Can Open Adoption Really Work? Part III: Is Open Adoption Best For Your Children?

"I like open-adoption because we can all talk about what's going on in our lives. I like knowing who my birthmother is and what she likes. And I like meeting the people she's related to—who I'm related to."

-Nicole, adopted-daughter and birth-daughter of nine years

We all ask questions about who we are. You might say, we are each on a lifelong quest to discover what makes us unique and individual, what we are supposed to do with our uniqueness, and where, in life, we are going.

So we have established that open-adoption is generally the clear choice for birthmothers and often adoptive parents too. A few years back I spoke on a panel at an adoption agency alongside five adoptive couples. Several of the adoptive mothers commented that when their children’s birthmothers hadn’t called for a while they actually began to miss them. One adoptive mother said, “after our daughter was born and we brought her home, I really craved being around her birthmother.” But what about the children?

Isn’t the greatest priority in any adoption to raise secure and well-adjusted children? And isn’t an adoptive parent’s first and most important responsibility to protect their adopted children? So what if your child’s birthmom is unstable? Disrespectful of you or your family? Unwilling to honor you as the real parent?

If any of these factors are present in an open-adoption, it is the responsibility of the adoptive parents to create separation from the birth-family. If the birth-family creates tension in the adoptive family, depending on the degree of inappropriateness, the adoptive parents may need to insist that all contact is prearranged, decrease the contact to letters and/ or phone calls, or perhaps cut all ties. Yes, it is the primary responsibility of adoptive parents to make sure their children are physically and emotionally safe.

But assuming that your child’s birthmother is emotionally stable, balanced, respectful of your family, and generally feels positively about her choice to place, it seems to be the best option for your child to allow him or her contact with his or her birthmother.

According to The Minnesota Texas Adoption Research Project (MTARP) the first longitudinal study to be done about open adoption, an adopted child will have a stronger sense of identity if he has a sense that his adoptive family is connected to his biological family. This finding sharpens as adopted children age. It is a lifelong struggle to make sense of our beginnings, to realize who we are and where we came from. A child’s biological family is an important piece of their identity puzzle.

I have seen in my birth-daughter’s adoption how important it is to her to be able to call me and ask questions as they arise. The older she has gotten, the more questions she has had. Sometimes she calls when she is working on a school project about family history, genetics, or pregnancy. Certainly over the years there have been hundreds more projects that she and her mother could work on alone. But when those questions popup that she and her mother would both like to know, we are all glad that they have access to the answers.

I think we owe it to adopted children to give them access to answers about their heritage whenever possible. After all, if we don’t know where we came from, we can’t figure out where we are going.