XVI. After the Adoption Order, Page 4
What Kinds of Contact Are There?
You name it, it happens. Technically “contact” covers everything from a one-off meeting at placement to full-scale inter-family meetings with your child spending vacations with his birth family, joint celebrations of holidays, and the like. In this country contact tends to be less intensive than in countries like the Netherlands and New Zealand and some traditional societies, but more common than in some other countries. The categories I describe below are not static. There are intermediate forms and contact can grow or be scaled down over time, depending on circumstances and the needs of the parties. And while I speak of contact between the child and his birth parents, contact can happen between the child and any birth relative, former carer, family friend: any important person from the child’s past.
Of course, for children adopted from overseas, open adoption presents special problems of language and distance, even when the birth family is known. But it certainly does happen, as several TV documentaries have shown.
The Single Meeting
The most minimal form of open adoption is the single meeting at placement. Even this can have benefits for everyone, in giving a real physical image of each to the other, with the adoptive parents being able to thank the birth parents and reassure them that their child will grow up loved and that they will do everything they can for him. The birth parents can reassure the adopters that they consent, even though the decision has been heart-wrenching, and that they recognise the adopters as the new parents. There may be an exchange of gifts. The child, even a baby, inherits the benefits indirectly.
Annual Reports
Many adopters send annual reports to the birth family. These would include photos and a letter about how the child is developing and growing, achievements, maybe difficulties. This can be done even if the birth parents didn’t want contact initially, by sending them to the agency to keep on file. The parents may change their minds one day and be grateful for the information. If you want to encourage more contact yourself, you can always include your name and address in the letters, and leave a statement with the agency that you would welcome contact of some kind.
Letterbox or Mediated Contact
Reports can be sent either directly to the birth family, if you know the address, or via the agency, which can either hold them on file or forward them. Forwarding mail between the two families (either one way or both ways) is often known as letterbox contact. It preserves the anonymity of both or either party, where this is felt to be desirable or necessary. It can also be a way of vetting or censoring correspondence, if that is thought to be necessary. This is often used by birth families to send birthday and greeting cards to their children. Even children who don’t want to have direct contact may look forward to getting birthdays cards, when they understand that the birth parents don’t know their address.
Supervised Face-to-Face Contact
Some children want or need to physically meet their birth parents. If there is concern about the behaviour of the birth parents the contact can take place with professional or volunteer third-party supervision, with or without your own presence. If there is a need for supervision, I personally find it hard to see how the relationship between the child and birth family can be very beneficial, but it does sometimes happen.
Direct Telephone or Letter Contact
Where there is a comfortable feeling between families, they may engage in direct contact with each other, without the services of an intermediary, exchanging phone calls and letters as often as they want. This can develop over time into more intimate contact.
Unmediated Face-to-Face Contact
This is the adoptive equivalent of The Full Monty. I’m talking about whole families meeting each other for picnics, other events, even going on holiday together. There is still no need for either party to know the phone number or address of the other, since these meetings can be on neutral ground and arranged through third parties. As confidence in each other grows, you can meet in each other’s homes and children can visit even their birth families alone for holidays. It may seem bizarre if you haven’t seen it in action, but there are families where it works. These families consider themselves to almost be joint parents of the child they share, with both families contributing, although the adoptive family must always be in the driver’s seat.
Adoption with Contact Orders
The extent and type of contact between a child and any other person can be the subject of a contact order. The order is made by the court and can only be varied by another court order. The order specifies the person or persons that are to have contact with the child, how often, what kind of contact, and under what circumstances (such as under the supervision of a third party). Usually a contact order will reflect the informal contact arrangements existing at the time of the adoption order, and a judge is unlikely to change these. The contact specified doesn’t have to be person-to-person; it can simply specify that you have to provide the birth family with a progress report letter and photograph once a year. A contact order can also specify people who are forbidden to contact the child.
If your child does not wish to obey a contact order, say with an abusing birth parent, she has seven days in which to obtain a court order to change the arrangements. Violating a contact order’s provisions is an offence. If you abet your child in refusing to comply with a contact order you will also commit an offence. But I know where my primary responsibility would lie in such a case.
Court-imposed contact orders tend to be used more in fostering and for children in children’s homes, and even more commonly to enforce contact between children and a non-custodial parent after an acrimonious marriage breakdown. They can be part of an adoption order, but it is usually considered better if arrangements can be made without a court order, because of the greater flexibility to respond to changing needs and circumstances. A child can apply for a contact order or a change to an existing contact order on her own account, without the consent of her adoptive parents.
A Final Word about Contact Agreements
Most contact agreements between adoptive parents and birth parents, foster parents, etc. are not legally binding because there is no court order. There are a number of cases where adoptive parents have refused to comply with an agreement and it turns out that they acted in bad faith from the start, only pretending to agree to contact in order to better their chances of adopting. This is highly immoral. If contact turns out to be the wrong decision because the other side is abusing the arrangements or the child is distressed, that is one thing, and the agreement can be altered or cancelled. But if you are simply unable to face contact with birth or foster parents in principle you should say so up front. To deliberately mislead the other parties before placement about your attitude to open adoption is a serious breach of trust, and means you are selfish, insecure, devious, and unfit to adopt.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
