Navigating Relationships in Open Adoption: When Love Isn’t the Only Thing in the Room

Open Adoption and Birth Family Relationships: Finding Healthy Boundaries

The Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.) works to improve outcomes for those impacted by adoption, foster, and kinship care. Providing guidance on how to best navigate connections in open adoption is essential to the work we do.

When we talk about open adoption, we often talk about relationships.

We talk about the relationship between an adopted child and their birth family. The relationship between adoptive parents and birth parents. Relationships with siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and extended family. We talk about maintaining connections, sharing information, and making sure adopted children have access to the people and parts of their history that matter to them.

All of that is important.

But sometimes, I believe we make open adoption sound much simpler than it is, because relationships are complicated. Families are complicated. Adoption is complicated. Put all three together and, well, nobody should be surprised when things get messy.

Why Open Adoption Agreements May Need to Change Over Time

One of the hardest parts of open adoption is that everyone enters the relationship with their own hopes, fears, expectations, grief, and history.

Birth parents may want more contact. Adoptive parents may want less. A child may desperately want contact with a birth parent who is inconsistent. Another child may want nothing to do with a birth relative whom the adults believe they should want to know.

And those feelings can change over time.

A child who showed little interest in birth family at age 8 may be consumed with questions at age 14. A teenager who once wanted frequent visits may suddenly need distance. A birth parent who struggled to maintain contact may reappear years later wanting a significant role in the child’s life.

There isn’t a bad guy in these situations. People simply have different needs when trying to figure out how to be in a relationship with one another.

And sometimes there really is behavior that is unhealthy, unsafe, or destabilizing, and we need to be willing to name that too.

Setting Healthy Boundaries in Open Adoption

There has been an important and necessary shift in adoption toward recognizing the value of birth family connections. For too many years, adoption practice treated separation from birth family as though it erased those relationships.

It doesn’t.

But in correcting that mistake, we have to be careful not to make another one. We cannot become so committed to an idea of openness that we stop paying attention to the experience of the individual child.

A relationship can matter deeply and still need boundaries.

A birth parent can love their child and still be unable to maintain a healthy relationship with them at a particular moment. An adopted child can love a birth parent and still be hurt by repeated cancellations, broken promises, inappropriate conversations, shifting expectations, or being placed in the middle of adult conflicts.

Love and capacity are not the same thing.

Parents sometimes worry that setting limits means they are “closing” an adoption.

It doesn’t have to.

Healthy relationships have boundaries. In fact, relationships without boundaries usually don’t remain healthy for very long. A boundary might mean changing how often visits occur. It might mean having visits in a neutral location. It might mean that communication goes through the adoptive parents rather than directly through the child. It might mean saying that certain topics aren’t appropriate to discuss with the child. And sometimes, it might mean temporarily pausing direct contact while still finding ways to preserve the child’s connection to their history and birth family.

The best question for us to consider is:

“What kind of openness is healthy for this child right now?”

Helping Adopted Children Navigate Conflicting Feelings

The issue of openness is one of the places where adults can unintentionally ask too much of adopted children.

Children should not be responsible for protecting their birth parents’ feelings. They should not have to reassure their adoptive parents that loving their birth family doesn’t threaten them. They should not be messengers between adults. And they should not have to choose sides.

An adopted child should be able to say:

“I miss my birth mom.”

And also:

“I’m angry with my birth mom.”

Or:

“I love my adoptive parents.”

And also:

“I wish I could have grown up with my birth family.”

Those feelings can coexist.

Adults often want emotional consistency. Children, particularly teenagers, rarely cooperate with that expectation. Adoption adds another layer because some of the contradictions are completely reasonable.

Our job isn’t to resolve those feelings for them. Our job is to make enough room for them.

Perhaps the biggest mistake we can make is thinking that an open adoption agreement made when a child is an infant can predict what that child will need 10 or 15 years later.

It can’t. Children grow. Birth parents change. Adoptive parents change. Circumstances change.

Technology and Social Media Are Changing Birth Family Connections

A generation ago, adoptive parents could manage most contact between a child and birth family. Today, a teenager with a phone and a social media account can find relatives the adults didn’t even know existed before dinner.

The question is no longer whether we can completely control these relationships.

We can’t.

The question is how we help young people navigate them thoughtfully and safely.

That requires something more complicated than simply saying yes or no to contact. It requires conversation. Talk about birth family before there is a crisis. Talk about expectations before visits. Talk afterward about how the child felt. Ask questions without interrogating. Notice what happens emotionally before and after contact. And pay attention when behavior tells you something that words haven’t yet been able to express.

Most importantly, give adopted children permission to have complicated feelings about complicated people.

What Does Healthy Openness Look Like in Adoption?

Birth family relationships don’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. They don’t have to be constant to matter. And they don’t have to look the way the adults originally imagined they would.

Sometimes successful open adoption means bringing people closer. Sometimes it means creating clearer boundaries. Sometimes it means helping a child grieve the relationship they wish they could have. And sometimes it means leaving a door open without requiring a child to stand in the doorway waiting for someone to walk through it.

There is no single formula for getting this right.

But there is a compass.

Keep the child’s needs, safety, identity, and emotional well-being at the center.

Not the adults’ guilt. Not the adults’ fear. Not promises made years ago under entirely different circumstances. And not an idealized picture of what open adoption is supposed to look like.

The goal isn’t openness for the sake of openness. The goal is helping an adopted person build relationships with the people who are part of their story in ways that are safe, honest, meaningful, and sustainable.

And sometimes the most loving thing we can do for a relationship is help it find the boundaries it needs to survive.