In the decades of closed adoptions, adoptive parents could choose to put the emotional details of adoption aside to come back and deal with at some future time, perhaps when their child became an adult and wanted to connect to birthfamily. Of course we have also learned with time that the system and process of closed adoptions is one that did not work well for most people involved. Many people were not told details and as a result had many questions which their adoptive families also had no clear answers for.

In the open adoptions of today families are going about the daily details of parenting their children and also finding their way through the sometimes complicated maze of adoption emotions at the same time. This may be better for the birthparent who has the ability to continue a meaningful relationship with their child and also the adoptee who benefits from knowing the connection to their heritage all through their formative years, but what about the adoptive parents? Is open adoption an easier or more emotionally conflicting experience for them?

While most adoptive parents appear to desire some amount of openness in their child’s adoption and believe in keeping no secrets from the child about their adoptive identity, there does not seem to be a lot of information about how the open adoption experience effects the ability of adoptive parents to also feel as capable and entitled as other parents. Does the complexity of having an open arrangement cause more stress on adoptive parents and therefore affect the way they parent?

Speaking from my own experience I believe that although open adoption is not billed as co-parenting there are certainly aspects of the relationship that take on that feel of shared parenting. When a child grows up with the understanding that they have two sets of parents whom they see and love, they will also expect both sets of parents to be represented on equal levels to one another. This presents a challenge for adoptive parents as they often do not enter the experience expecting to think about themselves as anything other than “normal” parents. The experience of adoption and especially openness does not however fully allow either set of parents to parent “normally.” In order to have a good open relationship with your adopted child in mind adoptive parents must let go of their autonomy in favor of the rules for a productive open adoption. That is not always comfortable or even understood by adoptive parents. As they discover this throughout their adoption does it make their job more difficult? I believe that it does.

In so many ways open adoption (although preferable to closed adoptions) is still a social testing ground. We will learn more once this current generation of those practicing open adoptions move into adulthood and beyond. It will also be interesting to hear from the adoptive parents perspectives then if they felt that they parented in the ways that they had thought they would.