One is all it takes
The social worker said he was a great little boy, he was healthy and was achieving his development targets for his age of 20 months.
"Is there anything that we should be aware of"?
"There can be no guarantees, Mr and Mrs Smith, as to what happens as children grow older, all we can say is his mother did drink during the pregnancy and we have NO information as to the short nor long term effects on the child".
So with those words from the experts we readily agreed to the adoption of our first son.
Young Charlie arrived and after several visits to his foster family we were able to take him home with us, the day soon came when he was to stay overnight in our house.
I would imagine those parents who are reading this will understand the concern we had about that first night
He had been perfectly happy with the day visits and trips but not going home to "mummy" and "his" bed at the end of a busy day in the park or playing with the dog was a completely different situation. I am not able to go into details in this short article about the preparations we did to ease him out of one house and into another, ours. Let us just say, when the sun went down and his eyes started to close we put him to bed and kept our fingers crossed and toes and everything we could think of. We found out later that when he woke up in the evening the best way to get him to sleep was not telling him a story but putting him in the car and driving around the block once. . . It never failed, he went out like a light, we sometimes did it in our pyjamas, lucky it was dark. After six months in our house the legal adoption went through and the return to sender address was removed . . . The dog now had a little brother.
About the time he went to school , my wife said there was something not right and she took him to a child specialist for an assessment in Milton Keynes, the result of which said he had mild "Foetal Alcohol Syndrome"! That was a new one on us, never heard of it before. The professionals
60 Phonebox Magazine
A local fa ly's story
  The National Organisation for Foetal Alcohol Syndrome -UK www.nofas-uk.org. Tel. 0208 458 5951
Email... Help@nofas-uk.org
were not a great help so we did some reading on the internet on the subject and eventually found a charity down in London who had information and support for parents who were in our situation. We learned that our doctors, schools and adoption services were very close to being completely in the dark on this subject so finding NOFAS-UK online was a light in a dark room. They helped with information, chats on the telephone, they held Saturday seminars with local and international experts in the field and opportunities to meet other parents. Sometimes it's nice to know you're not the only one fighting big brother in town hall, we told our story and others said try this, try that, we did this, we did that, but above all the message was, keep fighting, don't give up or be fobbed off. Lackofspacepreventsmefromsaying much to you, we gave leaflets and CD's to the schools, doctors and adoption services to bring this subject to their attention and generally the response has been good but still on a too limited scale.
How does *Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) affect Charlie? Well, lucky for him, he was diagnosed as being very mild, he goes to school and joins in regular activities but he struggles with certain every day aspects of
life you would just take for granted such as abstract topics like passage of time, maths, money, arithmetic. His reading age was always far ahead of his years, I think he finds words easier to work with than times tables and algebra. I won't go into details about social skills but children with FAS find it difficult to function in social settings, they often say the wrong thing or perhaps take too literally something said to them, they see the world as black and white with no grey, yes or no with no maybe. Some of the characteristics of FAS include, Attention and memory defects, Hyperactivity, Difficulty with abstract concepts (maths, money, time), Poor problem solving skills, Difficulty learning from consequences, Poor judgement, Immature behaviour, Poor impulse control, Confused social skills.
Remembe  no individual child displays all of them:
The sad fact is, Charlie will have to battle with these problems all his life in a world that sees nothing wrong on the outside and will judge him first and ask questions not at all. This was not genetic, it was not an accident, he has been condemned to a life sentence with no parole. . . his mother poisoned him when she drank alcohol. •