Most of us involved in open adoptions understand that secrecy in our relationships can be detrimental to everyone involved. Secrets in the closed adoptions of the past were usually kept in order to withhold information from an adoptee about their adoption, or to keep birthparents from knowing how their child fared in their life after placement. Even today a system of closed records, keeps secrets that harm many adult adoptees. Most of us now know that this type of secrecy often destroyed the bonds of trust, and did far more to harm parent and child connections that it actually helped them.

Recently I ran across a concept that one adoptive parent shared they were using in their current open adoption, and though at first it really intrigued me, as I later thought about it I began to question the possible damage that it could bring about (in my perception), due to a certain level of secrecy it seemed to subtly promote. To me the suggestion of secrecy, just sent up a few red flags in my mind.

This adoptive parent was going to be providing their young child with a place to write “secret” questions and letters to the child’s birthmother, for them then to discuss together in private. This apparently is something the adoptive parents would not be directly involved with, not knowing what was written, or how those questions would be privately answered by the child’s birthmother when she was with the child. Again, this was my perception of what was shared since I do not know the family or the intimate details of their personal relationship.

While I am not going to go about telling anyone how they should raise their child, I admit I was concerned with this idea. As I considered this concept of communication between birthparent and child, I wondered if this was somehow promoting some subtle form of secrecy that would ultimately affect the attachment and bonding between the child and the adoptive family. If secrets kept between adoptive parent and child could be harmful, couldn’t secrets kept between the birthparent and child be equally as detrimental? How would this kind of situation compromise the adoptive parent/ child relationship?

While I do think it is a positive thing to encourage the child to ask questions about their birth or adoption, sometimes directly of the birthparent if possible, I also believe that as adoptive parents our role is to properly filter the information and discuss the answers to be presented with birthparents first, so everyone is on the same page, and not possibly saying or doing things that could harm either set of parents or the child involved.

So I liked some of this idea, but with a twist. I would encourage the child to write down what they want to ask of their birthparents, and save that for a time when they could do just that. I would also talk with their birthparents about those questions beforehand, and have an understanding of what kind of answers would be shared. If some deeper questions seemed to merit a private conversation between birthparent and child, in my personal belief those things would be best left to when the child is grown, and mature enough to understand possibly difficult information, and process it on an adult level. As we have often read about right here, even processing some adoption related details as an adult can be painful and challenging, so perhaps this is territory we need to enter cautiously into with our very young children.

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