Benefits of Open Adoption

This information was taken directly from Child Welfare Information Gateway

Adoption professionals and researchers 5 point to important benefits of open adoption for adopted children, birth parents, and adoptive parents. Since every adoption is different and the situations of the involved parties vary, these benefits may not apply to every adoption.

Benefits for Adopted Children and Youth

Children and youth who have been adopted naturally have questions about their background and personal histories (Who am I? Who do I look like? Why was I adopted?). Through openness, adopted children and youth gain access to birth parents, and possibly grandparents and siblings, which removes the need to search and helps provide needed answers to compelling questions. Regular contact during childhood creates a base of familiarity and normalcy for adopted children so that they may connect more easily with their birth parents throughout their lives.

Open adoption allows adopted children and youth to:

Establish a sense of connection and belonging
Develop a deeper understanding of their identity and a greater sense of wholeness
Gain access to important genetic and medical information
Preserve connections not only to family but also to their cultural and ethnic heritage
Develop a better understanding for the reasons for placement, which can lessen feelings of abandonment and increase a sense of belonging
Relate to birth family members as real people with strengths and flaws rather than idealized (or overly negative) fantasies
Increase the number of supportive adults in their lives
Create a foundation for lifelong relationships

Benefits for Birth Parents

While birth parents of a child placed for adoption may continue to feel loss and grief over the course of their lives, openness can help them deal with these powerful emotions. Openness from the earliest stages of the adoption process can help birth parents gain a sense of control over the decision-making related to placement of their child. Over time, openness also may help birth parents to:

Gain peace of mind and comfort in knowing how their child is doing
Develop personal relationships with the adoptive parents and the child as he or she grows
Become more satisfied with the adoption process

Benefits for Adoptive Parents

While openness is becoming a more common practice, many people seeking to adopt (as well as their families, friends, and co-workers) are not familiar with open adoption, and many maintain fears and false impressions of the concept. Once in an open adoption, however, most adoptive parents find a comfort level with their arrangements.

Open adoption often allows adoptive parents to:

Build a healthy relationship with their child’s birth family and provide lifelong connections for their child
Gain direct access to birth family members who can answer their child’s questions
Improve their understanding of their child’s history
Develop more positive attitudes about their child’s birth parents
Increase their confidence and sense of permanency in parenting

Openness Is Not for Everyone

In some cases, ongoing contact between a birth and adoptive family is not in a child’s best interest. This may be true when a parent has mental or behavioral issues and is unable to maintain a healthy relationship or respect appropriate boundaries with a child. In some instances, contact might result in additional trauma for a child who has already been victimized by abuse or neglect.

In addition, some parents are comfortable only with closed adoption. For example, a birth mother may have strong needs for privacy or may feel that confidentiality will help her to move on with her life. Adoptive parents may have concerns over interacting with the birth family or may want to have greater control over the information that their child receives.

Resource

Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2013). Openness in adoption: Building relationships between adoptive and birth families. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau.

Citation

5 See, for example, the research conducted under the Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Project (http://www.psych.umass.edu/adoption/) and the review presented in Openness in Adoption: From Secrecy and Stigma to Knowledge and Connections (http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/research/2012_03_openness.php)