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There is a quiet thing many adopters know but rarely say out loud. The moment they had imagined, the first time they met their child or first held them at home, did not feel the way the books and films had suggested it would. It did not feel like falling in love. It felt awkward, or unreal, or like meeting someone for the first time and trying very hard to act normal.

Most adopters know the bedtime struggle. The bath, the books, the calm, then a child who wakes hours later, or cannot fall asleep at all, or sleeps in fits and starts in your bed long past the age you imagined. Standard parenting advice rarely matches the reality. Sleep in adopted children is its own thing.

For most families, the summer holidays are a chance to slow down. For adopted families, the same six weeks often look very different. The structure that has been holding your child quietly all term, the morning routine, the school day, the predictable adult expectations, falls away all at once. Many adopters describe their child as visibly more dysregulated in the holidays than in term time.