In the first two installments of this blog, I wrote about a problem I sometimes see in open adoptions: open adoptions that aren't really open but consist of on going correspondence between the birth parent and adoptive parents, correspondence that the adopted child has no knowledge of while it's ongoing.

I think I have made it clear that this is a big mistake. It is calculated to breed distrust between the parent, birth parent and adopted person. It simply defeats the purpose of open adoption.

So why do adoptive parents do this?

It's the snowball effect. Many adoptive parents don't start out with the intention of withholding information from the child. It just happens and then it becomes harder and harder to tell the truth.

This secrecy is all fear based. My observation has been that parents in these type of situations build up fear that grows with the years. They have an inner dialogue that they scare themselves with over time. "If I tell my child about the correspondence they will want to know more about the birth parents (probably,but so what?), become traumatized because they never think about the birth parents and now I've gone and brought it up (wrong), get upset because I have kept it hidden (maybe)," and on and on. Some of the inner dialogue gets completely irrational but then its based on fear. Fear generates irrational thinking. They convince themselves that telling the truth will set off some earth shaking consequences that will be just awful. Or, adoptive parents don't "get" how and why it might help to know the truth. Remember children are forming their identity, they do have questions and concerns, even if unexpressed, and knowing that birth parents love and care bout them can only help!

So, please, tell the truth. Share information with your child about his or her birth parents. Build their story over time. Take each age, each stage of development as it comes,and don't worry and anticipate problems that don't exist!