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One day a friend who is a foster carer came to see Carrie Grant. She told her about a little boy – the 79th child she was fostering – who was approaching his second birthday, and was mixed race. “These three factors – that he’s male, about to turn two and that he’s black – meant that the chances of him getting picked up for adoption were going to really plummet.” So the story of Carrie and David Grant adopting a child with special needs when they already had three others – each also with their own special needs – began.

What keep me going is the belief that love wins.

Carrie Grant

Carrie speaks of she and David needing to “parent in four different ways – like a professional and an expert moulded into one. I think what keeps me going is this belief somewhere that is just unsquashable and unquenchable – that love wins.”

There are days when Carrie and David are parenting a child that, in Carrie’s words “can be incredibly violent – and I don’t respond well to being hit.” She says that’s been a real challenge, and something no one told them about in adoption training.

The important thing, Carrie says, is to see the bigger picture. “I look at Nathan and I see the child that he was meant to be. This bit of him that is now reacting and acting out… All behaviour is communication so I’m trying to look at ‘what are you trying to say to me, Nathan, with this behaviour because this is not you – this is not who you were meant to be.’” Carrie holds on to that thought because, she says, she can see who he’s meant to be: 'I believe in that child and I believe in him.” She sees the bad behaviour as trauma that can be healed. “Those needs can be met so that the behaviour doesn’t happen any more.”

Carrie says she and David run an “open house” which she describes as a “very Jamaican” way of looking at life with lots of people coming to stay. “We’re just very people-centred, so for us it wasn’t like this massive intrusion.” For the Grants, the process of adoption wasn’t necessarily that different from having birth children. She remembers being besotted with her first birth child (Olivia) but on another level she says she was absolutely terrified and really felt the pressure to connect.

“Everything doesn’t always click immediately.” Looking back, she realises she may have suffered from post-natal depression. “Attachment happens both ways – it’s for parents to attach to the child and the child to attach to the parent, and that’s something that’s a process.”

But what about when she and David first met Nathan? The foster carer “introduced us to him as mummy and daddy… And Nathan absolutely clicked with David immediately. And I think, looking back, that was probably because he hadn’t had any men in his life.”

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