Brett is 41
We’re celebrating by keeping Noah home from religious school so we can all hang out together. I feel guilty about this because usually I help serve lunch to the choir and there’s no way to get a hold of the woman to tell her that I won’t be there today. Damn.
There is an agent who is interested in seeing a proposal on the other book idea I have. I’ve given up on the secondary infertility book because the more I wrote on it, the more I didn’t want to write on it. (The proposal books will tell you that this is an over-looked advantage of writing a proposal — if you hate writing the proposal, you probably don’t want to write the book.) Anyway, this book idea is one I casually mentioned here about looking at openness in adoption and how it’s changing the way we think about adoption (or conversely, how the way we think about adoption is driving the trend of increased openness).
These are some of the things I want to look at:
- The activism around open records: What drives it, what gets in the way, controversy, where it’s headed.
- Research around openness, particularly the Minnesota-Texas study and a lot of anecdotal discussion including beliefs & fears and how they are true and how they are not.
- The way openness is used as a marketing tool in domestic infant adoption, the lack of open adoption support, the misuses of the term (open to describe semi-open).
- Which states have legally enforceable open adoption agreements and what that means in practice.
- Openness in foster-to-adopt, between siblings as well as parents. How family reunification policies seem to have contributed to the trend towards open foster-to-adopt placements.
- Reunion and opening closed adoptions.
- Openness in international adoptions — the ethics, the market (people who search for birth families for a fee, people who make money off photographing “finding places”, the cultural clash of adoption values). People who adopt siblings and open the adoptions to each other.
- I also want to talk to adoption professionals who are against openness and hear why and also why they think adoptions continue to trend to openness.
- And I want to look at how our values have changed — like how people used to not tell adoptees they were adopted and look at why that was and why the expert advice has changed on this and what the consequences were then and what they are now.
Now I want to ask — what are some things that you would want to read in a book about open adoption? This wouldn’t be a how-to — it would be a social/cultural exploration of openness in American adoption. It’s not just Open Adoption — it’s openness. What are you curious about it? What questions do you want to ask? What players do you want to hear from?
I’m going to work on this between writing jobs; it’ll be my big project for the summer.
When this book is finished I want to buy the first four copies.
As you know, or maybe not, that we have an open adoption with Baby R’s grandmother. R’s Social Worker asked us to face our fears about openness. We are still working on it but I’m glad that we have something to work on.
I would love to read about real experiences with fost-adopt and openness. How people work through the initial fears and how they work through the long haul.
I talked to the Director of the agency we are working with about more training on openness. It is one thing for agencies to push it but without training and experience then it doesn’t mean much.
Please let me know if we can help at all.
I’m curious whether there is any connection between the growing acceptance of non-traditional families in general (single parent, stepfamilies, same-sex parents, etc.) and openness in adoption. The pressure to present as “normal” family was definitely a factor in earlier eras’ closed adoptions. And some of what I had to overcome internally as an AP was the fact that my family would never be a simple nuclear family. As social acceptance of non-nuclear families expands, does it help expand acceptance of open adoption? My gut tells me “yes,” but I’d be interested in a deeper discussion.
Now you are going to force me to turn on the old mac and look for my senior seminar research. There is little empirical study on openess and this was inteteresting stuff.
I agree with Heather, I really think the closing of many adoptions is because of lack of support and the influence of the friends and family on the aparents. Maybe even on the first parents. Noelle’s mom was constantly telling her how she would have closed the adoption if she were me. People told me constantly either a)they would try to steal the baby or b) they were really lucky that they were allowed to see the baby. Every parent in open adoption I talk to has siminlar stories.
That creates the expectation on both sides that openess shouldn’t be trusted and is suspect.
There are also kids in their teens and early twenties, I would love to hear stuff about them. If I were in the early stages of open adoption I would be interested in how openess effected the adoptee. We are most sold on it’s good for first families, with just the adoptee as a side benefactor. I know my child feels more secure about her place in the world and the first parent she has contact with than the one she doesn’t. Not knowing her first father bothers her.
How does openess affect day to day parenting of a child?
Happy birthday Brett! You are just a baby!
This topic really seems to be where your life is, right now. I’ll admit that I’m sad that the cultural infertility book won’t see the light of day (rats!) you are correct about writing a book being a loooong process, one that requires tremendous enthusiasm right from the start, to see you through. So if yer not feeling it now, you REALLY won’t be feeling it later…
Good luck on this new project. I think whatever you do, it will be terrific!
I would be most interested in a book with lots of personal experiences - your stories about how you have experienced openness and what has made it easier and harder - rather than lots of study and research. I’m not saying the study and research shouldn’t be there, but the personal experiences are most compelling, and most reassuring. I’m trying to convince my husband to try open adoption, and research about “best for the child in the long run” is OK, but he’s really worrying about the new relationships we’ll be having with a whole other family and how to negotiate those.
I’d buy one - and one for every one of my extended family.
The part about either accidentally or deliberately mis-interpreting “open adoption” on the part of agencies is really interesting to me. That’s the one thing that still angers me about our whole experience - being encouraged by our agency to not be “too open” when our daughter’s other mom was wanting to open up our adoption. The one we were told was “open” to begin with.
I’d personally like to hear from adult/teenage adoptees who are in open adoptions; what they think of it all, which would really help both me and my daughter’s other mom to support our child.
What I’d like to read is some long-term info about open adoptions. I’d like to read about open adoption after the baby years. What’s it like when the kid is 10, 20? 30? What is the “real” reality of open adoption? Since open adoption started in and around the 1980s, this kind of info is now available because families have lived it. I’d like to hear from everyone–birth moms/dads, adoptive moms/dads/ and the kids.
Like life, open adoption is wonderful and messy, and too often it is presented as white-washed one way or the other.
If you want, I have the name of a lawyer we used who has been in the adoption arena and juvenile justice arena for decades. He is an adoptive parent himself with adult children raised with open adoption. He could be a good source for your book.
Everything people said already. Plus … this might be too how-to-ish, but I’d want to know about possible downsides to open adoption from a first parent’s and adoptee’s POV. All the negatives I’ve heard so far are from either a-parents (or, even worse, people who know a-parents but have no personal experience with adoption), and I tend to take those with a grain of salt and be very positive about open adoption, but all the same I think things are rarely that clear-cut; openness surely presents challenges for first moms and adoptees that I’m just not hearing about. (I don’t mean challenges that make it a bad idea, but challenges that a-parents ought to be aware of, all the same. But like I said, that might be too how-to-ish.)
Also, in a historical context, I wonder if open adoption actually has deeper roots than closed adoption? I’m guessing kinship adoption has been around as long as people have — is closed adoption really a historical blip, a result of the formalization of the adoption process?
Also, exploring agency resistance, how does open adoption threaten agencies? change the balance of power in the situation? affect an agency’s bottom line?
Showing my international bias, I’d be interested to read about how other countries of similar culture are handling adoption these days - Canada, Britian and Australia, for instance (I know for instance, that here in Canberra, Australia, where domestic adoptions are all done through a government agency, that some level openness is recommended and that open adoption agreements are legally enforceable, but I have no idea how that’s going, or how people feel about it - I think that domestic infant adoptions here are much less common than in the States, maybe because we have way less people).