Family Ties

When Lisa and Todd Sylvester first began sharing pictures of their adopted baby, Ty, they sent them out to friends and family, but also to someone they’d met only months before: Ty’s birth mother. “We encouraged her from the start to be involved in his life, and in our lives,” says Lisa.

Domestic adoptions—open arrangements in which birth parents can get updates or even visit with their children—are increasingly common, according to Gary Debele, who specializes in family and adoption law at Walling, Berg & Debele and is himself an adoptive parent. In the past, he says, there was a pervasive belief that contact with birth parents would leave children confused about family roles.

But a wealth of recent research—especially from Harold Grotevant at the University of Minnesota and Ruth McRoy at the University of Texas—shows that far from causing anxiety and frustration, open adoptions provide direct information with which children can build a sense of self and identity. Those relationships enrich them with the knowledge of where they came from and why their birth parents chose the path they did.

The arrangements can be beneficial to parents as well: In the mid-eighties, Grotevant and McRoy began following 190 adoptive families and 169 birth mothers. They have found that fears about birth parents trying to reclaim their children or be intrusive aren’t apparent in families with open adoption.

“Far from being disruptive, researchers have found open adoptions are helpful,” says Debele. “At this point, most domestic adoptions are open, which is a huge switch from even thirty years ago, when adoption details were shrouded in secrecy.

In open adoptions, the level of contact between birth and adoptive parents varies greatly, says Katrina Cisneros, a manager for the open adoption and pregnancy counseling program at Children’s Home Society & Family Services. Some birth parents and adoptive couples exchange information only through their agency representative, while others lean toward inviting birth parents to family gatherings and holidays. Most adoptions involve only the birth mother, although there are instances in which birth fathers are involved, too.

“Adoption in itself is not the best option for every couple, and open adoptions might not work for everyone,” Cisneros says. “But for the majority of couples and birth parents who come to us, they’re really interested in creating a relationship that benefits the child, and often, that means open adoption.”