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The Pros And Cons Of Open Adoption

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After grueling labor and a few days in the hospital to recover, most new mothers carefully bring their newborns home for the first time to start their new life as a family. Although this may seem like an expected and natural occurrence, many couples will never understand the joy of bringing their newborn home from the hospital for the first time. For many parents, due mainly to biological factors, adoption is the only way to have children. The idea of adoption is often romanticized as being parallel to the experience of having a biological child, but unfortunately there are many factors that hinge adoption away from this parallel fantasy. Open adoption “offer(s) birth parents and adoptive parents the opportunity to share identifying information …show more content…

When each of the risks are examined together, it becomes clear that the concept of open adoption is unfair because it stirs many unnaturally occurring emotions, situations, and distress. Open adoption is unfair because it stresses the relationship of adoptive parent and child, and makes vulnerable children cope with unnecessary stressors (Berry 128-129). One of the “biggest risk(s) of open adoption postulated by most adoption professionals is that it will interfere with the process of bonding between adoptive parents and child” (Berry 129). Whether through one-sided openness, challenges from contact, or withholding of information, open adoption cultivates unnecessary stress and worry. In a closed adoption, where the adoptive and biological parents do not have contact, the child does not have the burden of information, meetings, or dual standards that are present in an open …show more content…

Inquiries and interviews reveal the shattered family view that open adoption adoptees face every day. Adoptees often “fight feelings of being unloved and unwanted, even though [they are] constantly told how much they [are] loved” (Siegel, “One Adoptee from an ‘Open Adoption’ Tells Her Story”). This often occurs because their biological family relinquished rights to the child and gave them to another family, only to infrequently and erratically surface in the child’s life, confusing their feelings of being loved and wanted. Family structure, according to one young adoptee, is “unstructured and ambiguous. It includes legal ties that lack genetic ties and genetic ties that lack legal ties, both of which have emotional ties” (“What Growing Up In An Open Adoption Has Taught Me As An Adoptee”). Adoptee’s feel as if they are a mistake, worthless, disposable, or worth less simply because they have a relationship with their biological family that is unnatural and unreliable (“What Growing Up In An Open Adoption Has Taught Me As An Adoptee”). As seen, the lack of genetic ties or legal ties greatly distresses young adoptee’s view towards family life and compassion from both biological and adoptive parents. By fostering an unnatural family experience supposedly in the child’s ‘best interest,’ participants of open adoption are

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Followed by “Overly intrusive questions about adoption” with 86 incidences mentioned and “Assumptions of Bionormativity” with 62. Harrington et al. (2010) conducted interviews with 46 families who have adopted from China with Baden (2015), a contributing author to the Harrington et al., searching online collecting comments or statements from those in the Adoption Triad analyzing for themes related to adoption microaggressions. They found 14 themes specifically related to adoption, of which only 8 apply to the adoptee, of these 3 were the same as suggested by Garber (2014) and Garber and Grotevant (2015). They found the most common theme impacting adoptees was “Biology is best” with 55 incidences reported followed by “Bad see adoptees” with 9 incidences and “Grateful adoptees” with 8 incidences.

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Many of the children who grew up in the foster care system where they were abused and had a loss of identity tend to end up suffering from psychological and emotional problems, and oftentimes these problems do not emerge until later in life. These problems can stem from loss of identity, trauma, disrupted relationships, cultural disconnection, loss of language, lack of trust, and intergenerational problems. A social worker from the university of british columbia, professor Raven Sinclair describes these and this professor describes these horrible experiences these children had to endure as creating “tremendous obstacles to the development of a strong and healthy sense of identity for the transracial adoptee”(n.d.) March 13, 2023). Overall, the foster care system and the 1960s scoop had profound and lasting effects on Indigenous communities in Canada, impacting their sense of identity, culture, spirituality, and well-being.

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Institutionalisation can also severely affect a child’s development, but this can sometimes be recovered when the child is adopted. The child’s physical features like height, weight and head circumference can suffer during this time. Also, cognitively a child’s IQ can be off a normal range if adopted around their 3rd birthday but when it comes to school performance the cognitive performance can lag cognitive competence. Also, when it comes to emotional development, a study of Romanian adoptees demonstrated that attachment was affected if the child wasn’t adopted before they were 12 months old compared to secure attachments likely to be achieved before then, but babies adopted under 6 months showed normal attachment patterns during early childhood.

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Tie to the audience: Some of the children that are in foster care might be related to you or the child could be someone that you know like a friend’s child. C. Thesis and Preview: Consequently, we need to do something to make adoption easier and better not only in the United States, but all over the world. Today I will give you a few solutions to fix the foster care system. I’ll begin by telling you about the need to improve foster care. II.

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The foster care system is successful in helping these children have an equal opportunity and a chance for a “normal life”. Foster care requires protection and the service to children to give them the best family and provide the wellbeing of the child. By removing a child from their given home and into safe facilities, it can give them the necessary resources to grow and adapt. Indeed, a foster parent can learn to love a child as if they were their own and provide for them just as a parent should. In a news report, “Love revealed in brokenness,” a foster mother explains how she fought a biological mother in court to win custody of her future foster child.

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Families are left feeling emotionally empty and hesitant to trust in a system that they feel has failed them. Often, 3 these families are unprepared to handle the disappointment and are apprehensive to expose their family again to adoption. For the Jimenez family, 1 the thought was inconceivable. According to the Texas Adoption Resource exchange, 8 one of the responsibilities of foster and adoptive families is to: “make efforts as team members with children’s caseworkers towards reunifying children with their birth families.”

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The third modern foster home is called Kinship, which refers to the care of children by relatives or close family friends. Kinship is the preferred resource because it maintains the children’s connections with the family. Ultimately, “58% of the children in care, that case plan goal is to reunify them with their biological parents or place them in the care of a relative. But for 26% of cases, parental rights have been terminated for one reason or another and the end goal is for the child to be adopted by a new family” (National Council For

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As stated earlier both past and current circumstances play a role in an adopted childs life. Adoption isn’t something to be taken lightly, as shown it can have serious consequences for the child that is being adopted. People who are planing to adopt should be educated and not go into it blindly, it can be a beautiful thing but not without its challenges, both for the adopters and

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I can never have my father’s smile or my mother’s eyes, and my skin tone will never match their pale skin, even though I am their daughter. My parents’ DNA cannot be traced in my body nor my siblings’. Growing up in this family has given me a future I would never have had if I were not adopted. At the age 10, I saw the world from another perspective when my family and I embarked on a journey to adopt my younger sister. Traveling back to my birth country shaped me into the person I am today because I have become open-minded through having a better understanding of privileges and values.

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Covert losses are issues that numerous adopted children suffer with. Often an adoptee may feel intense emotions over this. While, they are not obvious to anyone around them hence, the term “covert”. One such loss lowers self-esteem because of apparent abandonment or rejection by birth parents. Another is a feeling of deprivation because one does not know one's medical, social, or cultural history (Nickman 6).

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I chose this topic for a personal reason. One personal reason is because I was an eight-month-old baby when I was first placed in foster care. I was taken away from my biological mother when she decided to take me to the hospital. Once there the hospital staff diagnosed me with a severe bronchial infection on top of a severe skull fracture. When asked my biological mother couldn’t explain what happened and had multiple men that were not my biological father trying to give a reason for what had happened.

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Introduction Imagine growing up with the fear of constantly being abused by your parents, or not knowing the next time that your caretakers would feed you. Believe it or not, that is the reality for many children living in the United States, which is why the foster care system was established. The foster care system was created to find homes for children who are unable to live with their biological parents, for reasons such as death, abuse, or an unhealthy home environment. Today, there are around 500,000 children residing in the system, and this figure is growing daily (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 2013). There has been some controversy about how the government handles the foster care system, as some believe that there

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Having a family is a universal concept that transcends blood-relations. The only difference between me and someone who isn’t adopted is that my situation is unique; I still have a mom, somewhere in this world that has endearment for me that might not be seen but felt. And I have a mom that lives with me, who loves me equally as much. I learned from this moment that being adopted shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of or disheartened about.

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It needs to be noted that, adoptive parents can ensure the development of positive cultural identity and strong self-esteem of their adopted child by embracing the racial diversity. It follows that, members of multicultural families should be able to discuss on the subject of race and ethnicity with each other comfortably and recognize any potential concerns before they arise. Intercountry adoption displays the ability of a human to love one another despite the differences which becomes a positive energy for good in a world where hatreds are spreading on the ground of national, racial and cultural variations. It appears that, intercountry adoption encourages the

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Therefore from these studies, childrearing are perceived to have a subtle effect on personality development. McCrae et al. (2000) revealed that from the results that were obtained from the adoption studies, the adopted individuals tend to have minimal resemblance to either of their foster parents or their foster siblings. In its place, the adopted individual appeared to have more similarity towards their biological parents and/or siblings. This is because every human being inherits and shares about 50 per cent of their genes with each of their parents and their siblings respectively.

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