When did mum become a dirty word?

Posted by Francesca on Feb 24, 2014 in Blog | 0 comments A day doesn’t go by when i don’t read a blog, a Facebook post, a tweet by mums claiming that their job is the hardest, most unrewarding in the world. I know they are trying to be funny. But it’s just getting boring. And offensive. It’s another twist on the “God it’s hard being a woman” industry, the one which spawned the similarly misguided “All men are useless” narrative. Cliche? You bet. Yes...
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Adoption reopens that old debate of race and religion, throwing in same sex adoption too in Harrow

Posted by Francesca on Feb 3, 2014 in Blog | 1 comment I was contacted by LBC radio to comment on this story As ever the topic of interracial adoption is a complex one, one that makes the headlines in the New York Times on the same day – link here. I think the title of the NY Time summarises the whole thing correctly. Yes race (and indeed religion) do matter. They are part of a child’s identity, and it will stay way into adulthood. In an ideal...
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Adoption Weak

Posted by Francesca on Nov 9, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments To read some of the statistics bandied about during this Adoption week, you’d think things were really looking up. According the British Association of Adoption and Fostering almost 4,000 children were adopted between April last year and March – the highest number since records began in the early 90s. If only things were that rosy. 68,110 children were in the care of local authorities on...
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A neglect epidemic

Posted by Francesca on Oct 20, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments This is a true story. It’s a story of how everything is connected and why we need to think about the way we look after our kids. You want to know how adults screw up then read this. A couple of months ago, late in the evening I was watching TV. Our new house overlooks the park. Like a lot of houses in London it’s the ‘good’ real estate opposite the council flats. I had...
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For the traumatised child, love is simply not enough.

Posted by Francesca on Jul 2, 2013 in Blog | 0 comments Time and again the simplistic utterings of the Cameron government invite my despair and bemusement at the same time. Cameron and co’s whole act is based on pronouncements about ‘fixing things’ that they have identified as broken. This has been their rationalel for many of their inhumane policies towards people on benefits and this same philosophy governs their rather naive...
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Why blood isn’t thicker than adoption

Posted by Francesca on Jun 20, 2013 in Blog | 1 comment My husband and I are the parents of adopted children. We are their real parents because we are the only ones they have. We know their seasons, we know when it’s bad, we know when it’s good, we know when they are not themselves. How is this possible? When we’d just adopted our first child, Gaia, the question was “Do you know anything about her ‘real mum’?” Now we...
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