A beginner’s guide to openness in adoption
Whether you’re an adoptee, a birth parent, an adoptive or hopeful parent, or you work with families, this page walks through the ideas we come back to in almost every episode. About a 10-minute read.
What is open adoption?
In an open adoption, a child’s birth family and adoptive family know who each other are and stay connected in some way.
It isn’t one arrangement. It can be shared names and medical history, letters and photos, video calls, or birth grandparents at every birthday. And it can change as a child grows and asks for more, or less.
Most of all, it’s for the adoptee. Openness keeps a child connected to their story, their heritage and the people they come from.
Openness isn’t a trend. It’s a return.
Most adoptions had some openness until the early-to-mid 1900s. Secrecy and sealed records came later, and some of those policies are still on the books.
From Ep. 103, “Why Open Adoption?” →Two kinds of openness
Researchers describe openness in two ways. Adoptees need both, and only one of them is ever fully in your control.
Contact between an adoptee and their birth family.
How much contact is possible depends on everyone involved, and it can change over the years.
- Shared names and medical history
- Letters, photos and texts
- Calls and video chats
- Visits, birthdays and holidays together
- Keep the promises you make, even small ones
- Plan for contact to grow and change as your child does
- Let your child help decide as they get older
- Use whatever tools actually work for both families
How freely a family talks about adoption.
This is possible in every adoption, even when contact isn’t. It’s the part adoptive parents fully control.
- Questions are always welcome
- Birth family is spoken of with respect
- Big feelings, including grief, are allowed
- The story is the adoptee’s to share
- Talk about adoption early and often, in age-appropriate ways
- Answer honestly, even when you don’t know everything
- Make room for mixed feelings without taking them personally
- Ask before sharing your child’s story with others
“Communicative openness is even more clearly related to outcomes.”
What the research says
Knowing about their birth family, however often contact happens, helps adoptees feel they belong in their adoptive family.
Siegel, 2012Teen adoptees whose families communicated openly with birth family reported more trust in their parents and felt less alienated.
Kohler et al., 2002How openly a family talks about adoption may predict an adoptee’s self-esteem more than how much contact there is.
Brodzinsky, 2005Discussed in Ep. 103, “Why Open Adoption?” Full citations are in the episode’s show notes.
Myths & facts
Tap a myth to see the fact.
Key terms
- Adoptee
- A person who was adopted, at any age. Adoptees are the experts on their own experience.
- Birth parent (first parent)
- A child’s biological mother or father. Ask each person which term they prefer.
- Adoption constellation
- Everyone touched by an adoption: adoptees, birth families, adoptive families, and the people who support them.
- Structural openness
- Contact and shared information between an adoptee, their birth family and their adoptive family.
- Communicative openness
- How freely and warmly a family talks about adoption, birth family and the feelings that come with them.
- Disenfranchised grief
- Grief that society doesn’t recognize as valid. Adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents can all carry it. Ep. 100
Your listening path
- 1Ep. 67 · Open Adoption 101, Part 1What open adoption is, why it matters, and how to build relationships that last.
- 2Ep. 68 · Open Adoption 101, Part 2Openness in practice, from our own family and from adoptees we’ve interviewed.
- 3Ep. 103 · Why Open Adoption?The research on structural and communicative openness.
- 4Ep. 95 · Things I Want You to Know: Adoptee PerspectivesAdoptees in their own words.
- 5Ep. 58 · Adoptee-Centered LanguageHow the words we use shape the story.