Megan Pleva

Your child has an ADHD diagnosis. Or an autism diagnosis. Or an attachment disorder diagnosis. The medication, the strategies, the school support, none of it is quite working the way the professionals said it would. Many adoptive parents eventually arrive at the same uncomfortable question: is this actually what my child has?

The slammed door. The small refusal that detonates. The rage that arrives faster than you can respond to. For many adoptive parents, the hardest behaviours in their child are the angry ones, and the hardest truth about them is that the anger is almost always grief wearing a different face.

FASD, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, is estimated to affect a significant proportion of children in the UK care and adoption system. For many adoptive parents, it is the diagnosis they eventually consider when the trauma, the attachment work, and the sensory profile do not quite add up to the whole picture.