Fellowship Work – Al Coates

The start point is my own home, we’re a family made through fostering and adoption. How that came about is their story but the themes of early adversity, separation and loss, then navigating the care system before being grafted into a home and family are common for the majority of adopted, kinship and fostered children. The impact on them doesn’t require too much imagination or knowledge of child trauma to understand. 

The affect of early life challenges cast a long shadow across my children in different ways. Lots of normal parenting challenges but also meltdowns, dysregulation, shouting, threats, refusal, aggression, destruction, bullying and intimidation became our normal. Behaviour supercharged with, what was often, an intensity and duration far beyond behaviour that parents and carers expect. We found ourselves consumed and exhausted by the challenges, constant accommodation, negotiation, regulation and peacekeeping all the while struggling to keep ourselves sane.  

There was an ebb and flow to our lives, we received support some good and some not so good, it would come and go, interventions and support would run it’s course.We managed at times for a period but then would be drawn into extremes of behaviour that would unravel us all. 

This experience specifically inspired me to consider how services support families made through adoption and kinship arrangements beyond short bursts of intervention. For many families the challenges that they face are enduring and span childhood rather than brief moments in time or developmental phases. This question was the spark for my Fellowship*. 

All this made me question how other countries and contexts supported parents and carers in similar circumstances. I knew, anecdotally, of some services in North America but the nature of the issue means that services supporting families are not always that easy to find. The Fellowship’s purpose is to draw learning from international models and then to see it applied to the UK. 

I decided to undertake my learning online mainly because I didn’t know where to go. The silence around this issue is deafening and having been successful in my application I had a mild panic that I would not be able to identify professionals and services to speak to. I’ll not bore you the trail and where it led me but frequently the key links in the chain were parents and carers who had built on their lived experience to then go on and build, develop or work in services that helped other families. 

Peer support was the cornerstone of so many services that I spoke to (Canada, USA, Republic of Ireland etc.). This was no real surprise, peer support offers specific antidotes to parents and carers who often find themselves isolated both in practical terms due to the physical need to be present with their child and to manage the environment but also the relational isolation that so often occurs. Online communities offer a unique opportunity to connect the caregivers in a way that meets the practical challenges but also the instant and reactive nature of many families’ daily lives. 

Trained and supported peer coordinators/mentors working with clinicians offering interventions to families was a model utilised in Canada. The mentors were able to build onto the connections they had with parents and carers delivered low level but immediate interventions. For example,  writing safey plans, identifying supporters and advocacy with other professionals. Beyond this they understood the clinical interventions being offered and spoke directly to the practitioners delivering them. Carers were supported while they waited for interventions, they were offered support in terms of their own wellbeing and then once the interventions drew to the end they didn’t fall off a cliff edge but remained part of the peer community and if necessary could retain access to the clinicians. 

The benefits of community underpinned by interventions were clear, families spoke of feeling held, understood, supported and validated. They could ‘top up’ their knowledge and seek clarification.   Like all families life would take over, children’s behaviour would ebb and flow but the door remained open with families remaining connected and did not have to start from scratch if they wanted help.  

There was so much more discussed across the conversations I spoke with services in Australia about the model of intervention used for families and with practitioners in the US about respite and the needs of children. There was so many valuable conversations that I decided to release over 20 of the interviews as part of the report as well as the three podcasts that I created with my findings. You can view the report summary and listen to the podcasts here.   

There’s no longer a silence in the UK about challenging, violent and aggressive behaviour in children but there remains no clear consensus on how to help families. My hope is to help move that conversation on. My Churchill Fellowship Report is part of that conversation. I hope people find it at least interesting and at best of value. 

*The Churchill Fellowship is a UK charity which supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK. Together the community of Churchill Fellows use their international learning to lead the change they wish to see across every area of UK life. 

60% of adoptive parents say they have experienced violent and aggressive behaviour.  Kinship families are often caring for children with similar biographies that can be compounded by the interfamily challenges and the age and circumstances of the carer.