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The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.
This round we’re going to consider one critique of fully open adoptions. Have you ever heard–or perhaps even made–statements like these?
“We have medical histories and can share the information we have about their birth parents with our children now. If they feel a need to initiate contact with their birth families when they are adults, we will fully support them.”
“The decision to have a relationship with her bio family should be hers when she is ready. Creating a relationship between them before she wants it might cause issues in the future.”
“Children deserve to have just one family during childhood and not to deal with anything adoption-related until they are more mature. A fully open adoption robs a child of a normal childhood.”
The writers share a certain point-of-view: that direct contact during early childhood between birth families and children placed for adoption may not be the best idea. Adopted persons should be free to initiate relationships with their first families–or not–on their own timetable. The parents (first and adoptive) in an adoption shouldn’t make such an important and personal decision for them.
What is your response? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
I vehemently disagree.
First, we don’t know how much time we have on this Earth. I wrote about death and adoption when my mother passed away. Even if our children’s birth parents are young, young people do die every day. If adoptive parents wait until their children are older to establish a relationship with their birth parents, their birth parents may no longer be alive. In May, I wrote:
[Adoptive parents] are not secure enough in our roles as parents to involve another person. We think that we are the most important people in our children’s lives, that they don’t need anyone else.
That is simply not true.
A woman in my online adoption group is an adult adoptee and an adoptive mother. She was not allowed contact with her birth parents while growing up. She found them, but because she missed decades of experiences with them, their relationships are strained.
Children are capable of understanding so much more than we give them credit for. If we’re consistent in our terminology, if we can tell them their stories, if we can demonstrate how relationships work, then they’ll follow our lead. As they grow and become more independent, they can choose how their relationships with their birth parents will grow. Without our example, how will they navigate?
If we foist the responsibility of birth parent relations on our children, we’re saying “We don’t want this relationship”. How are they supposed to deal with that knowledge and put it together with the “support” we’ll supposedly give them when they want a relationship?
Families are more complex now. Technically, my grandmother is my step-grandmother, as she married my grandfather after his first wife died. If my son can grasp that fact – and he seems to – then he can understand a birth mother. If he can remember that he has family and friends across the US, then he can remember his half-siblings.
To address the last comment, “Children deserve … not to deal with anything adoption-related until they are more mature”, well that’s just plain stupid. It’s fear on the adoptive parents’ part. They don’t want to deal with the realities of adoption, so they won’t expose their kids to them. Adoption can be messy. Life is messy. The earlier you handle that information, the better.
If you have the opportunity, Dawn at this woman’s work wrote an excellent piece this week.
