Adoption is a lifelong commitment. It is about providing a permanent family for a child or children in care, who cannot return home. When you adopt a child, you take on all the rights and responsibilities for the child that the birth parents had. It is the stability and security of family life that makes it such a positive option for children.
There are all sorts of children who need adoptive parents, from toddlers to teenagers and more rarely, babies. Often there are two, three, or more brothers and sisters who need to live and grow up together.
Some children may have been abused or neglected in their past. Other children may have physical or learning disabilities. The one thing all these children have in common is that their parents are unable to look after them and they need a new, permanent family to care for them as they grow up.
Many children will have been through very difficult and distressing experiences. All will have lost people they love. They may find it difficult to trust adults, to make relationships and to adjust to ordinary family life. Like all parenting, it means sticking with it through good times and bad. It is one of the most challenging, but also one of the most rewarding things you can do.
