What is Child –Centered  Open Adoption?

By Micky Duxbury

When we look closely into the heart of adoption, we can see a child who will have questions about her origins and who will someday understand that the family tree that represents her life is different than others. The roots of the adopted person's family tree represent the biological and ethnic heritage they received from their birth parents. The branches of the tree represent their adoptive family and all the nurturing that will allow them to flourish and grow. We know that in the heart of open adoption is not just a child, but a child who was created and given life by one family and parented by another. That child will grow up and become a teenager and an adult, with all the challenges of incorporating these two different realities into their identity.

Identity is a complex issue for all of us. Discovering who we are, learning to accept our strengths and limitations, and feeling good about ourselves is a life long process. All of us, adopted or not, face losses that influence us forever: curves in the road, not of our own making, that often determine the course of our future. But for children who join families through adoption, their quest for wholeness is more complicated. As Lois Melina states, “Every person who has been adopted must come to terms with the fact that the people who were supposed to take care of him made a decision that they could not.  Every adoptee evaluates whether this affects his worth as a human being or his ability to attract people who will love and commit to him.”

We know from the voices of adopted persons, that severing the ties to their birth family often creates vulnerabilities to loss. For some, these vulnerabilities are like jagged-peaked mountains to climb with thickly forested valleys to cross, often leading to angst and confusion. For others, these templates are more lightly imprinted, leaving a marking, but one that can be transformed with relative ease. But for all adopted persons, forming a whole identity, weaving a story about their lives from their adoptive family with the strands from their family of origin, is often a psychologically challenging task.

Child-centered open adoption acknowledges that a child's current and future needs are at the center of adoption. It is for the child that an adoption decision was made, and it is for the child's identity that relationships are developed and maintained. Child-centered adoption means keeping family ties when they are appropriate, and creating healthy boundaries between birth and adoptive families in order to maintain those ties. Child-centered adoption means remembering that the child is of two worlds, and for that child to grow up as one integrated person, he will have the task of putting these worlds together.

Adoptive parents and birth parents can help adopted children weave these worlds into a cohesive braid that is the reality of their lives as adopted persons. Although birth parents were not ready to parent, they have a vital role to play in helping their child know that he was loved then, and is loved now by those who gave him life. Parents who understand the psychological tasks for their adopted child, can honor the birth family as an important part of his identity. People who created life and those who become the child's parents are related in ways both more profound and more intricate than the term “adoption triad” can adequately convey.

Many of the families interviewed for my book on open adoption, (www.mickyduxury.com) conveyed their commitment to help their children grow-up feeling connected to birth families who were unable to raise them. It was that child-centered commitment that allowed many of these families to move away from their preconceived ideas of what constitutes family, to welcoming and embracing people who were initially strangers. Many birth and adoptive parents spoke about the beliefs and values that sustained them in the process, much more often than they spoke about 'how-to-do' an open adoption. The essential beliefs that were often cited as touchstones for their relationships were these: that their children's sense of self would benefit by keeping family ties, that including birth family members does not lessen one's right to parent, and that knowing their birth parents would not confuse children.

If it were not for the fact that adoptive parents want so very much to parent, and that birth parents were not able to parent at a particular time, these people would rarely find themselves in each other's lives, but find themselves they do. And all differences aside, one will parent the other person's child. Because of that connection, whether they are in each other's lives monthly, every few years, or not at all; whether they like each other or tolerate each other; whether they open their hearts with acceptance or not; they will be related to each other for the life of that child. There are ties that bind, and heredity is one of the strongest ties between human beings. Even if birth and adoptive parents never meet, they will always have a connection through the life of that child. Child-centered adoption understands that connection and puts it at the center of adoption practice.