Terrible for the family and the child. My heart goes out to them all.

How horrible for that little boy. Just one more rejection for him to deal with. Not good for the parents either. They really need more funding for this type of thing

Very sad and heartbreaking indeed.
However I don’t think it’s wise to jump into adoption when you haven’t had a child first for a while in care and see how you and our family system is responding. In this case social services warned the couple and they should have taken that serious. The fact they didn’t is harmful to the child they adopted and their own family.
We have 2 sisters in permanent care (under Victorian court) and will hopefully their legal guardians this year. The youngest has Down Syndrome and we have her since she was 5 weeks old. The older sister is 6 yr (nearly 7) old and we have her in care since she was 4 years old. The older girl shows more behavior problems and she steals and lies a lot.
Besides them we take regularly children in short term or emergency care. We always look carefully to the kids we take along to make sure we can handle it as a family.

We have a family members children in our care aged 5 and 2, we have had many difficulties over the past 2 years but services promised when initially taking on care of the children have been denied. Just recently all funding has been cut, we were originally promised we would receive financial support till the boys reach 16 years or leave our care. It really does make it hard to get by day to day without taking a mental toll on all involved without the proper support available. I really feel for these people.

It sounds as though this child needs urgent counselling. He obviously has problems that possibly needed addressing prior to being cared for by this family. It seems their requests for help were denied. It is extremely difficult to observe a parent being threatened or bashed by a child. A child who does that often has mental problems caused by various circumstances and needs to see a professional to get to the root of the problem. These parents would have had no idea what this stemmed from, therefore what appropriate methods to use to help the young boy. Different conditions need a different variety of methods of coping. Without that advise how do the parents know what way to handle the child’s and their own situation. Often a child shows very disturbing behaviour – even self harm or threats of suicide before they get the help they need and I personally know of a couple of cases of this.

It sounds as though this child needs urgent counselling. He obviously has problems that possibly needed addressing prior to being cared for by this family. It seems their requests for help were denied. It is extremely difficult to observe a parent being threatened or bashed by a child. A child who does that often has mental problems caused by various circumstances and needs to see a professional to get to the root of the problem. These parents would have had no idea what this stemmed from, therefore what appropriate methods to use to help the young boy. Different conditions need a different variety of methods of coping. Without that advise how do the parents know what way to handle the child’s and their own situation. Often a child shows very disturbing behaviour – even self harm or threats of suicide before they get the help they need and I personally know of a couple of caes of this.

It sounds like they did the best they could do and it just didn’t work out for every-one.

how sad for all involved, we need more services to help!