Look at the websites of most local councils and adoption agencies and you’ll find there’s a desperate need for foster carers and adoptive parents. As a spokeswoman from Barnardo’s explains: “We particularly need parents for children over seven years old, children with siblings who need to stay together, children with disabilities, and those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.”

Every family’s experience is different, so we asked WI members* to tell us what adopting or fostering a child has meant to them and the children in their care.

Adopting from abroad

Janice, from Surrey, says that celebrity adoptions are not helpful for potential adoptive parents:

“It gives the impression it’s something ordinary people don’t do, that you have to be super-rich and super-trendy, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

She and Chris couldn’t have children, but were put off adopting in England by a discouraging experience with their local authority. Then, in 1995, they saw Channel 4’s documentary The Dying Rooms and read newspaper articles about the terrible treatment of children who ended up in orphanages because of China’s one-child policy. So, after being assessed by the local authority, they joined the organisation Children Adopted from China and travelled there to adopt Flora in 1998, and Carrie in 2001, when they were both nearly 18 months old.

The process was done through a Chinese government body, the China Centre of Adoption Affairs. Janice stresses that both girls had been well looked after, and the adoptive parents gave donations to the orphanages, which pay for the care of other children.

Although Carrie is still coming to terms with having been abandoned by her parents, both girls are bright, doing well at school and have a great relationship with their adoptive parents. They are taught to have pride in their Chinese origins. Janice and Chris studied Mandarin, they regularly see other families with adopted Chinese children, and they host Chinese students. The couple also plan to visit the country in the future.

Terrible choice

Marion and John adopted Darren in 1964 and Caroline in 1966, through an adoption agency, because they were unable to have children. Of course at that time there was no contraceptive pill and unmarried mothers were persuaded to give up their babies for adoption. The couple first met Darren when he was six weeks old and still with his birth mother.

“It was very hard for him and terrible for her,” explains Marion. “She wanted to see us, and put her head around the door. She obviously didn’t want to give up the child, but some weeks after he had come to live with us as a foster baby, she signed a form agreeing to the adoption, and saying she wouldn’t try to contact him.” Their Daughter Caroline, had been in foster care since birth.

The children grew up knowing they’d been adopted. Only once was that fact used in anger, by Darren, when he was about six.

“He wanted to do something and I wouldn’t let him,” says Marion. “He came out with ‘my real mother would have let me’. He didn’t understand what he had said, but it did upset me.” Caroline has recently traced her birth mother, but Darren has no interest in finding his.

Search for birth family

Liz, from Kent, and her (now ex) husband Tim, adopted a baby boy, Kenneth and a girl, Karen, because they couldn’t have children, but, says Liz: “I was adopted, so to me it was natural to come to motherhood in that way.”

The adoption process took several months, and included home visits from social workers, lots of searching questions and dealing with an adoption panel.

Karen began to trace her birth family as soon as she could access her file at 18. She is now a social worker and has worked on adoption cases. Her mother had been a teenager when she gave birth and social difficulties in her family meant no one offered to look after Karen.

She finally found her mother living in sheltered accommodation after some homeless people recognised her picture. Karen visits her mother as often as she can and has traced her siblings, but not her father. Liz visits her too, and they get on well.

“It’s important for their wellbeing that children know their roots,” says Liz, “otherwise you feel like you’ve done something wrong. Knowing where you’ve come from helps you understand yourself. Karen has met people who look like her, and she shares some traits with her mother.

“As a teenager Karen had all sorts of rejection problems, but since meeting her family she has calmed down.”

However, Liz adds: “She wasn’t always pleased with some aspects of her family and one day she said: ‘Mum, I’m glad you and Dad brought me up.’”

Kenneth, whose birth background she describes as “not so pretty” has never expressed an interest in tracing his natural family.

Fostering highs and lows

During the 1970s Irene, from Lincolnshire, who had six children of her own but was “feeling a gap somewhere”, answered a newspaper advertisement for foster families. A social worker came to talk to the family one evening, and the following morning they were asked to foster a baby girl.

“No checks were done on us,” she says. “She’d just spent one evening in our company. I was flabbergasted but said I would. Nobody came to check how we were getting on.”

She subsequently took in two brothers, aged eight months and eight years.

“Naïvely, I’d pictured getting nice, clean, well-behaved children. But the baby had been left in one nappy for days and was covered in blisters. They were in a disgusting state, with lice and all sorts. The older boy had never even worn pyjamas or underclothes. I like to think I sent them off in a better state than the one they arrived in.”

Marion, from Ropsley, cautions that fostering can become a lifelong commitment. She and her husband are still supporting Roger, whom she fostered from the age of 10 to 16. Roger, now 36, had gone into foster care after his parents divorced and his father couldn’t cope with his ADHD. The couple decided he could no longer live with them when he began stealing from them and their neighbours.

Sadly, he has since spent time in prison and sleeping rough, although he’s now living in council accommodation. His mother is dead and his father is in prison.

“We were called in the middle of the night,” Marion recalls, “asking if we were Roger’s foster parents. He’d been stabbed and was in hospital and ours was the only number he could remember. He’s a very loving person and cares for us very much. We’re the only stable thing in his life and the closest thing he has to parents.”

Saved from residential care

What’s unusual about Sonia, from Lancashire, is that she and her husband are able to have their own children, but have chosen to go into long-term fostering of troubled children aged over five, who are more likely not to be adopted and so can end up in residential care.

“Why bring more babies here when there are already babies who have no one to look after them?” she asks.

The couple have fostered 11-year-old Alfie, who had medical and aggression problems, didn’t really sleep, didn’t know how to use the toilet, and had been excluded from school for assaulting a teacher.

He bears scars from physical abuse, having been removed from his birth mother because of neglect and emotional abuse, the result of her mental problems. He had been in four foster homes, and attended 11 primary schools. The local authority told Sonia that Alfie was likely to kill someone by the time he was 40, and not to turn their backs on him.

Having spent a year with the couple, Alfie has learnt a toilet and bedtime routine, isn’t aggressive and is doing well at school. But, says Sonia: “He won’t hug because he says if I leave it’s just going to hurt him.”

Karen and her husband will be Alfie’s foster carers until he is 18. “When he’s tucked up in bed and I know he’s happy and safe I consider myself very fortunate,” she says. “He’s good-looking, fantastically bright, very gifted musically, brilliant at playing the drums and dancing, and he wants to go to college and work with animals.

“We’re not the Waltons; there are times when I think I can’t do another day, but then he comes home having won Scout of the Year...”

*Some names have been changed.

Further information

To find out more about adoption and fostering, contact your local council or visit www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/index.htm or www.barnardos.org.uk