The Donaldson Adoption Institute | Untangling the Web II
reverse situation, if a birth parent is struggling financially, emotionally or legally, people connected to the adoptive family may be able to see sensitive information. ! ! “Depending how contact is facilitated over the internet, there is no guarantee who else has access to that information. Once something is posted online, it is out there, and somewhere it can be found again. For adopted kids, this may be difficult down the road if they come across conversations, or their friends come across conversations about them.”!
!The greatest risk in this era of post-adoption contact is likely to adopted children.
The details around their placements and life circumstances of their birth families (both at the time of placement and beyond) are all parts of their personal stories. A child may not be of age to understand these circumstances, or to communicate what he or she is comfortable with sharing. It’s up to the adoptive parents to respect the details of their child’s story, keeping in mind that once something is posted online, it is virtually impossible to take back. The definition of privacy is changing significantly with each new technological advance.!
!As adoptees get older and have access to the Internet, the possibility for contact
with birth parents, if not previously established, becomes greater. Professionals who responded to our survey expressed strong concern about adopted children searching for their birth families without their parents’ knowledge. Of those who responded, 63 percent indicated that adoptive families had reported unexpected or unmonitored contact with the birth relatives. In contrast, only 21 percent reported that birth parents had informed them of such contact. Workers said this type of contact has been increasing for at least the past five years. The outcomes of these unexpected encounters are mixed, and it appears adopted children tend to reach out to members of their birth families as much, if not more, than birth parents reach out to their children. The greatest risk in these situations is when communication takes place between children who had been in foster care because of abuse and neglect and their birth parents. !
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“I have worked with three children who have all located a birth parent soon after termination of parental rights and whose parents attempted to get them to run away back to the birth families.”!
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Guidelines and training need to be provided to all foster and adoptive parents so that they are prepared for when, not if, this kind of contact may occur. The training must help such parents to support their children through the emotions associated with the severing of legal ties to birth parents. It also requires assisting adoptive parents to acknowledge their own fears and anxieties about contact between their children and birth families so that they can have open conversations about managing connections. Guidance is also needed to assess the level of contact that is in a child’s best interest and to navigate a plan for contact so that adopted children can maintain connections openly and not secretly.!
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International Adoption and Post-adoption Contact The connections forged between children and their birth families are not limited to domestic adoption. Although the respondents to our survey tend to work primarily in domestic agencies, those facilitating international adoptions also reported stories of communication online and through social media. One professional noted a few instances of adopted children connecting with their Ethiopian birth families, while
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