Parents who smacked children told to give them up for adoption
TWo young children are being removed from their family home and put up for adoption after social workers told a judge that their parents used smacking as a punishment.
The mother, 35, who has learning disabilities, and the father, 59, must give up the children after a court ruled they were at risk of harm.
The couple’s use of smacking was one of the reasons given by Judge Martin Dancey as to why the girl, three, and two-year- old boy had to be removed. They also have a 12-year-old girl – the child they had smacked – who will be brought up by a legal guardian.
The case is the first to become public in which smacking children without abusing them has been taken as a reason to remove them from their home.
Judge Dancey said in the adoption case in Bournemouth that the mother, who has a ‘mild’ learning disability and is partially deaf, could not cope with the children. He said her husband, who is her registered carer, had failed to help her or accept the advice of social workers from the unnamed local authority that the family needed to change its ways.
He also heard that the mother had thrown a mug at a wall and the parents had rowed in front of the children.
Their two-bedroom flat was ‘ unacceptably cluttered and unclean with numerous hazards for the children’.
The children were sometimes dirty, the family did not keep to everyday routines, and the mother could not cook or carry out other household jobs without help. However the judge said the parents ‘ loved their children very much’, the mother had ‘done everything she could to care for the children’, and they had behaved through the three-week Family Court hearing with ‘the utmost dignity’.
But he said the children needed ‘attuned parenting,’ adding: ‘Kisses and cuddles are not enough.’
The judge said in his ruling from December that it was ‘not reasonable’ for the mother to have slapped her oldest child, the 12-year-old girl.
The father had also smacked her at least twice and ‘this should not have happened’. The law on smacking in England and Wales dates from 2004 and says parents can use ‘reasonable chastisement’ as long as they do not hurt their children, for example by causing bruising.
The parents, who cannot be named, met in 2009, when the mother was bringing up her older daughter by a former partner who had died the previous year.
They married in 2013 and had two children, a girl born in 2014 and boy the following year. The family came to the attention of social workers when the man applied to adopt the older girl in 2014.
The parents were sent on an American ‘Incredible Years’ parent- ing course, which is designed in part to teach how to ‘replace spanking and harsh discipline’.
But at a children’s centre in March 2016 the mother told staff she had slapped her 12-year-old for hurting her younger daughter.
The judge said there was shouting in the home, the mother had mood swings and the father became depressed. The three-year-old girl once fell and hit her head on a barbecue, and on another occasion cut herself on an exposed edge in the bathroom. The judge also criticised the father for ‘an apparent failure to prioritise payment for basic needs – food, milk, clothing – in favour of a television, new car and phone’.
Judge Dancey said the children had thrived since they were sent to live with foster parents. The two youngest must be adopted, he said, because the limitations of the mother were ‘fundamental’ and the father was unable to change. The 12-year-old will be brought up by a teacher under a guardianship order.
The break-up of the family – at a time when overall numbers of adoptions are falling – attracted criticism from family campaigners.
John Hemming, of Justice for Families, said: ‘Almost all of the reports that the court saw were written by employees of the local council or people who are dependent for their income on money that means they have to keep the local council happy. In this case it appears that the local council has decided to fail the parents.’
‘Kisses and cuddles are not enough’