Helping children feel safe and secure after early trauma can require years of emotional care from adoptive parents. Halfpoint/ShutterstockIn a deeply personal passage of his first Labour Party conference speech as UK prime minister, Andy Burnham paid tribute to the care workers who had looked after his father, Roy, who had Alzheimer’s disease and had died just two weeks earlier.Those workers were “holding a threadbare system somehow together”, he said, yet remained “invisible to the political class of this country”. Addressing them directly, he added: “You are not invisible to me. I see you. I thank you.”His words made me think about the care that goes unseen within families. Why are some forms of caring recognised as care, while others become almost invisible simply because they are considered part of family life?I research trauma and adoption, and I am also an adoptive parent. I’m familiar with the story often told about adoption: a child finds a permanent family, a new life begins and everyone lives happily ever after.But my research focuses on what happens after that supposed happy ending, particularly when the effects of a child’s earlier trauma continue into their adoptive family. And Burnham’s words made me wonder how much of the care provided by adoptive parents goes unrecognised simply because we call it parenting.In England and Wales, an adoption order makes adopters the child’s legal parents. But a legal order cannot erase what happened beforehand. Children adopted from care are often described as “previously looked-after”, a phrase I have long struggled with. There is nothing necessarily “previous” about the effects of their early experiences. A child may be physically safe but still struggle to feel safe. Earlier experiences can affect their development and their ability to trust the adults closest to them, since a family can be permanent in law long before a child feels secure enough to believe that permanence will last. Adoptive parents are therefore living alongside the effects of experiences that happened before they even knew their child. This can make the parenting very different from what people usually imagine.The relationship offering safety can also be the relationship in which fear and mistrust are expressed. For some families, this includes child-to-parent violence and abuse. A child experiencing overwhelming distress may run away or behave in ways that put themselves or others at risk. Parents may find themselves calling the police to protect their child or another family member, or because they fear for their own safety.Understanding the reasons behind a child’s behaviour does not protect a parent from the emotional and physical impact of living with it. A parent can see why their child is hurting and still be hurt themselves. My colleagues and I have researched compassion fatigue among adoptive parents raising children affected by early trauma. Compassion fatigue describes the emotional exhaustion and disconnection that can develop through repeated exposure to another person’s trauma.My doctoral research also explored adoptive parents’ mental health more broadly. Parents described feeling exhausted while continuing to hold family life together. Sometimes, the very fact that they were managing made their distress harder for others to recognise.The effects can reach beyond parents and children, affecting siblings and other family members. The adversity may belong to the child’s past, but its consequences can become part of the whole family’s present.When families struggle to get helpFamilies are also affected by what happens outside the home. At school, a frightened child may be seen simply as badly behaved. A child who cannot get through the school gates may become an attendance problem. When the reasons behind their behaviour are overlooked, attention can quickly turn to what the parents are supposedly doing wrong.Parents described fighting for help while feeling judged or blamed, sometimes until their family reached breaking point. Professionals, meanwhile, described recognising that families needed support but working within services that could not always provide it.This is where Burnham’s description of a “threadbare system” particularly resonated with me. I have often described the services surrounding adoptive families as both traumatised and traumatising. Professionals are working under enormous pressure, often without the resources needed to respond to families’ complex needs. And when services are struggling, their responses can add to the distress of children and parents who are already finding life difficult.For families, this can mean reaching a crisis and then having to demonstrate just how bad things have become before support is available.Burnham’s words were powerful because they acknowledged care workers whose contribution is too often overlooked. But they also invite a wider conversation about what society recognises as care in the first place.Care can come with a uniform and a job title. It can also mean a parent staying close to a child whose earliest relationships taught them that the adults they depend on may not always be safe or able to stay.Helping a child learn to trust those relationships can take years, and the emotional demands on parents can be considerable. That work deserves recognition and support.Care should not become less deserving of either simply because we call it parenting.Claire Agius does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.