Becoming a parent is one of the most far-reaching and identity-changing experiences of adult life. While the process of bringing forth a child into the world is fairly universal, subsequent relationships between parent and child, and the condition of parenthood are shaped by the structures and cultural norms of the particular context in which they are lived. Similarly, adoption has life-long implications for adopted children, their biological parents, their adoptive parents, and their respective kinship networks. Adoption too, and the kin relationships it creates, are shaped by the particular child welfare discourses, legislation, and practices of the jurisdiction in which it is enacted. This study is interested in the complexity of family life for the individuals whose most significant relationships are made, unmade, and permanently altered through adoption. It is an interpretative exploration of adoptive parentsâ accounts of the lived experience of parenthood in the context of contemporary open adoption.
The majority of adoptions in the UK, and significant numbers in the USA, are of children who are being looked after in State care and cannot return to their family of birth, and who are, therefore, adopted by strangers with the intervention of public child welfare agencies. All of the adoptive parents whose experiences are explored in this book became parents in this way, through domestic non-kin adoption of children within the child welfare system. Specifically, therefore, the book explores what it is like to be an adoptive parent in the context of open adoption from care.
In both the UK and USA the majority of adoptions are now âopenâ and there is some form of ongoing contact between the child and their birth relatives, either via letters or face-to-face meetings. Open adoption may counteract the disadvantages previously associated with secrecy. However, it has also been contentious and is recognised as potentially bringing its own difficulties and further complexity to adoptive family life. It can conflict with many adoptersâ primary aspirations for parenthood, and there are few cultural norms of social interaction to help any of the parties know how to behave or feel towards one another. The chapters that follow explore the subjective lived experience of adoptive parents within this professionally and legally mandated context of openness.
The starting point for this interest in adoption derives from experience as a Social Worker responsible for arranging adoptions for children in care who could not return to their birth families. In the course of this work I encountered a number of practice dilemmas for which I could find no ready answers in the existing literature. I also made observations about the complexity of relationship for the individuals whose family lives were permanently shaped, often against their wishes, through the process of public adoption. I wanted to find out more about the experiences of those for whom my professional intervention had such far-reaching consequences, and contribute to the development of more sensitive, ethical, and effective social work practice.
Open adoption remains contentious in social work practice and the initiation of birth relative contact is simultaneously encouraged and resisted. This push and pull for and against openness practices is symptomatic of the paradox at the heart of open adoption which installs the child fully in a new family while retaining the significance of their original family (Sales, 2012). In my experience, the professionals and parents who were at the centre of this contested and paradoxical field of practice were hungry for any information that would help them determine what openness arrangements might be right for any particular child. The exploration of adoptive parenthood documented in this book is produced within this context of uncertainty regarding the relative significance and strength of original and adoptive kinship and the contested nature of openness practices.
Whether children should have ongoing contact with birth relatives and what form that contact should take is a key question also for the Court and is answered for individual children during adoption proceedings. Most contact arrangements are therefore negotiated and agreed prior to the making of the adoption order. It struck me that the choices about post-adoption contact that were made prior to the legal formation of the adoptive family established a context that might shape their subsequent experience of family life. I wanted to find out from adoptive parents whether the context of openness established from the beginning of placement, and over which they had limited influence, affected their experience of adoptive parenthood.
Most of the adopters I encountered were primarily motivated to achieve parenthood, create a family and enjoy the benefits of a loving parentâchild relationship. I wondered what it is like to be an adoptive parent and facilitate your childâs links with another parent. Practices of open adoption might conflict with the aspirations adopters hold for their experience of parenthood (Logan 1999). I, therefore, hoped to illuminate the effect of openness on adoptersâ parental identity and concept of their parental role. I had experience of facilitating direct and indirect post-adoption contact and had witnessed meetings between adoptive and birth families. I had been struck by the emotional and social complexity of these meetings and felt that none of our cultural norms of social interaction were fully adequate to help any of the parties know how to behave or feel. I felt a professional imperative to find ways of facilitating comfortable interaction between these connected but separate individuals.
Adoptive parents are crucial to successfully achieving the aim of current UK adoption policy which is to âdeliver stable, permanent new familiesâ for children who cannot live with their birth families (Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety, DHSSPS 2006, p. 5). Given that the sole and enduring responsibility for the welfare of adopted children is invested in their adoptive parents, I considered it important to ask adopters about their parenting experiences. In particular, I wanted to explore how professionally driven practices of openness helped or hindered them in fulfilling the parenting tasks with which they were charged.
Domestic adoption of young babies is now rare in the UK, and the children who require adoption tend to be older and experience a range of health, emotional, or behavioural difficulties. However, as the numbers of children waiting to be adopted attest, there is a shortage of adopters willing and able to meet the complex needs of the vulnerable children awaiting placements. There has been a suspicion among practitioners that the prospect of contact with birth relatives deters potential adopters and thus diminishes childrenâs chances of securing a permanent home (Bridge and Swindells 2003). Part of my motivation for undertaking this study was to contribute to effective recruitment of adopters for children in care. I hoped that by offering further insight into the realities of open domestic adoption I could help inform prospective adoptersâ choices about how they formed their family.
While this study originated in social work concerns, it acknowledges also that the child welfare policy agenda does not necessarily reflect the reality of adoptive parentsâ experience or interests. Consideration of public adoption has been predominantly located in questions of policy and service delivery, and much of the adoption research considers its outcomes as a placement option for the child. Adopters, however, generally do not see themselves as offering a child care solution or placement but approach adoption as a means of creating a family (Smith and Logan 2002; Triseliotis et al. 2005; McSherry et al. 2008). The interpretative phenomenological approach taken in this study is an attempt to move away from policy, practice, or outcomes driven questions to focus on adoptive parents, their experience, and the meanings they attribute to this. Rather than testing any particular hypothesis, the study had the exploratory aim of finding out what it is like to be an adoptive parent. This revealed what the most salient aspects of parenthood were from the adoptersâ viewpoint, and, consistent with social work ethics, enabled their perspective to emerge and potentially shape subsequent research and practice agendas. This approach also allowed unanticipated aspects of experience to be uncovered. For example, the social visibility and microaggressions (Sue et al. 2007) experienced following domestic adoption from care, and the role of contact as a set of family practices (Morgan 1996, 2011) that constitute adoptive kinship, are dominant themes in the chapters that follow but have received little attention in prior adoption research.
Open adoption creates a new adoptive kinship network and, in this context, adoptive parents have been referred to as relationship pioneers (Grotevant 2009) because there are few cultural norms to guide their interactions with the adopted childâs birth relatives. It is recognised that many families may, therefore, require help to negotiate and sustain contact, and that this support should be informed by understanding of relational processes in the adoptive kinship network. This book provides insight into adoptersâ experience of adoptive kinship: how they understand and manage their own and their childâs relationships with birth relatives and the meanings these interactions hold for them as parents. It suggests ways to facilitate positive interactions and sustainable relationships between adoptive and birth families.
This study approaches adoptive parents, not as carers or placement providers, but as parents first and foremost. It therefore, connects the experience of adoptive parenthood not only to the body of adoption research, but also to more general theories of family life. While adoption features highly in child welfare literature, because it is considered a special case it is almost invisible in the general sociological, anthropological, or family process literature. To redress this, the book answers recent calls (Jones and Logan 2013) to consider sociological understandings of kinship as âmadeâ rather than âgivenâ (Mason 2011) when thinking about adoption. As a resource for interpreting adoptersâ accounts of parenthood, it draws upon a social constructionist conceptualisation of kinship, prevalent in recent sociological explorations of personal life, which understands âfamilyâ not as an inevitable derivative of biological or legal connection, but actively constituted through everyday functional and interactional processes (Holstein and Gubrium 1999). This focus on âdoingâ family examines the way that all family relationships are constituted and sustained through the activities, or âpracticesâ (Morgan 1996, 2011), of everyday life, thus blurring the distinction between adoption and other family forms. This offers a way of understanding adoptive kinship additional to theories of psycho-social development and attachment that have predominated in adoption research to date.
The Content of the Book
The next chapter locates adoptive parenthood, as the phenomenon of interest, and the study itself in their wider social, and child welfare policy context. The meaning and main features of adoptive parenthood and open adoption as they presented themselves in this study are outlined. This includes an overview of the existing research knowledge on open adoption. Chap. 2 also presents a concise outline of how the study was conducted. It gives a brief explanation of the methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) (Smith et al. 2009) which has as its focus the subjective lived experience of the participant and the meanings they attribute to make sense of that experience. In the next chapter, I outline what I mean by the phenomenological and interpretative aspects of the research, and give a very brief summary of the theoretical foundations of these concepts and how this shaped the knowledge that could be found. The overview above of the motivations and prior assumptions with which I approached the topic is my attempt at the reflexivity required for rigorous application of the method.
The chapters that follow are organised according to three over-arching...