How Choosing Open Adoption Benefits Everyone
If you are a prospective birth mother who wants to have a relationship with her child and your child’s adoptive family, you’re in luck.
You can achieve both these things when you choose open adoption.
Most modern adoptions are open. Many prospective birth moms and hopeful adoptive families choose open adoption because it benefits everyone on the adoption journey.
As the prospective birth mom, you are in control of choosing the hopeful adoptive family for your child.
When you choose an option adoption, you, your baby, and the hopeful adoptive family will benefit from many things, including:
- Finding the perfect hopeful adoptive family: You can pick an open adoption waiting family.
- Building a relationship with the hopeful adoptive family: You can get to know the hopeful family before giving birth.
- Continuing your relationship with your child: You get to have a lifelong relationship with your child.
If you’re ready to start planning your adoption with an adoption specialist, you can reach out to us today for free. But, if you want to find out more about why most adoption agencies encourage open adoption, continue reading.
How Finding Open Adoption Waiting Families Benefits Everyone
Finding the Perfect Hopeful Adoptive Family
If you’re a prospective birth mom who has recently decided that open adoption is right for you and your baby, you’re most likely starting to wonder, “where can I find open adoption waiting families.” The quick answer is online.
Although you can start looking at open adoption family profiles today, you will benefit from your adoption specialist’s skills. Because your adoption specialist is the person who can send you filtered family results based on your adoption preferences.
An adoption specialist can help you find open adoption waiting families by:
Helping You Create Your Adoption Plan
Your adoption plan will contain all your adoption preferences. Your adoption specialist will use your preferences to:
- Ensure you get everything you need during the adoption process: This could include adoption financial assistance, help with finding prenatal medical care, and more.
- Ensure everyone follows your birth plan: Tell your adoption specialist what you need to ensure that your delivery goes as smoothly as possible.
- Ensure you find the right hopeful adoptive family: Although you can start to browse open adoption family profiles now, your adoption specialist will use information from your adoption plan to filter through hopeful adoptive families. This way, you don’t have to search through 300 adoptive family profiles!
Helping You Decide How Open Your Adoption Will be
Although you already know you want some form of open adoption, your adoption plan will detail your adoption’s actual “openness.” Your adoption professional will use this information to help determine which adoptive families you may want to meet. Because you and the adoptive family need to agree with how open the adoption will be.
In general, most adoption agencies encourage hopeful open adoptive families to agree to openness in the adoption.
For example, American Adoptions, a national adoption agency, requires hopeful open adoption waiting families to remain open to:
- Direct communication with email and phone (calls and texting)
- Post-placement visits within the first five years of adoption
- Openness to sharing last names
American Adoptions explains that “a more open adoption relationship allows for adoptees to know more about their birth parents’ history, for adoptive parents to more easily incorporate their child’s culture and history into their lives and for a birth parent to know that their child is growing up happy and healthy.”
Building a Relationship With the Hopeful Open Adoption Families
After viewing open adoption family profiles and choosing your baby’s adoptive parents, you have the opportunity to get to know the hopeful adoptive family early in the adoption process.
Many prospective birth mothers and adoptive families benefit from knowing each other and often build strong lifelong relationships.
The initial conference call is the first step to getting to know the hopeful adoptive family. In general, first calls go like this:
- Your adoption specialist will connect you and the hopeful adoptive family.
- You and your adoption specialist can ask the hopeful adoptive family open-ended questions to help get the conversation started.
- You’ll also talk about yourself.
In general, you and the adoptive family will not talk about touchy issues (you don’t have to talk about the birth father if you don’t want to, and it’s best not to discuss a couple’s infertility) during the call. While you all will cover various topics during the call, everyone can have more sensitive conversations during future meetings. Or, you can tell your adoption specialist any sensitive details if you’d rather not talk about them unexpectedly.
From here, you and the adoptive family can continue to have conversations via email, text, phone call, or in person. This is really up to you.
And because you are choosing to have an open adoption, you can continue to build your relationship with the adoptive family even after post-placement.
Continuing Your Relationship With Your Child
When you select your baby’s adoptive parents from a pool of open adoption waiting families, you also get the opportunity to have a lifelong relationship with your child.
Similar to how you can continue to build your relationship with the adoptive family after your child is placed, you also will have the opportunity to build your relationship with your child as they grow up.
When you choose an open adoption, you can:
- Watch your child grow up
- Answer all your child’s adoption questions
- Give your child their birth family history so they can better understand who they are and their culture.
Next Steps
When you choose an open adoption, you give open adoption waiting families a chance to become parents.
If you’re ready to start the open adoption process, you can reach out to one of our adoption specialists today to get the process started. If you want to start browsing open adoption family profiles now, you can see families who are waiting to adopt right now.
