Copin’ with Open – Open Adoption: Is it worth it?

By Michael Colberg

             I recently met with the parents of a child who had come into their family through adoption. They were having a rough time at home and attributed it to having made the mistake of having an open adoption. Their child’s relationship with her birthmother was causing, they felt, a lot of acting-out and, they feared, unnecessary stress. They wanted to know what to do. Would they do more damage by closing the adoption? As I talked to them I realized that there are a lot of adoptive parents out there who might be wrestling with many of the same feelings.

Open adoption has been touted as being better for the child. There are books written espousing it’s virtues and adoptive parents are encouraged to do all that they can to make the fact of adoption something that is an acknowledged part of their family’s history. Over the past several years I’ve also noticed that families involved with open adoptions have to deal with a lot of extra work and often a lot of extra stress. Is this form of adoption, which is becoming more common, worth it?

I am an adoptive parent and an adoption professional. My family has an open relationship with my daughter’s maternal birth-family and a closed adoption with her paternal birth-family. Professionally, I work as a therapist seeing many birth-parents, adoptive parents and adopted children, teenagers and adults. This article is written based upon my experience as both a professional and a parent. I hope it helps the many adoptive parents out there who are trying to do a good job, are confused about what that means and could use some help.

The movement toward openness in adoption grew out of an acknowledgement of the problems present for adopted persons who grew up with the cut-offs present in closed adoption, the pain caused birth-parents who went through their lives not knowing whether their biological children were safe and well and the trauma caused adoptive parents whose adolescents engaged in risky behaviors as they tried to make some sense of who they were and where they came from.

The individual rights movements gave pregnant women/couples more say in making adoption plans. Informal arrangements were made between people wanting to become parents and people needing to place their children. Eventually agencies sprang up that created models for helping people interested in open adoption to navigate the placement process. Most of this activity was in the private sector. Books were written and studies were conducted. I myself sat on New York City’s Adoption Options Taskforce which looked into the efficacy of using open adoption as a way of moving children through the foster system more rapidly. Today, openness is practiced in most areas of the country, in both the public and private sectors and in many different forms.

But is it helping to create child-centered adoption? By this I mean, does it help children to better understand who they are and where they belong?

The answer, I believe, depends on how well the adults understand what open adoption is, the purpose it serves and what the normal developmental challenges are that face families maintaining open adoptions.

Open adoption means different things to different people. For some it means that the birth and adoptive parents met before the baby was born and placed. They may have a way of contacting each other through an intermediary, but the child does not have a relationship with their birth-parents. For others, letters and pictures are exchanged at regular intervals. For other families, the birth-families are involved and are an ongoing presence – some might say - in a way similar to other extended family members. Sometimes open relationships are conducted per an agreement made to follow the model proposed by the adoption agency used while at other times the two sets of parents work things out on their own.  For others, visits consist of someone taking the child to a designated place at mandated times where they have a visit, sometimes supervised, with their birth-parent. In my opinion, whatever the form, open adoption exists only when the child is able to know their biological parent. If they do not, the adoption, from the child’s perspective, remains closed.

What purpose does open adoption serve? For the adoptive family the purpose of open adoption is to enhance a child’s sense of ownership over their own history, to build in the child a feeling of being valued by their birth-family though they are being parented by their adoptive family and to create an arena in which the developmental challenges facing members of the adoptive family can be most safely negotiated.  What form of openness offers the child the most opportunity while causing adoptive parents the least amount of stress? In my opinion, this must be decided on a situation by situation basis.  It does not make sense to fit the people into the adoption but rather to create an adoption that meets the needs of the people involved. One hopes that it is meeting the needs of the child that ultimately best meets the needs of the parents.

How is this done? We must recognize that adoption is an ongoing set of relationships. These relationships are complicated and at times conflicted. They are filled with love and with anger, they are filled with need and with rejection. They exist in reality and in fantasy. But they always exist. Birth parents, adoptive parents and adopted children remain in relationship forever. We have no choice in the matter. We do have a choice about whether to have a relationship in fact or relegate the relationship to our fantasy lives. One of the lessons learned by the pain caused those who suffered through closed adoption is that secrecy creates shame. It is always better for a child to feel able to experience their truth than to feel forced to live in a world inhabited by shadows, fantasies and hidden desires. But, children need our care and they need to experience truth in a way that is at least endurable and hopefully much more than that. They need to be made to feel safe. After-all, that is our primary job. If we are not comfortable with the way things are arranged, our children sense it and they feel less safe. We need to create adoptions that we can live with.

But, some say, our child is so much more upset and confused because of having an open adoption. How can we be comfortable with that? To this I say, look at the bigger picture. You are speaking to the fact that they are struggling and not to where the struggle leads. One of the main jobs facing any adopted person is to make sense of relationships. What does it mean to trust? Is it OK to trust? How and why are boundaries established? This is hard work and open adoption changes the way that the work is done. In closed adoption, the child grows up expected to behave “as if” adoption was an event – an incidental moment in their lives. It is not until they are adolescents who are wrestling with the complicated issues of identity formation that the fact of adoption returns to play a visible role.

In open adoption the timetable is different. Things are not so neat and boundaries are not always so clearly marked. The adopted child has a relationship with their birthparents while they are growing up. If the relationship begins from the outset of the adoption, the child grows up knowing their birthparent before they are truly able to understand what being adopted means. This scenario has its pluses and minuses. On the one hand, the child has an opportunity to know, in the deepest part of their being that they were not “thrown away”. They also have to make sense of why their birthparent is not parenting them. They may, at some point feel that it is because of some piece of who they are and they may wrestle with issues of low self-esteem – either acting out or worse, acting in.

If a birthparent comes back into the picture at a later date or if the “openness” is mandated by the court, different challenges are present. The adopted child may become confused about where their allegiance is supposed to lie. They may become angry with their adopted parents who, they feel, are keeping them from their “real” parents. It may also mean that it is with their adoptive parents, the parents who are caring for them day in and day out that they feel safe enough to express their anger and confusion. They may act out wondering if this relationship too is subject to breaking down – if they are still at risk. They live through a period that can, simply put, be not a lot of fun for either themselves or their parents.

If this is the case, why not defer opening an adoption until the child is able to understand and handle it. I’ll try to explain why I do not feel that this is a useful question to ask. Open adoption can be very confusing and disruptive to children during their mid childhood years. This is not something that adoptive parents expect. We were told that open adoption makes things better for the child and we took it to mean that it made things easier for parents too. As we are discovering, this is not always the case. It is not easy to watch our children struggle and behave towards us as though we are responsible for their suffering. The fact of the matter is that this is our job – remember? Our primary job is to help our children remain safe and it is safer for them to struggle while they are still in our care than defer all of their suffering and acting out to a time when they are going out into the world on their own.

Confusion, anger and sadness are all feelings that come with making sense of having been placed for adoption. They are a part of coming to terms with having been moved out of one family and into another. Having an open adoption accelerates a child’s search for self. Although this complicates childhood, children have less power to hurt themselves in sixth grade than in twelfth grade. We can keep them safer when they begin to engage in their search for identity during their younger years. It is also immeasurably helpful for a child to grow up knowing that their birthparents care for them enough to stay connected.

Most aware adoptive parents dread adolescence. We’ve heard stories and dread it’s onset. Risky behaviors, residential programs, runaways. Some of the running away is a search for belonging. It is not just a running away but a running toward something that is intangible. Open adoption, in my opinion, changes the topography of a child’s search for identity. By the time that they become adolescents, the issues are not new to them because they have been aware of them since they were children. They have experienced them out in different ways at different points in their development. They do not have to run away during adolescence. They know where they come from and they know that they are home.

A word about the quality of the relationship present between the birth parent and the adopted child. Ironically, the more compromised and/or dysfunctional the birth parent is, the easier it is for the child to understand why they have been placed for adoption. The more positive and supportive the relationship is, the harder it may be, during middle childhood, for the adopted child to understand why the adoption needed to take place. It may take more sophistication and maturity in these instances for an adopted child to come to an awareness of why an adoption took place. The reasons are more abstract. Put another way, ironically, the easier it is for the adoptive parents to have a stress-free relationship with the birth parents, the harder it may be for the adopted child. The more stressful and disruptive the open relationship is, the more concrete may be the reasons for having needed to create an adoption.

Finally, it is important to a child’s sense of well-being that if birth and adoptive parents are going to have a relationship, they find a way to create a positive relationship. This is most easily done with the help of a trained adoption professional. These are very complicated relationships and our children benefit when we get it right. It can make it harder to get to know somebody when you sleep with them on the first date. You’ve made yourself too vulnerable in one way while remaining complete strangers in another. Open adoption is a little like that. You’ve become profoundly connected to a stranger. This needs to be acknowledged and the formation of a relationship should include this awareness.

The relationship between birth and adoptive parents must be one of consciousness. It is not a casual relationship and must be treated with the respect of any other important, and sometimes conflicted relationship. Generally speaking, when birth and adoptive parents understand that they are both wanting the child to be well and whole, a foundation is laid for them to work to find common ground. No matter how good their adoptive home, adoption leaves children feeling rejected. The only people who can show them that they have not been discarded are the people who made the decision to place the child for adoption. This is a significant contribution to the child’s being able to feel valuable. By the same token the contribution made by the adoptive parents, the day to day parenting is essential to establishing who the child becomes. Each set of parents has a unique contribution to make and it is a professional’s job to help the adults be all of who they are capable of being. In the end, we want to be able to look back and say, this has all been worth it and, for our family, we did it the right way.