• Maintain bonds with people who matter to them
• Make sense of their identity and family relationships
• Feel less isolated or confused about their past

Supporting these connections can be a powerful way to help your child feel secure, understood, and valued, especially when they are guided by empathy, openness, and your child’s voice.