Why Open Adoption?

Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 103. We're the Nelsons. I'm Lanette and I'm Shaun. In today's episode we answer the question, why open adoption? The day that this episode is being launched, Lanette and I will actually be speaking at the Utah Foster Care Annual Symposium and we get to really hype up openness in adoption. We are going to be leading a panel discussion with four incredible adoptees that will share their perspective and

how openness played a part in their experiences. And so we're super excited. If you're one who learned about us at the conference that will be happening that day, we hope that this episode just adds to the experience that you had. Yes, so we're gonna start off by diving into what exactly open adoption is. So the first time that the term open adoption was used according to

Merriam-Webster was in 1973. That's not that long ago. Not really, but there's this common misconception that open adoption is like the new way of doing adoption. That's right. But most adoptions involved some level of openness up through the early to mid 1900s. So what did that look like? So I mean it was usually like a family would help out with another family who needed help

taking care of their child, right? Or there were sometimes like apprenticeships back in the early days of the United States where it wasn't really adoption but those sorts of situations where you knew where your biological family was, you knew what was going on. It didn't really become secretive until the early 1900s or mid 1900s. Do we know why it became secretive? I mean I imagine there's a lot going on here, but there's this adoption worker named Georgia Tan

and she was super sketch. Some really really bad stuff. She was a child trafficker and she would like kidnap children from poor families and then have rich families pay a lot of money to adopt them and it was child trafficking and kidnapping and super super sketchy. But things became a lot more secretive and I know that she played a part in that. Some of our adoption policies today remain from her and she was trying to protect herself, right? And like protect

this scammy way of doing adoption and so that's one reason. I know there's others like the rise of international adoption, right? Like so many other things. I have one thing just to interject really quick. So I think you just said something that made me think about this but a lot of the adoption laws that exist right now were created with the benefit of the adoptive parent or the adoption agency as the focal point. Yeah. And today we really need to switch that so that it is

a lot more adoptee focused. It should be entirely adoptee focused, right? That should always be our goal and our mission. Anyway I know that was a tangent but that's something that I feel passionately about. Yeah absolutely and just a quick additional tangent. So a lot of adoption records are closed or sealed, right? This is a big talking point right now helping adoptees have access to their original birth certificates and that was something that started during

Georgia Tans era as well. So yeah just really important to advocate for these changes but open adoption is not new is the point. We're not gonna dive anymore into this. So the misconception was that open adoption is new however that was really the case almost all the time until the early 1900s but now since like

the 1970s. I mean that's when it first began but yet it picked up more in like the late 80s early 90s that open adoption became more common and so the definition if you look it up in Merriam-Webster of open adoption is an adoption that involves contact between biological and adoptive parents and

sometimes between biological parents and the adopted child. So it is a very very loose definition when we say super loose yeah when we say open adoption like amongst ourselves we're talking about a lot more openness definitely like the child having some kind of relationship or contact right but that is the

dictionary definition. Yeah and I mean I'm reflecting back to and I know we've shared this on the podcast before but so the first time we really considered what open adoption was and what that would mean to us and without knowing and without the adoptee being the focus it's can be a really scary thought if you're if you're really thinking about your own prerogative and it's about you as an

adoptive parent open adoption can sound pretty scary. Absolutely yeah and so one of the important things we need to do first I think is shift our mindset and think about the child not ourselves right we're thinking about what they need and how we can help. Yeah so we're gonna look at some academic research don't worry we're not gonna be boring but that will help us focus on the adoptee and look at two different aspects of adoption both structural and

communicative open adoption or openness. Do you want to maybe briefly describe what both of those are? Yeah absolutely and also we'll have some references in our show notes if you want to look up any of these different studies some of them are older but they're really the groundwork that helps us understand open

adoption as we know it today. So structural openness involves sharing biographical information so there can be in-person contact with biological family it can range from whatever I like it could be letters it could be visits it could be yeah there's some kind of yeah there's contact information is shared and there's some kind of contact. Some type of connection between adoptive parents and biological parents or adoptee and biological parents and that

could be that could look different in different situations. Yep and then communicative openness that involves more of the transparency and open dialogue regarding adoption within the adoptive and maybe also biological relationships right so in the adoptive family there's a transparent open conversation you can ask questions like the adopted child is comfortable and free to raise questions it's not a taboo subject there's an open dialogue there

and this could also translate over to relationships with birth family right like comfortable asking questions about biological family and adoption and yes

yes yes. Great so we have structural openness and communicative openness and each adoptee is going to experience a variety or a kind of like it's on a kind of a continuum in both of those right to how much structural openness they have how much actual communication they have with their birth parents and communicative openness how much they're comfortable and able to talk about their feelings as an adoptee with their adoptive parents with their

biological parents with others that respected people in the community so

there's two there's two different sides. Yeah yeah so since the 1970s structural openness and adoption has become a lot more common especially in Western nations like the United States but how common is it that's a really hard question because there's not really straight data on that but the National Council for Adoption which is a nonprofit advocacy organization they collect some data about private adoptions from each state

since it's not collected federally or other ways and according to them about half to two-thirds of domestic infant adoptions incorporate some degree of openness which is pretty low but then I've also found the number 90% and 95% for the amount of open adoptions but those come from adoption agencies I haven't been able to find a source for where they're getting that so it's really hard to say and remember and remembering that that openness may mean

that adoptive parents have the name of a birth parent right right it might not be an actual contact yes yeah yeah yeah so it's really hard to say exactly how many adoptions are open but it's somewhere in that ballpark a very big ballpark to two-thirds of domestic adoptive or to 90% or 95 right but yeah that can just vary across this large continuum and then when we're looking at other kinds of adoption like international adoption or adoptions from

the child welfare system like foster care it's generally lower so generally domestic infant adoptions are going to have higher rates of openness whereas international adoption and foster care adoptions are going to have lower amounts of openness yeah like structural openness yeah yeah and that's what we're talking about right now yeah because international adoptions we might not know any information right those can be tricky and then child welfare placements

can be challenging as well because of different situations so let's jump into I mean there's a lot of like ins and outs of structural versus communicative openness let's dive into a little bit to why it actually matters why openness actually matters yeah so there's some research by Brzezinski from 2006 and Siegel and Smith from 2012 that indicates that open adoption is preferred over closed adoption because it promotes psychological well-being and adopted

individuals so it's preferred for the sake of the adopted individual yeah and that it's better psychologically and so there's these different levels of openness that we keep talking about but research consistently supports that the practice of both the structural and communicative openness is beneficial to adoptive people so a study by Siegel in 2012 found that the knowledge of one's biological family no matter how often frequency is fosters a sense of

belonging within the adoptive family that's huge yeah that is huge I mean with that there I mean there's so many complexities in the nature of adoption there are some risks to it right I mean yeah right it's just it's so challenging to talk about right because we don't want to be looking at these risks from adoptive parents perspectives we need to be looking at it from adoptive needs and how we can best serve our children right yeah yeah I recently read

an article I guess it was more of a letter on a prominent adoption website from an adoptive parent to other adoptive parents talking about why openness is a bad thing or why you should maybe you should reconsider having openness and almost every one of his claims was focused on his own feelings and not any concern toward really his child which is tragic right but fortunately these risks that we do see sometimes in open adoption are

really heavily outweighed by the positive factors that open adoption can offer it can mitigate so many of the challenges that adopted individuals can face and it offers more support to adoptees yeah and so it's really really worth taking seriously and fostering as much openness as you can and if you can't control the structural openness say that the birth parents of your child don't want contact you can still have an open dialogue and that's the

communicative openness and that's really important yeah we'll dive into that a little bit more here in just a second but structural openness really I mean the definition of open adoption has changed a lot like we mentioned over the last several decades before the 2000s a lot of the research that discussed open adoption referred to only structural adoption which we can see now because like when I'm talking about open adoption I'm usually default thinking

about structural openness right I think that's pretty common yeah so a structurally open adoption supports the adoptees direct contact and relationship with the bio the biological family members right and really really can range from just the biographical information to in-person and like really close types of contact with biological family yeah and some earlier studies of structural openness showed that adoptees are not confused by having open

adoption it doesn't cause confusion it does not cause lower self-esteem and it actually increases self-esteem and causes a more whole sense of self yeah and I remember really early on again kind of as the naive new adoptive parent thinking well is she gonna call you mom and her birth mom mom like what if she used that terminology and I was a scary thing back then I was so worried about what how I was reacting to that but in you know we have four children that were

adopted but I'm thinking of my daughter's experience in in reality she has two mothers right yeah and two fathers right and and in her reality what how she distinguishes what she calls us or them and it's up to her and what it what feels right to her obviously we have a culture in our home where we have different kind of norms what we refer to birth parents as versus versus mom and dad here at home but in reality like where she has two sets of parents we

have different roles we have different responsibilities but we're parents yeah we've talked about how we need to have this mindset shift where we're focusing more on the adopted individual I think it's also important to focus more on the birth parents or the first parents because that's a key part in forming these relationships you know there are actually studies as well that show the adoptive parents demonstrate more empathy toward birth parents and toward

their child and they also feel like they have more secure relationships with their child when they have that structurally open adoption and it's kind of a question to me of like which comes first right like does it does the openness bring more of that empathy and connection or does the empathy and connection bring more openness I imagine it's both like it's a cycle that feeds itself so structural we're gonna kind of transition into communicative here but

they I mean they really do tie together and and as you were saying that I was kind of thinking about you know we have these relationships with birth families and one of the things that we talk about a lot on the podcast is how we talk about them in our homes and with other people and it's so vital and important that we see our children's birth families in the best light possible because our children relate part of their identity to those individuals their birth family

and so that kind of well they come from them yeah it's part of them right and so that kind of brings us to this this thought of communicative adoption how we talk about adoption with an adoptee whether that's in our own homes or with other people that is communicative adoption how we're communicating about adoption yeah and that can really play such a big role some research shows I hesitate to say this because they're both so important structural and

communicative openness are both so vital but research really does show that that communicative openness is so important and possibly a little bit more important than the structural openness because that conversation is so important in developing a healthy identity and strong sense of self well and even as you say that I think the more communicative openness we have in our home mm-hmm it will naturally lead to some level of structural or at least like

encouragement of structural openness right like if it's not possible they're still like it's because you're building empathy right it's this connection and fostering like showing your child that you love all of them you love their birth family it's you're right I think it's kind of a chicken and the egg where they both are so important to each other so there is some really cool research from Kohler it's in 2002 that found that adolescent adoptees who felt like their

family had more open communication with their birth family reported higher levels of trust toward their parents and felt less alienated from them and reported better overall family functioning which it's intuitive but it's so important yeah yeah yeah and then Brzezinski in 2005 found that a communicative openness may be a more important predictor of adoptees self esteem than structural kind of like you mentioned yeah that's really yeah what

that's coming from so communicative openness is so important and it's something that adoptive parents you have complete control over right we really encourage structural openness I feel like it is so important but sometimes it's not possible sometimes we can't have the degree of openness that would like but we can always have communicative openness you can always have that open dialogue yeah and with with technology the way that it is today like our

daughter's birth mother moved away like move states halfway across the country and we still have structural openness with with or between them and between us and her I mean Polo's been a great tool we also see her parents grandma and grandpa that live not too far from us so that structural openness is just really important to you there's so many ways that you can maintain that structural openness yeah yeah I just have to share this so our daughter recently had a

birthday and we planned to go out to dinner for birthday and because of other circumstances friends weren't able to come with the eclipse actually people were traveling kind of funny but in the end it ended up being our immediate family the six of us limits parents and then two sets of unrelated biological one of our sons yeah biological grandparents but their grandparents to all the kids and then and then our daughter's birth mother's parents and so

those grandparents that are her birth grandparents yeah so I was just sitting at this table and the waitress actually took a picture for us and I just looked at all of the support and love around that table and then we were missing a lot of people in our open adoption family Bush it's not really a tree but I just I just kind of sat there thinking like there there's so much love here for that girl and the rest then our three boys like it was it was just

awesome it really is beautiful it's amazing to see because I feel like all parents feel inadequate at times or a lot of the time but that extra support it really benefits our children and it benefits us as parents and it's just amazing to see yeah so open adoption can really bless your family yeah so we we support and want to foster as much communicative adoption sorry communicative openness and structural openness for our adoptees sake now there

are some practical things as adoptive parents that we have to do and know and think through and some of that deals with maybe some of the fears that we have around open adoption so we would like to consider a couple questions that we've heard and that we maybe we felt ourselves to some degree about openness openness and what it actually can look and feel like yeah so people often will ask how you can have a safe structurally open adoption if there's

any substance use or exposure or maybe some mental health challenges with the birth family yeah I think this starts with some really clear communication up front just harkening back to that letter that I read from that from the adoptive father he said something like we found this because it was one of the top things when we were searching for open adoption on the internet like it was one of the very top it was crazy but he said it was the perfect match

and then his reasons for it being perfect was that this particular expectant mother wasn't using drugs and didn't seem to have any emotional concerns and it there was no conversation about perfect match meaning I have a strong relationship with this person and know that they're going to be a part of my child's life forever and I know that we can navigate this together there was no there was nothing like that it was just again about the birth about

the adoptive parent getting what quote-unquote he wanted in a child that wasn't exposed to drugs or potentially potentially having hereditary emotional issues and that hurt my heart hurt my heart so bad but substance exposure is a real challenge in adoption and honestly the science is kind of hard to access right because generally children who are exposed to substances and utero like stay with their biological family and it's really hard for researchers to know

what is coming from environmental factors what's from exposure and utero and so that's really hard to know but we do have a few resources on open

adoption open adoption project org from dr. Jeremy Stone who is an adoptive father and he did do some research into or at least presented some information for different types of substance use in utero and what potentially that could mean so if you're interested or have concerns about that go check that out on the website but going kind of kind of back sorry circling back to our question of like is it safe for the adoptee and what happens if it's not a safe

situation all right so first of all I think it's important to consider a scenario where say that you decide it's not safe to have any contact at all and down the road your child has a genetic predisposal toward addiction and it's something you've never talked about they have never seen someone struggle with it and overcome it and it's going to be a lot harder I think without that background and it's some studies do show that these different addictions and

challenges can be hereditary yeah so there's there's a level of communicative adoption that needs to sorry communicative openness that needs to happen around some of those issues where in a compassionate way right like we never talk smack about birth parents but but helping them understand that they may be pretty the predisposed to behaviors or health challenges right that are genetically passed down so that's one side but yeah and that they need to

be extra cautious and vigilant yeah yeah but the structural side yeah we we have friends and we've been involved in these conversations where up front and this kind of where I tangent off to that birth father that adoptive father but upfront you need to be really clear in your communication about what type of openness you want what type of relationships you want there are some boundaries that you need to set and if you know that they have experience with

you know with drug abuse or substance abuse then upfront saying we love you we want you to be part of our family when you're not clean we don't want you in our home yeah have these really direct conversations about what expectations are but also address it with compassion right like if this parent is having a hard time getting clean they can still send a video for your child it's okay and you can let them see this video of birth mom saying how much they love them

or I don't know like you can find ways to still connect and support them and show them love and there is research that shows that connection is so important especially in helping people heal from addictions and so I think it's just so important to address this compassionately to remember to keep a child-centric and it's okay to have boundaries we need to have boundaries yeah we need to keep our kids safe but we can also balance this with love and

compassion and we can find ways to make things yeah and I want to add a huge caveat here that this is one of the common questions that is asked about those that are struggling with addiction by no means are we saying that the majority or even a big portion of birth parents yes isn't yeah we're just addressing some common questions yeah and and so I would love to dispel that misconception so then there's also some struggles with social media that people

have like how do we navigate social media connections with birth family like do we connect on social media do we interact how do we feel if they're posting pictures of our child it's their child too some people get upset if this if someone else refers to their child as my child you know it's both of your child so yeah these are conversations to have things to think about and a lot of these conversations need to happen before yeah before papers are signed it's

important and if if it's already like if you've already sent papers it's not like it's too late you can still have these conversations but I think it's really important to have them before papers are signed if possible so that you can be sure this is a good fit so you can have everything out in the open it's it's just so important to keep things ethical and yeah and one thing I thought about this you know what we have a lot of connections with lots of birth family but

with our youngest his his birth parents were connected on social media and we use like a Facebook messenger to have we have a smaller group with just Lena and I and them and we share fun updates and cute pictures and stuff like that but we also have a group that has you know her grandparents and mom and you know yeah way more and a lot more that we also include and share information and updates with and it's so fun because it's a great tool yeah and they just kind of

pour on more love and kind of fawn over our kids which is really fun so fun yeah so one thing we've chatted about a little before in the past is that it can be really hard for birth parents to let you know when they might want more contact when they're feeling like like they need more right yeah and so we need to be sure that we're making it safe for them we want to treat them the way we would want to be treated if our roles were reversed right so this level of

communicative openness that we have with with biological family members yes is really important and we want people to feel safe we want people to feel like they can share obviously respect is really important here but on both sides we want people to share their feelings and if we've created a scenario where that's not ideal then there's gonna be feelings of resentment and perhaps anger and frustration that will eventually come out in some way and so we I mean we

need to do what we can to avoid that absolutely all right so hopefully by talking about some of these issues and similar issues we can help assuage some of these concerns and we can better understand how open adoption can help us through these challenges how it's not really a burden or like a hurdle to cross but how it can actually help us get through different struggles and adoption relationships yeah any other like frequently asked questions that

we've heard that we might want to address yeah so we have heard quite a few people say that they felt pressured to have an open adoption because they were told or like assumed that they wouldn't be able to have a placement yep if they didn't say they're willing to have an open option and maybe some of that pressure is coming almost that pressure is coming from an adoption agency or but that's a great yeah and it's great that they're pushing open

adoption but these people don't understand what open adoption is why it matters and so they're agreeing to it but not with their heart and not with this understanding yeah and so there's some research about this and it's wild this is from McDonald 2011 so the way in which open adoption education is presented seems to really impact how openness is practiced within an adoptive family so when adoptive parents choose to have higher structural

openness because of an agency or a social worker prompting that rather than choosing it for the well-being of the child then they are significantly less likely to maintain that openness two years post placement so basically it's less likely that they're gonna stick to it if they don't like feel that for lack of a better word like conversion to open adoption yeah hence we're here and we feel really passionately about this we know for our like our children are in

better places and we've talked with so many adoptees on the podcast that have benefited so much from both of these types of openness that it just kind of boggles my mind that it's not that is in some cases it's not even considered right it's really heartbreaking and I think we've talked quite a bit on the podcast over the last few months about structural and communicative openness but we realized we hadn't really done a deep dive into them and so that's part

of where this episode was coming from also wanting to address some of these frequently asked questions but it's so important right that we are I feel like I'm quoting I've never watched the Bachelor of the Bachelorette guys except for a couple of episodes a long time ago and all I remember is they were always talking about being there for the right reasons this is such a stupid tangent but you need to adopt for the right reasons and I feel like I'm

quoting that stupid show now yeah but right reasons right yeah okay we've talked about a lot of these but like adoption does not cure infertility you will still be infertile if that is the reason that you're adopting emotionally you have to deal with that then one does not solve the other right knowing that this child this human is connected biologically to other people and will most likely from all of the interactions that we've had have some level of

curiosity questions concern about their origin story mm-hmm it will come back to that and it will the picture will be painted of what actually happened yeah and so if you do anything in this and ended up in an adoption process whether that's an infant or later on in a child's life it's coming if they're being adopted out of like the foster care or welfare system anything that is going to be painted badly of like you in the experience like you need to think

about your actions imagine that your child will have access to like everything that you've ever said or done and I don't know maybe they will maybe we'll have time travel in a few years but but no we want to make sure that we're practicing ethically we want to make sure that we won't have these embarrassments and regrets about our ethical conduct and adoption because it really matters and that makes adopting a lot more work it is adoptive parents

it is and if you if you're wanting the easy way out and you're trying to say okay you should never be the easy way out yeah just so that you're pacifying caseworkers or an adoption agency that is not the right reason to do an open adoption but again we feel really passionately for the of a soapbox for the adoptees sake yeah that openness is the best mm-hmm and the research really shows it as we've been talking about right like the open adoption is so

important because it helps adoptees and that should be our entire entire purpose in our goal yeah all right well thank you so much for listening to us rant a little bit we're a little soapboxy about this because we we really care and so our invitation to you no matter who you are in the adoption constellation is to foster openness structural openness or communicative openness or the adoptee sake right like we want to do both and as much as we can for the sake of our

children yep absolutely all right well I think that's gonna wrap up this episode of the open adoption project but we'll be back in a couple of weeks with more content and yeah we're really grateful you're here yeah listening to us soapbox and we just want to remind you that Lanette recently published the openness guide for prospective adoptive parents and this really is kind of the what you should know about open the open adoption as you're going into it the reason that

we published this guy that Lanette I mean Lanette started this probably two plus years ago and the reason that we came out and published it now is that so we can support the podcast moving forward right like it takes a lot of time there's licenses and you know other fees that that go into producing the content the people helping us out and so the proceeds that we get it goes right back to the podcast right back to the podcast and if it ever gets to the point

where there's more than the podcast needs it's going to go into further helping educate adoptive parents or future adoptive parents the adoption community at large so that we can foster the best situations for all of our adoptees in our lives yep absolutely all right well thank you so much for being here and we'll be back soon you