XVI. After the Adoption Order, Page 3

What about Open Adoption?

Many adopters are very nervous about contact with the birth family (usually called open adoption) or even with the foster family. There is no need to worry, except in cases where the birth family were very abusive or there is real worry about kidnapping. The most important things to remember are that it is always the child’s best interests which should govern what happens, and that contact as such poses no threat to you or your relationship with your child. If you have trouble with the idea of contact or about how to manage contact, there are courses run by various post-adoption services on the subject, or you can ask for individual help from your social worker or a post-adoption counselling service.

The main determinants of how open an adoption it is, or what kind of contact you have, are the child’s own needs and desires, although the needs of the birth parents are also important. Your needs as adopters come last in this particular equation. You need to be flexible and strong enough to support the needs of your child at all times and those of the birth parents as much as possible without compromising those of your child. If contact is what your child needs, it is part of your commitment to him that you will support it.

Why Open Adoption?

Simply because it is usually beneficial to everyone concerned:

The birth family benefits because they can see their child growing up healthy and happy. Just because they gave their child for adoption or were unable to look after her, or even neglected her, it doesn’t mean that they have no love for her or can forget her — far from it. Very few birth parents are monsters. And being able to see with their own eyes that their child is doing well and in a loving family helps them deal with their loss.
Your child benefits because the source of the answers is there. If she wants to know where her nose, which is unlike anyone’s in her new family, came from, she can find out. If she wants to know how many uncles and aunts she has, she can find out. She doesn’t have to rely on third-hand and possibly corrupted information. Rarely, contact can make kidney or bone marrow donations possible where other donors can’t be found. Most especially, she gets the reassurance that she was not rejected, and is still loved by her first family. Contact can also be a corrective for the tendency of adopted children to have unrealistic fantasies about their birth parents, such as that they are famous film stars or royalty, and one day they will take them back to live with them in Hollywood.
You benefit from the knowledge that the birth parents support your position. They may even explicitly tell your child that. You also get access to knowledge about family and medical history which can sometimes be very important.

Are There Drawbacks to Open Adoptions?

Sometimes, yes. There are a few birth parents who will try to undermine your relationship, entice your child away from you, even kidnap him. An abusive birth parent may use unsupervised visits to repeat the abuse, or use letters to hurt the child. Some birth parents are mentally disturbed and their behaviour may be distressing for your child, or their way of life may be totally unacceptable to you. For some birth parents contact makes the mourning process impossible, instead of assisting it. Some birth parents may intrude too much on your life. Some children may be unable to settle with you and even start shuttling between their birth and adoptive families.

When there is contact it is always possible to scale it up or down, wait to initiate it at some later stage in the adoption, or terminate it. Contact does not have to include telling the birth family where you live or your phone number or your real names, even when there is face-to-face meeting. Face-to-face contact can be supervised (and of course, if there is worry about kidnapping or abuse, you would never leave your child unsupervised): you or a neutral adult can be present.

But the number of birth parents who abuse contact this way is not great, and I would always start out with a presumption in favour of contact, and decide against it only if there were good reasons. If a birth parent abuses contact, threatens you or your child, starts to stalk or harass you, etc., you can apply to the courts for an order against them.

This assumes of course that the birth parents want contact, which is not necessarily the case. A few unmarried birth mothers do want to try to forget the baby and start their lives again. While unmarried mothers were formerly forced to do this by the adoption agencies, they are now encouraged to deal with their experience and pain more constructively. But there are some who simply don’t want anything more to do with their child. They may later refuse to meet an adult child who traces them. Some others find the way they became pregnant, or their relationship with the father, or having to give up a child so traumatic that they can’t face contact, in case it rekindles the flames of hurt, loss and shame.

Does Contact Confuse the Child?

Not very often. Most children are able to separate out who fills what role in their lives. Adopted children can cope with several sets of parents just as step-children can. The overwhelming majority of their life is with you, not their birth family, even where there is face-to-face contact. You are the parents who live with them, care for them, set the rules, discipline them, make the important decisions. Contact will not change that. Having an extra Mum and Dad, extra brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents usually just adds to the fun and excitement.

And in a few cases, where real trust and friendship develop between the two families, the child can move between two homes with ease and confidence and be part of both families. And even then, there is no confusion in the child’s mind. This kind of easy movement between families is quite common in some cultures and the children involved are not in any confusion about who the different adults in their lives are.

Previous Page Next Page