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Elsewhere in my travels someone made a comment that to them an Open Adoption is equivalent to co-parenting. Now I think there are lots of reasons that a particular individual might not be comfortable with an open adoption, but this is one that makes no sense to me at all. To the extent that parenting is defined as making the day to day decisions on how to care for and raise a child and actually doing so, there is simply no way that an Open Adoption could ever be confused for co-parenting. There is also absolutely no way that such a relationship could ever be forced on an adoptive parent. To the best of my knowledge this is just simply not how it works.

So what is behind statements like this? My own belief is not so much that people have a fear of sharing the parenting, but that they have a fear of sharing the love a child has for their parents. That somehow by entering into an open adoption they will get less “love” from their child.

Is this a reasonable fear? I can only speak for myself and say that I will continue to do whatever I can to make it as easy as possible for my daughter to grow to love her birthfamily and do not worry in the least that this may somehow diminish how she may feel about me.

Tags: Open Adoption by Windthrow
3 Comments »

Ok, so way back when….when I knew next to nothing about adoption I couldn’t get my head around the concept of open adoptions at all. Am sure this is one of the main reasons we ended up pursuing a defacto closed IA originally. When our unexpected opportunity to adopt privately here came up I was forced to quickly re-evaluate my thinking on open adoptions. In the space of a week I read every book on the subject I could find and then set about doing an online search for anything I could find. I very specifically recall trying to find some viewpoints that were negative towards open adoptions. I also recall that I found none. Obviously I was quickly convinced that open adoptions were nothing to fear.

Fast forward to now and I remain convinced, yet I know there is still a great deal of fear out there on this subject. My hope here is to try to coax at least a few of you out there that have doubts about open adoptions to articulate why so that we can discuss the issue a bit more fully.

I won’t promise you that I won’t try to change your mind, but I do promise to be respectful of your thoughts and I guarantee you will have my respect for being willing to engage in discussion on this issue.

Tags: Open Adoption by Windthrow
5 Comments »