Pregnant and Thinking About Adoption: Staying in Touch With Your Child After Adoption

This information was taken directly from Child Welfare Information Gateway

Staying in Touch With Your Child After Adoption

Today, most domestic infant adoptions involve some level of “openness.” Open adoption allows birth parents to know and have contact with the adoptive parents and possibly the child who has been adopted. After the adoption, the birth mother (and possibly the birth father and other family members) and the adoptive family can communicate in various ways—letters, phone calls, social media, emails, texts, video calls, and/or visits. In some cases, the adoption agency may serve as an intermediary to pass information between birth families and adoptive families. The type and frequency of communication will depend on the choices and needs of the people involved and often changes over time.13

Research points to many benefits of openness for children who have been adopted and their birth mothers. Through direct contact with birth family members, openness can help your child learn more about his or her personal history, family background, medical information, and the reasons for placement. As a result, your child can benefit from a stronger sense of identity, self-worth, and connection. In addition, birth mothers often report a greater sense of control in an open adoption and comfort from knowing that their child is healthy and cared for.

Many birth mothers in open adoptions also have been shown to adjust better after the adoption.14 Some birth parents feel that they would prefer not to have contact with their child after the adoption and may arrange for a “closed” adoption. In closed adoptions, the birth parents and the adoptive parents do not know each other, although the adoptive parents may receive some nonidentifying information about the birth parents (such as a medical history). These types of adoptions are becoming less common as the benefits of openness are increasingly recognized. In addition, as social media make it easier for people who have been adopted and birth family members to find each other, it is becoming harder to keep an adoption closed.

If you decide to make an adoption plan, talk to your adoption counselor or adoption lawyer about how much contact you are interested in having with your child’s adoptive parents and your child. You and the prospective adoptive parents should work out in advance how you will keep in touch, how often, who will be involved, and how you will go about changing the arrangements if desired in the future. Sometimes these arrangements will be formalized into a written postadoption contact agreement.15

Keep in mind: Postadoption agreements can be useful tools in setting common expectations and should be filed before the adoption is finalized. However, such agreements may not be enforceable by law if the adoptive or birth parents change their minds and decide to drop communication.

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Resource

Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2014). Are you pregnant and thinking about adoption? Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau.

Citations

13 For more information about open adoption, see Open Adoption: Could Open Adoption be the Best Choice for You and Your Baby at www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/openadoption.cfm and Openness in Adoption: Building Relationships Between Adoptive and Birth Families at www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/f_openadopt.cfm.

14 For a summary of openness research see Openness in Adoption: From Secrecy and Stigma to Knowledge and Connections on the Donaldson Adoption Institute website at adoptioninstitute.org/publications/openness-in-adoption-from-secrecy-and-stigma-to-knowledge-and-connections/.

15 For more information, see Postadoption Contact Agreements Between Birth and Adoptive Families at www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws_policies/statutes/cooperative.cfm.