Sorry for this rant! I needed to get this off my chest.

Social media has blown confidentiality and protection for our adopted children out of the water. Social workers do not seem to grasp the severity, the huge emotional impact it has if used in the wrong way. How DEVASTATING it is, undermining the family life so many ‘good enough’ and loving adoptive parents strive so hard to provide for their children.

I think there is a fundamental problem in that there is a lack of understanding or an oversight about the nature of modern adoption in the social work community. Social care professionals do not seem to grasp that the Adoption Order is exactly what it says on the tin – an Order, a Court Order, a legal ruling – to keep our children safe until aged 18 and beyond, protecting them, sometimes from their first/biological families who were unable to keep them safe for whatever reason, and – to provide them with the basic human right of a secure family life, which otherwise they are denied.

Social workers should be supporting adoptive parents not judging them, and they should respect the parents’ views, and insist on social media and internet use supervision, if and when our children need to sadly go into foster care under Section 20 where we retain parental responsibility, or Section 31, where it is supposedly ‘shared’ with us. They need to get their heads around the difference between supervision and control; emotionally-delayed traumatised teenagers need supervising.

I became sick of hearing about my child having a right to this and a right to that. Social workers need to recognise that with rights come responsibilities.

Our daughter has a right to family life but not a right to a SMART phone…