Customer Reviews

Children of Open Adoption and Their Families

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I was reminded of how this book has helped me over the last years when I was browsing the Adoption shelves here. I think it was published about the time we became an adoptive family, which was in 1989. I had read about Open Adoption, where both adoptive parents and birth parents at one extreme know each other's first names, all the way to knowing each other as people and visiting back and forth. We were pretty sure we wanted nothing to do with this scary and threatening idea. But as I read more about adoption, I realized that for the good of my daughter, and believing she had the same right most all of us have, to know who she came from I needed to know more and act on it. So we tried hard to continue to have a relationship with her birthmom after the birth. I wasn't sure the woman even wanted this with us. I got the book because I wanted PROOF it would be OK to let our daughter and her birthmom know each other, spend time together and have a relationship. And that her birthmom would not try to reclaim her (a big fear of adoptive families) and that my daughter wouldn't be confused about who her parents were (it turns out kids are rarely confused--they get it). I was, frankly, threatened. So the book was very instrumental in giving me the strength to go down this path, and 11 1/2 years later I am very thankful for it. My daughter and her birthmom are in contact, and see each other from time to time, which would be more often if we didn't live across the country from each other. The book actually lets you hear from kids in open adoption, in their own words, and you see there is not the trauma, confusion, and craziness you feared would follow. These kids are the pioneers, even though they are just a group of normal kids, and they have shown us the way to a better way of making families through adoption.

I am currently pregnant with twin boys that I will be giving up for adoption. I was looking for books to help me and the adoptive parents truly understand open adoption. I LOVE this book! I read through it in only a few days time and now the a-mom is reading it. I recommend this for both sets of parents, it is a GREAT resource!

Finally a book that addresses open adoption and how it has affected the children of open adoption. As an open adoption birth mother, I constantly face society's disapproval and their opinion that I am a disposable, unimportant member of the adoption triad! Society and open adoption nay-sayers love to point out that there are no studies on open adoption...and no proof that it might be better for the children than a semi-open or closed adoption. This book is at least a small dent in that claim! Hopefully more books will be written in which the open adoption adoptees can speak for themselves and tell society about their experiences.

We were given this book while we were learning about the process of openness in adoption and nine months later, our child was born to us by his birthparents -- our shared miracle. Back when we were still waiting, reading about open adoption in this book helped my husband and I better understand how this approach to adoption might work in different people's lives. The authors helped us embrace the idea that birthparents could be known in a child's life and be part of a functional extended family. For us, this became true. "Children of Open Adoption" was for us a primer that described the common issues surrounding the concept of openness. This book provided for us the chance to hear from other parents and see how things might play out later in our child's life if we opted for openness. Page by page, we read parts aloud to one another and became more and more convicted that our intuition was right. Openness allowed natural adoption, so that our family would include our child's birthparents. We understood that the amount of openness might be different for each family, but this book helped us also understand the beautiful potential for a normal life that included birthparents and honored both them as life-givers and us as family. For anyone who wants to disagree, I no longer argue. I know that what this book describes, we have. We allowed our trust to grow and we gradually experienced open adoption as a family -- a family that includes our child's birthparents and birthgrandparents, with openness for all of our child's life -- if we are lucky.

They need to update/revise this book. It was written it the late 80's when open adoption was just beginning to take root. The book only goes as far as how open adoption affects elementary-aged children. The sections on teenagers & adults discuss how they are affected if you seek out an open adoption after years of closed adoption. I want to know how teenagers and adults who have always lived with an open adoption are affected. What is the end result when an openly-adopted child grows up? How do they cope?

Also, this book is pretty redundant. It could have been about 100 pages shorter.

Even so, it was informative and worth the read. I enjoyed reading the real-life stories of adoptive parents, birth parents, and their children.

If you are contemplating adoption, dont read this book without reading DR Rappaport's excellent "the Open Adoption Book" first. If you have any questions or doubts about the open adoption process, this is not where to start. This book needs updating and references. All the opinions in this book are just that. They are not sourced and its hard to get past the feeling that you are being fed "feel good" propaganda, if you are still trying to learn about open adoption vs closed. This book would not pass English 101 as it is now, with no supporting evidence to back up what the authors are saying.
That being said, if you are already sold on open adoption, and have read the studies which show that open adoption IS the better alternative, then this book will provide you with many examples, drawn straight from families, about children who are adopted. With updating, the authors would now have plenty of studies to cite to support their statements, beyond just the few families they quote in the book. They would also be able to pull from older children which would make the book feel more "credible".

We were given this book while we were learning about the process of openness in adoption and nine months later, our child was born to us by his birthparents -- our shared miracle. When we were still waiting, reading about open adoption here helped my husband and I better understand how this approach to adoption might work in different people's lives. The authors helped us embrace the idea that birthparents could be known in a child's life and be part of a functional extended family. For us, this became true. "Children of Open Adoption" was for us a primer that described the common issues surrounding the concept of openness. This book provided for us the chance to "hear" from other parents and see how things might play out later in our child's life if we opted for openness. Page by page, we read parts aloud to one another and became more and more convicted that our intuition was right. Openness was "natural adoption," so that our family would include our child's birthparents. We understood that the amount of openness might be different for each family, but this book helped us also understand the beautiful potential for a normal life that included birthparents and honored both them as life-givers and us as parents. For anyone who wants to disagree, I no longer argue. I know that what this book describes, we have. We allowed our trust to grow and we gradually experienced open adoption as a family -- a family that includes our child's birthparents and birthgrandparents, with openness for all of our child's life -- if we are lucky.

Needs updating badly. I'd like to hear how adult children of open adoption feel now. This book is from the 1980's.