Unbalanced Contact- between brelatives and arelatives?

In what way can this damage them? Is the birthfamily inappropriate with them? I know you to be a spiritual person. My personal spiritual belief on this is that God wants us to nurture and deepen the relationships in our lives. He wants us, as parents, to nurture the relationships that our children have in their lives in whatever way we can. You have the opportunity to build deep and lasting relationships with birthfamily. There is nothing wrong with that. Trying to "even" things out by cutting back on contact, IMHO, is like cutting off one big toe because the other is missing. It doesn't really balance things out, it just creates more loss. It is far better to find interesting ways to connect with family far away. There is a great website on building long distance relationships with children. PM me and I'll send it to you. Or google "Long distance grandparenting". I think that you will feel better adding to your life instead of subtracting.

I completely agree with the importance of building those relationships with our kids birthfamilies...but my question is how MUCH...emphasis should we place on their birthfamilies. What bothers me is that "THEY" are the ones more present in their lives and as my children grow up THEY will be seen as grandma and grandpa, they will be in MOST of their memories. All this at a time when they should be completely attaching to our family and growing those bonds and memories with them as their main family unit. I always imagined our childrens birthfamilies would be a special "part" of their life....not the majority of it. I want their main connections and memories to be with our family, our traditions, beliefs, etc. I guess I feel like such an important part of me and my husbands lives are missing from our childrens lives..and I want to share that with them, more than anything. When our kids look back to their childhoods I don't want them to only remember our relatives as the relatives that live far away...and the birthfamilies as the grandparents that have always been there for them. I know God has a purpose and plan for everything. I know we had to re-enlist and that in doing so we will have to stay here for at least the next couple of years. Maybe this is his plan that we continue to work on building these family relationships, while we are here, maybe our kids will really need that strong foundation to always know that they were loved as they come to understand adoption. It's just not at all what "I" dreamed my life would look like and how I would have a family, or raise them. God certianly keeps tearing my plan up to pieces and showing me a different way....it always turns out to be a wonderful way. But right now,it just hurts to not be able to share "myself" with my kids....I feel like I'm getting lost in it all, and that my kids will never have some of the same experiences I had growing up around my family members and my husbands. I know when you get married you incorporate the two lives, families, traditions. It's similiar with open adoption. Only in our case we're adding 4 different sets of birthfamilies. I just kinda feel like NO ONE else in an open adoption even comes close to the dynamics we have in our situation. I've never heard of a couple adopting and then raising their kids with their childrens birthrelatives the main focus in their lives. Especially in a case where the children were removed from their first home and the parental rigths were terminated. Maybe it would be easier if circumstances were different, but we can't leave our kids alone with their birth relatives, we can't just have them take them out for a couple hours or to sleep over at grandma's house. Our visits are always with my husband or I present(or both). I could never at this point even consider an unsupervised visit with any of their birthrelatives. So yes while they do have "grandma's" close by they can't even have "normal" experiences with their grandparents that they do have nearby. I don't know if any of that helped to explain my feelings or not...I wish i knew someone who was in a similiar situation, who might understand how I'm feeling.

I think I get what you are saying. It is not a 100% healthy birth family(s) and you want to instill your values, morals ect... and your bio familie's presense rounds that all out. But you hardly get to visit. You want equally strong bonds formed in your bio family and you want to show your children life inside a non dysfunctional family.Then they can emulate that and become healthy adults some day.We were military too.WE are still making up for lost time.Maybe you can plan an annual visit and talk about it a lot,do books similar to life books and maybe get a web cam also to get more visual contact.Do your folks have computers?(mine don't-they are in their 80's).

None of our families really "get into" the whole Instant messaging and webcams. The only one that has one is my sister in law, she is also the only one we are able to send IM's to. I wish they did that would make things a lot more fun and interesting for the kids to help them get to know each other. We do meet with my husbands side of the family about once a year(they actually paid for us to come visit them this christmas which was so nice). But my family is in a couple different states and we only get to see them every 2-3 years. Hopefully we'll get to visit a lot of my family this summer when we take our next trip. Some of my family has only ever met my oldest son. So this time they'll be able to meet all 4.

This is the crux of it. The thing of it is our children will not have the same childhood as you and your husband has had. What you might want to consider is making a list of all the things that were important about those family contacts and try to find a way to capture them. I grew up in a family of six. I have two kids I am raising. How do I recreate the warm chaos I grew up in? I have made my house the kid house. You would think I had six kids with the amount of traffic we get. My family meets for a week every year. The cousins (my kids and the nieces and nephew) got to know each other deeply that way. My son was raised this way. He's now 22. Granted, we are a pretty functional family. They did trust me to have him stay with me. (Although the first time he spent the night he was 10.) If you ever want to chat, pm me and I'll send you my number.

I am a new adoptive mom to an adorable 4 month old boy. My own father has not yet seen the baby because he lives in Florida for the winter and is "too busy" with golf tournaments etc. On the other hand, my son's bgrandparents have seen him 3 times, brought him gifts etc. They have been very respectful and refer to themselves by their first names not grandma and grandpa. They have supported me and my dh wholly and are wonderful to us. My own dad is a nice guy, but his grandkids are not a priority for him. I am beginning to accept the fact that my son's bgrandparents might end up beinbg more influential in his life than my dad, and that makes me sad. but frankly, they are better with kids than my dad is. (my dad is exactly the same with my brother and sister's bio kids..he hasn't seen my brother's 7 month old yet either) I know my situation is not the same as yours, but I could relate to the topic. I agree with the previous poster about prioritizing what traditions you want to carry on. Lastly, I know your children are going to grow up and thank you for so selflessly embracing their flawed but loving bio families. You are giving them the gift of a stable loving home aznd parents who love them and helping to minimize the feelings of being failed by their bio families. It's a lot of hard work. Bless you for it.