Having birthparents involved can seem like an unnecessary complication, especially after a long struggle with infertility. However, deciding which avenue of adoption to take is going to be your first actual parenting decision.
Focusing on what is in the best interest of your future child, even if the answer stretches your comfort zone, should be your priority.
Open Adoption will empower your child to feel confident and proud in telling his or her adoption story of how you became a family. Open Adoption will allow your child to grow up feeling like they know who they are.
Avoiding the Consequences Of Secrecy
Without answers, their imaginations will fill in the gaps. Children naturally develop fantasies to explain things they don’t understand or have answers for. Accordingly, children who do not know their birthmothers may have exaggerated fantasies that their birthmother is a princess in a far off land, or in the other direction, fear that she’s someone very awful and that’s why they aren’t allowed to know her.
A child who is raised in an environment of secrecy receives the unspoken message that the subject of adoption is taboo, and they will continue to have unanswered questions multiply inside them.
Open Communication
Alternatively, if a child grows up in an environment where their birthparents and adoption story is easily part of conversation, it can be something they ask about without fear of upsetting their parents. Through their relationship with their birthmother, they can also hear from her directly about the reasons she sought out an adoption plan and about the story of how she “just knew” that these were the people meant to be the parents of her baby. They will hear from her how confident she is of the decision, which will be reassuring to the child. (And of course it is nice for you to hear as well!)
Children Will Always Be Related To Their Birthparents
This is a basic fact. Not allowing them to have an open relationship can send a message that something must be bad about their birthparent or shameful about being adopted, or why else would they have to be kept from them? The obvious question that follows is, “I know I came from her, could I have inherited whatever it is that is bad?”
Ultimately, Open Adoption brings peace of mind to birthparents, adoptive parents and, most importantly, to children.
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