Living Losses: Grief, Adoption and Children in Care

About the event

While adoption is often joyful, children who are in care or join their family through adoption often carry experiences of grief and loss. For example, they can feel grief about the loss of their birth parents, siblings, home, friends, pets, school, possessions, neighbourhood and culture. In this panel, we will consider these living losses, exploring the specific challenges faced by adopted and looked after children and the range of emotions they experience.

The panel will feature author, performance poet and filmmaker Malik Al Nasir. He will share his experience of being taken into care at the age of nine after his father was paralysed and its impact on his life and identity. He will be joined by John Simmonds (Director of Policy, Research and Development CoramBAAF) and Alison Crowther (Director of MadeToLast Resilience), who will reflect on the joys and challenges of being adoptive parents and offer advice on how to open up difficult conversations with children. The panel will also discuss the role memory plays in children’s grief and how we can use meaningful objects and creative tools (such as the trove) to enable children to tell their story. The panel will be facilitated by Lesel Dawson.

This panel has been supported by the Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol.

Note, this event is a broadcast of a pre-recorded discussion so there will not be a live Q&A.