Today is world siblings day.
When children can’t live with their parents, the decision whether to keep brothers and sisters together in a new family is a really difficult one.
Decisions need to be based on the relationship between them - if there is a previous relationship. Children who live together in abusive or neglectful families can develop incredibly unhealthy relationships that make living together tricky. They can look to each other to get their needs met, instead of to the adults in their lives, and that can be difficult to break in a new family set up where the adults are safe, capable, and available. There can also be abuse between siblings that's never come to light. That's on top of the potentially less damaging competition between brothers and sisters who don't believe there's going to be enough love, care, attention, or food to go around.
Another consideration is how realistic it is for one specific family to meet the complex and often conflicting needs of two or more children. In the early days of our two being placed, we did a lot of divide and conquer. We each took a child and spent the day apart - giving the child we had our undivided attention. There were other siblings that were placed in another family. All of the children needed lots of undivided attention. I'm not sure how that would've worked if all the children were placed together in a family with two parents.
In our case I feel confident the right decisions were made placing two children with us and placing the rest elsewhere. We’ve all supported relationships to continue - meeting much more often than the agreed once a year and eventually moving across the country so they could all be closer.
I know there are many many adoptive families who they feel the decisions made weren’t the right ones. Usually because the number of children with complex needs outweighs the number of available adults.
For us the benefits have outweighed any challenges but it's still been hard at times.
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