My Parents Disapprove of Open Adoption - Weekend Wisdom

Question: How do you speak to family members about open adoption? My entire family supports my intention to adopt as a single parent and has been very excited and generous as I have been working towards becoming a parent. My siblings were both adopted and there is a history of adoption in my family, mostly closed adoptions like my brother and sister. I would say my parents were ahead of their time in how they spoke openly about adoption and really worked hard to make us all feel loved and special. They shared with my siblings as much information about their birth parents as they had and supported my sister even to seek out a connection with her birth mother. However, despite all of this my parents seem to question open adoption. Do you have any tips for educating parents and family members about open adoption?

Resources:

• Adoptee Voices (Resource page)
• Interview with Pioneer Researchers in Open Adoption (Podcast)
• Open Adoption (Resource page)

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
- Welcome to this week's Weekend Wisdom. This is our opportunity to answer your
questions. Now we have another podcast. I suspect most of you know about it and it
comes out each week where we interview for about an hour an expert or someone of
lived experience in a topic directly relevant to foster, adoptive and kinship
families. But the Weekend Wisdom is where we answer your questions, so please send
us your questions to info
creatingafamily .org, or you can also find the link in the show notes. All right,
today's question is this. How do I speak to family members about open adoption? My
entire family supports my intention to adopt as a single parent and have been very
excited and generous as I have been working towards becoming a parent. My siblings
were both adopted and there is a history of adoption in my family, mostly mostly
closed adoption like my brother and sister. I would say my parents were ahead of
their time and how they spoke openly about adoption and really worked hard to make
us all feel loved and special. They shared with my siblings as much information
about their birth parents as they had and supported my sister to seek out a
connection with her birth mother. However, despite all of this, my parents seem to
question open adoption. Do you have any tips for educating parents and family members
about open adoption? Also, do you know of resources that I could share with them to
learn more? All right. Well, your parents adopted in a time, obviously, where closed
adoptions were the norm, and all the information they were given back then when they
adopted told them that closed adoptions were the best. Now, things have changed since
they adopted, but they're still living with the knowledge that the last time they
had any information about it, they were being told closed adoptions are what you
should do. Plus, honestly, from their standpoint, they would be thinking, well, what
we did worked. Our son and our daughter are doing fine. So they may be operating
under the, if it ain't broke, don't fix it type mentality. And then there's outside
of adoption. There's also kind of the classic issue of grandparents struggling when
their kids parent differently from the way that they did it. And this is, like I
said, this is across the board, regardless of adoption. It sometimes feels like a
rebuke of the way that they parented, if you're doing it differently. And this is
probably not the only thing that they're going to disagree with you on as you go
forward about how you parent. But because they're also adoptive parents and you
likely don't have a lot of other adoptive parents in your support circle, it's
probably harder to have them not approving of your decision to have an open
adoption. So how do you go about educating them? Well, that's somewhat dependent on
what speaks to them. If they are research focused and like to have facts, then look
up the Minnesota, Texas adoption research project. It started in the 1980s,
and I believe they're still following these families, so it's still an ongoing
research. What they found was that children and adoptive mothers who had face -to
-face contact with birth mothers reported having the highest level of satisfaction with
adoption and their lives. And then conversely, children and adoptive mothers with no
or stopped contact had the least level of satisfaction. So to answer their concern
about open adoption, you would tell them that you wanna do it because the research
that wasn't around when they were raising your brother and sister, but is now around
and you have access to it, shows that open adoption is best for kids. Now, if they
aren't research -oriented, you can share that you have read information, you have
listened to podcasts, and you've talked with professionals, as well as fellow adoptive
parents and adult adoptees, and that you've decided that this is the best approach
for you. I think it's important, however, to acknowledge their fear. This change from
what they did might feel scary to them, and that you know that they want what's
best for you and their future grandchild. Also acknowledge that you're aware that it
won't always be easy. In fact, you hope you are prepared for it to be hard, but
that you still have decided to have an open adoption. And then stop trying to talk
them into it. You're going to be the mom and you get to decide, end of story.
Also note that you're going to have to find a different support system for helping
you navigate The inevitable ups and downs of open adoption, because honestly it would
be unfair to asset of your parents. As far as resources are already mentioned, the
Minnesota Texas Adoption Research Project, just Google it, go directly to their
website, and they've got a lot of, you know, short synopsis of their research
findings. If your parents and family like podcasts, creating a family, has quite a
few on open adoption, including an interview We did a number of years ago with the
lead researchers on the Minnesota, Texas adoption research project. That one you're
going to probably have to find in our archives on our website, creatingafamily .org.
I'm not sure it's being included anymore because we've been doing this podcast for
17 years and the podcast apps will only keep a couple of years worth of podcasts
on their sites. We have them all on our website. We also have lots of articles on
the benefits of open adoption if reading is more
forward on creating your family. And before you go, let me remind you that creating
a family has a monthly e -newsletter. We curate the best of what we have found that
month to help you be the best parent possible for your kiddo. So check it out at
creatingafamily .org /newsletter. Thanks for listening.