“I’ll let you into a secret,” says writer Daf James with a grin. “I love foster carers. I do.”
It’s not flattery. The BAFTA and International Emmy-winning screenwriter, creator of the BBC drama Lost Boys and Fairies, credits foster carers with playing a vital role in his own family’s adoption journey.
Inspired by his experience of becoming an adoptive parent, the series explores adoption, trauma and belonging. But for Daf, the story was also about the people who help children - and families - through some of the most difficult moments of their lives.
“Having gone through the adoption process, it was the most dramatic emotional rollercoaster I’d ever experienced,” he says. “I had to learn so much and got to see the world from many different angles and perspectives.
“I felt a compulsion to write about it, especially in those first couple of years when everything was new. Everything felt incredibly intense and alive.”
The story was shaped by other experiences too. Daf’s mother died the year before he and his partner adopted their children, and grief inevitably found its way into the script.
“I take the ingredients of life and create something new from them,” he says. “Grief and death are big parts of the show, though expressed differently.”
Although the series has been widely praised for its portrayal of adoption, Daf insists he didn’t set out to make a campaign piece.
“I could sit here and say I had a crusade to create a positive representation of adoption,” he says, laughing. “But really I just had a story I wanted to tell.”
“But as I was writing it, it did become important to me,” he says, “partly because I kept seeing negative representations and thinking: this is not my experience. I realised I’d never really seen adoption authentically represented on screen - the challenges, the lows, the highs.”
When the series aired, the response surprised him.
“It blew my mind,” he says. “I had countless messages from adopters, adoptees, foster carers, social workers - people working within the care system - saying thank you for positive representation. And I thought, I don’t need to be thanked. I’m just reflecting what I’ve seen!”
One of the things viewers often comment on is the emotional depth of the characters in Lost Boys and Fairies. Daf says that comes from a conscious decision to write compassionately about people and their experiences.
“Often in archetypal storytelling you might have the good and the bad. That can work for certain genres. But I’m always interested in the good and the bad coexisting, and in how to write compassionately about what society might deem as monstrous.
“I think that comes from having adopted and gone through all the adoption training. What that does is encourage you to think about the impact of early life trauma on behaviour.
We were invited very early on in training to think about birth families and why it might be that our children have had these early life traumas. Most of the time it’s because their parents themselves were not modelled love appropriately, because they were experiencing their own trauma and there were no interventions to stop that cycle.
“The moment you start seeing life through those models, it becomes very hard not to think compassionately about humans.”
Drama, he believes, is one of the best places to explore that complexity.
“We all make judgments - it’s part of how our brains work. But our job as compassionate humans is to try to override that, and to try and see the good in people.”
During the adoption process, James experienced first-hand the role foster carers play in supporting families during introductions. The boys he and his partner would eventually adopt had been living with a foster carer who had cared for hundreds of children.
“The social workers deferred to her,” he remembers. “She knew the boys better than anyone.”
One morning, overwhelmed by the enormity of what lay ahead, he arrived convinced something wasn’t right.
“I said I couldn’t do it,” he says. “I was worried the match was wrong.”
Her response stayed with him.
“She just said very calmly: ‘You listen to me. This match isn’t wrong. You can do this. I believe in you. You are the parents these boys need’. She knew I just needed to be held.”
Today, he says, she still reflects on that moment. “She says she cannot believe the transformation in our boys. How glad she was that she was right - and how glad I am that she was right. But why should I have doubted her? She’s received an MBE for her services to fostering. For the countless lives she has changed, including ours…”
Looking back, Daf believes the support surrounding families in the early stages of adoption or fostering is often underestimated.
“We’re told to put your own oxygen mask on first,” he says. “You have to look after yourself. But I don’t think people talk enough about the support carers and adopters actually need.”
The emotional impact of parenting children who have experienced trauma can be profound.
“I had no understanding when I adopted my kids how my own childhood trauma would come up,” he says. Growing up gay during the years of Section 28 meant navigating bullying and isolation - experiences that resurfaced during that first year of adoption.
“A lot of that came out as rage,” he says. “But I felt like I couldn’t talk about it because I had to be therapeutic and kind and considered and measured - the perfect parent. And that’s such a lot of pressure.”
For him, the experience highlights the need for a more holistic understanding of support.
“More work needs to be done around a holistic approach - the team around a child. All adopted children, and those in care, need access to support and therapy. And parents and carers need more support too - more joined-up thinking, talking, understanding and listening - because we’re all wanting the same thing in the end, which is for our children to thrive.”
And yet, he says, foster carers are often carrying more of that responsibility than the system recognises.
“Foster carers are often propping up the system with their own health, their own mental health, their own emotional resources and their love,” he says. “They’re holding up a system they shouldn’t have to hold up. That system should be supporting them - but it’s the other way around.”
The relationship between his family and their children’s foster carers did not end with adoption.
“For us it was an absolute no-brainer,” he says. “These foster carers are amazing.”
He describes them as “oracles”.
“They’ve raised so many children. They have incredible insight.”
“They were there at the time when our children were most vulnerable,” he says. “They transformed those children’s lives forever.”
When asked what he would want foster carers reading this to know, he pauses.
“I think what you do is extraordinary,” he says finally.
“You take children at their most vulnerable and offer them this safe haven.
“You’re dealing with pressures in your own lives, challenges in the system, pay challenges, all sorts of pressures - and yet you’re fundamentally transforming people’s lives.”
“When adopters arrive during introductions we’re often like rabbits in the headlights - and foster carers are the ones holding that space.”
Asked how he hopes audiences react to the show, he says:
“When you’re writing a drama, first and foremost your job is to entertain. But if it can shine a light on something an audience might not have considered before, in a compassionate way, that’s a great byproduct.
“When I watch something I want to be moved. I want to laugh, and I want to probably cry. I want to come away a little bit different - a little bit transformed by the experience. So if I can achieve that in my storytelling, then I’d be very happy.”
