Monday, May 30th, 2016
Source:
Focus on Adoption magazine
More on these topics:
- Expect your child to find relationships with birth family difficult and confusing at times. Confusion is a part of life and they will need to handle confusing situations of many kinds.
- Expect relationships to change and evolve. There may be lots of contact today and less tomorrow.
- Your child's interest in openness will ebb and flow at different ages and stages.
- Plan on sibling relationships playing an integral part in the whole process.
- Expect the openness to become more complicated over time, not more simple.
- Understand that your level of comfort will shift with changes in your child and when the circumstances of the birth family change.
- Assume that this work is as difficult for the birth family as for the adoptive family.
- Remember that when a birth family starts living openness, they are on the receiving end o the same intrusiveness as the adoptive family but they are usually far less equipped to handle it.
- Approach openness with the understanding that not every birth family will be as enthusiastic as you are for openness.
- Understand that openness is equally as difficult as raising kids without openness--it's just different.