We have written before about adopter recruitment advertising that has landed badly with adoptive families. It continues regardless.
In October 2025, we received an email from a marketing and recruitment professional at a North East Regional Adoption Agency. They were frustrated. Campaigners from Action Against ASGSF Changes had been commenting on their adopter recruitment adverts on social media.
Adoption Tees Valley, like many Regional Adoption Agencies, have been running Facebook advertising campaigns, no doubt at considerable expense. The formula is familiar: Smiling toddlers in bright wellies splashing in puddles. Grinning siblings framed by happy couples. Children presented in a frozen moment of contentment, always young, always cheerful. Older children, teenagers and young adults are entirely absent. So too are the realities of trauma, loss, separation, neurodevelopmental impact, or long-term need. Alongside the imagery sit reassuring messages, sometimes with vague references to “support”.
These adverts present a picture of adoptive family life that, for most families, bears little resemblance to reality.
Campaigners commented on these posts to raise concerns about the cuts to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund. The individual who contacted us felt this “risked putting adopters off” at a time of national shortage. While expressing sympathy with our aims, they argued that recruitment adverts were not the place for protest.
Our response was straightforward. Political protest is not meant to be convenient. If adopter recruitment is harmed, responsibility lies with government policy, not with families highlighting it.
Prospective adopters are routinely told that support is available post-adoption. What they are not told is that the one source of support most often cited as effective in England has been hollowed out to the point where it is no longer fit for purpose. Campaigners were not commenting out of mischief. They were raising awareness of a government policy of material importance to prospective adopters, and applying pressure where pressure is needed.
This week, Adoption Tees Valley published another advert that provoked anger among many experienced adopters. It features a delightful photograph of a parent and her three children, sitting on a park bench overlooking Roseberry Topping, a distinctive hill in North Yorkshire. It is a genuinely lovely, bucolic image, and one that many families would recognise as a moment of real happiness. This vision is accompanied by the following quote:
“There have been challenges, but they are no different from the challenges faced by our friends with biological children, and the enjoyment, excitement and delight is the same too.”
Let us be clear. This is a genuinely happy family, and we respect their experience.
The problem is not the message. It is the context.
Sadly, the evidence shows that their experience represents a minority. The Adoption UK Barometer 2025 shows that only 22 percent of adoptive families describe themselves as “mostly doing well”. Thirty-seven percent report that they are managing but facing significant challenges. Forty-two percent report severe challenges placing great strain on their family.
This advert was published explicitly to promote adoption. In doing so, it equates adoptive parenting with parenting children who have not experienced early trauma, neglect, separation and loss, or removal from their first families due to serious risk. That comparison is misleading and irresponsible. It sets prospective adopters up to fail, and children up to further harm.
Children with a placement order are children who have experienced loss, harm and disruption through no fault of their own, and who deserve love, safety, stability and joy as much as any other child. Their experiences shape how they relate to the world and to the adults around them, often in complex and demanding ways. What differs is the level and type of support required to help them feel safe, regulated and able to thrive. To suggest that parenting them is no different from parenting children who have not experienced early trauma is neither kind nor reassuring. It is irresponsible. It minimises lived experience, misleads prospective parents, and increases the risk that children who most need informed, supported caregiving are placed into families without the tools or backing required to meet those needs.
The obvious question is, “So what is the alternative?” How do you recruit adopters without painting a glossy picture?
Even among professionals working in adoption, a concern is often voiced: If people truly understood what parenting children affected by early adversity can involve, would they still adopt?
In other words, if we tell the truth, will people walk away?
It is a fair question, and it deserves dismantling.
First, it contains an implicit acknowledgement that adoption can be profoundly challenging. Any attempt to address recruitment that avoids this is unserious. Recruitment cannot be fixed without addressing why families struggle and what support is actually required.
Second, people do not sleepwalk into adoption. Adopting a child or children is one of the most significant commitments a person can make. Yes, we probably do come at it with rose-tinted spectacles. But that is just a feature of hope, and is true of any major life endeavour. Few people would do anything without them.
Third, preparation that avoids reality is not preparation at all. Preparation means, among many other things, the removal of those rose-tinted spectacles, and the placing of the decision to adopt under meaningful pressure long before any child is placed.
Fourth, parents who do not understand what high levels of need may look like do not know what questions to ask. They cannot properly scrutinise post-adoption support or challenge inadequate provision. They cannot carry out informed due diligence.
Fifth, parents who are inadequately prepared are less able to meet need. When need is not met, children are exposed to further and sustained trauma.
Finally, it is simply unethical to recruit people into this commitment without providing the fullest possible picture.
This gulf between glossy messaging and lived reality is not confined to adoption. A recent foster carer recruitment campaign implying that all someone needs is a spare room demonstrates the same failure. Advertising is not accidental. Imagery and language are carefully developed, internally scrutinised, and aligned with organisational objectives. When they minimise need and the support required to meet it, children and families are left carrying the consequences.
Glossy ads fail children.
If we are serious about adopter recruitment, the answer is not better marketing. It is sustained investment in honest preparation and in post-adoption support that actually works.