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If you are a hopeful adoptive parent just beginning the adoption process, you’ve probably heard of open adoption, but you might not know exactly what it is, and you might not be sure how you feel about it.
Open adoption, quite simply, involves maintaining contact between the adoptive family and the child’s first parents after placement. The amount and type of contact in an open adoption can vary greatly, and sometimes a distinction is made between semi-open adoption, in which identifying information is generally not exchanged and contact usually takes place through an intermediary, for example, the agency or attorney who arranged the adoption, and fully open adoption, in which identifying information is exchanged and contact between the families takes place directly. For the sake of simplicity, I use the term open adoption here to mean any adoption in which any sort of ongoing contact is maintained and closed adoption to describe situations in which there is no contact.
Open adoption can be a scary prospect to hopeful adoptive parents; it’s unfamiliar and complicated, as opposed to the simple family—“just like everyone else”—that many hopeful adoptive parents crave. Hopeful adoptive parents’ concerns about open adoption are often rooted much less in what open adoption is than in what it isn’t. Because it is unfamiliar to most people who aren’t already involved in it, there are many myths and misconceptions that about open adoption that simply aren’t based in reality. So a discussion of what open adoption is must also include a little about what open adoption isn’t.
Open adoption is not co-parenting. Many hopeful adoptive parents worry that open adoption means that their children’s first parents will “interfere” with their own parenting; that they won’t feel as though they have the right to parent their children. It is possible—just as in any relationship—that boundaries may be crossed and that toes may be stepped on, but this isn’t inherently a problem with open adoption as a practice, and it can be addressed if adoptive parents and first parents work together to set (and adjust, as the children and the relationship grow) boundaries so that everyone is on the same page.
Open adoption is not confusing to children. A common criticism about open adoption is that children raised in open adoption must surely be confused by the presence of so many parents in their lives. But if we are honest with our children—and we should be—they grow up knowing that the mother and father who are parenting them are different from the mother and father who created them; when first parents and adoptive parents understand and respect each other’s roles in their child’s life, open adoption doesn’t add any confusion to the mix.
Open adoption is not risky. Thanks to television melodramas and sensational news stories, some people believe there is a risk in open adoption that the child’s first parents will try to take their children back. In reality, once an adoption is finalized, the adoptive parents are legally the child’s parents, whether the adoption is closed or open.
At the end of the day, open adoption is not about the adults. Open adoption is about the well being of the child; its intent is “to minimize the loss of relationships; to maintain and celebrate the adopted child’s connections with all the important people in his or her life; [and] to allow children to resolve losses with truth, rather than with fantasy.” [1] Because of the incredibly beneficial impact it can have in adopted children’s lives, open adoption deserves more than just casual consideration by hopeful adoptive parents.
