During the past 5 years, ACE is proud to have approved over 400 households for adoption and over 500 children have joined their adoptive families. Darren and Rebecca are one of ACE’s adoptive families and describe their journey to adopt a sibling group of 3.  

Darren and Rebecca begin: “When we first decided that we wanted to pursue adoption as our first route of starting a family in February 2020, we would never have guessed that 3 years into the future we would have the three most wonderful children filling our house with so much love, fun, and laughter. 

“Both of us had experienced the love, joy and frustrations of having siblings growing up. Combining this with having worked with many children and young people who had experienced trauma, we wanted to share our home, our love and our family with a sibling group who needed a forever home. The thought that any sibling group could be split up was devastating and so we started our process of adoption with Adoption Central England. 

“Initially, we were worried about the assessment side of adoption: what if our social worker didn’t like us, didn’t think we would be good parents or thought we were crazy, but we couldn’t have been more wrong! She made the sessions a safe space where we could be open and honest about all parts of our lives and how bringing little ones who had gone through so much may change it. We are so thankful for all the support that we received throughout the process and continue to receive as we know we wouldn’t be the family we are today without it. 

“We have very fond memories of our initial introduction to meet the children: reading them stories for the first time, being climbed on as a human slide, having water fights, and sitting down for our first mealtimes as a family. We also had many struggles and challenges as the children struggled with the earth-shattering change that happened in their life.” 

ACE is the first and only adoption service to be certified in approaches informed by Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP). DDP is an approach that appreciates the impact of childhood developmental trauma and which supports adoptive parents to emotionally connect with their child to help them to build security and trust. 

Darren and Rebecca continued: “Throughout it all, we experienced, first hand, the benefit of the therapeutic parenting we learnt about in training. Our children quickly started questioning “why do you not leave me when I’m cross,” “why won’t you shout at me?” or “why would you even love me?” All the training, both from stage one and from the fantastic support through the therapeutic team about PACE parenting, was fast becoming everyday life, and we were seeing that had a massive impact on the way our children were settling into their new home. 

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