:Adoption affects not only yourself, but your entire family. Your parents are loosing the privilege of the normal Grandparent role in your child’s life. Your siblings are loosing a niece or a nephew. Yes, through open adoption they can still play some sort of role in your child’s life, but it is still not the same. Your family will experience grief and loss of their role, just as you do.

It’s nice to have our family involved in open adoption not only just for the moral support that we as birthmothers may need, but as an added extension of the birth family for the child. But sometimes our family members may have a hard time dealing with open adoption or be hesitant of open adoption, making things more difficult.

Below are a few reasons I have speculated as to why birth families may not be one hundred percent supportive of open adoption from the get go.

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• They think that open adoption may be too hard on the birthmother and even themselves.



• Open adoption is a foreign concept to them. In the closed adoption era, a woman went away to have the baby then went back home and was told to forget about it. If your parents or other family members grew up in the closed adoption era this may be all that they know.



• They do not want to get too attached to the child since they feel they will not get to have a “normal” birth family role in the child’s life.



• They think it may be too similar to co-parenting or that you are interfering in the child’s life. They may also worry that open adoption would be too confusing for the child.


• They think it may be too confusing on the child.

Typically these assumptions stem from them not being educated about open adoption.

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