This is a tricky issue. Of course, if you maintain a relationship with your child’s birth parent(s), you need to be transparent about it. This creates pressure, on both sides. The birth parent(s) may expect to have a relationship with the child. Conversely, the child may feel pressured to have a relationship with them. Not every adopted child wants to know their birth parents. But most adopted children feel a heavy obligation to please their aparents – this could lead to potentially damaging encounters if the child is not ready. There may be small things you can do – perhaps getting paperwork from the agency in the homeland. But establishing contact…it makes me nervous.

As far as open adoptions – it’s almost impossible to say because it would change the face of international adoption. It would limit the mothers who would put children up for adoption – in Korea, for instance, agencies won’t contact birth mothers if they were unmarried at the time of birth.

I see your point and that could be an option, but he may or may not want to ever meet his birth parents.  In any case you would have already done the “leg work” so to speak.  As long as the birth parents knew that it was up to your son to ultimately decide if he wanted a relationship or not…I don’t really see any issue.  I have friends on both sides…some have conducted searches and other are not interested at all.

Another question dealing with birth parent searches:

I have a follow-up question on the birth parent search issue.  I, too,
have been thinking about ways to open our adoption a bit more on
behalf of my 3-year-old son.  I noticed that each respondent said that
the decision of whether or not to have birth family contact should be
up to the child.

My question is, doesn’t waiting 15 or 30 years remove the choice
somewhat?  It seems that, if I am able to contact my son’s birth
family and maintain some level of contact with them over the years,
then my son truly does have a choice about whether or not he wants to
have contact with them as he grows older.  If we wait to pursue a
birth parent search, it may be impossible to find his birth family,
effectively leaving him WITHOUT a choice to have contact.  Or am I
misreading this somehow?

I also wonder how your respondents feel about the suggestions from the
domestic adoption community that open adoptions are ultimately
healthier for children and their identity formation.

In my opinion…I believe it should be up to your daughter to ultimately decide on what type of relationship she would like to have with her birth mother. I totally understand that you want to do everything possible in order to facilitate that at some point, but I would apply caution to the degree you go about trying to make any contact with her birth mother. I agree with Juli that leaving a letter in her file is fine, but to go above that I don’t know.

Looking back to when I was younger…if I would have had contact with my birth mother it would have been too confusing for me & personally I am glad I didn’t. I don’t really recall ever wanting to search for my birth mother when I was young. For example, I have a friend that had constant contact with her birth mother while she was growing up here in the U.S. To say it was stressful is a major understatement. She was constantly feeling bad about the comforts she had & her life here in the U.S., had feelings of not being loyal to her adopted family & when she would talk to two of her siblings living back in Korea she would always end up crying & stressed out. She had this sense of being pulled in two directions, but didn’t know what to do. I’m only relating one person’s experience and I have heard of others where it’s the total opposite, but I know for myself it would have been really confusing to have had contact with my birth mother until I was ready & even now I’m not sure I am.

However, I recently conducted a search for my birth mother & I’ve waited until I was in my 30’s to do it. It wasn’t so much to find her, but to see if I had any siblings. I still have mixed feelings about finding my birth mother. I totally agree with Juli that it should be a personal/natural progression for your child. I waited to make sure I can deal with all the possible outcomes & even at that it’s a constant up & down in terms of my feelings about this issue.

This is a tricky question. There are a million factors that make everyone’s situation unique. I think it’s important to remember that the ultimate choice about contact is between your child and her birth mother. Respecting the birth mother’s desires and privacy are of the utmost importance. Small measures, like putting a letter in your daughter’s file are probably benign, but leaving something for her at the place she stayed feels uncomfortable to me. You don’t want her to feel pursued or haunted.

For me personally, I struggle with the decision about doing a search. On some level, I think I’m afraid of bringing pain back into her life, and I’m also afraid of being judged by her. I’ve heard stories on both ends of the spectrum about birth parent searches, so my anxiety is well founded. My parents are pretty indifferent – I think they figure that I am an adult, and once I make my decision there won’t be much they can do about it. I don’t really remember ever having a desire to find my birth mother in my childhood, so I can’t say whether or not they were supportive.

I do, however, think that I will eventually do a search because I am really desperate to know if I have half-siblings. I’m the youngest in my adoptive family, so I think it would be great to be the older, wiser sibling to someone. I almost wish that I could find my siblings without having to find my birth mother. There are some things there that I’m just not ready to unbury.

I think you have to let contact/birth mother searches generate naturally. I think there is something about the search process (which can be long and arduous) that prepares you for the emotional rollercoaster of actually finding your birth family. I almost want to say that it’s better that way. I mean, if the first time your daughter has an inkling of wanting to find her mother you whip out a letter from her, it might be too much too soon. I know it doesn’t intuitively make sense, but it’s just something I feel in my gut.

Another thing to keep in mind is that I’ve had some friends who had really great experiences finding their foster mothers, which I’m told is an easier process anyway. For me, I feel a stronger connection to my foster mother than i do to my birth mother and would be really interested in meeting her.

Our next question comes to us from Elisabeth:

One question I have is what I/we should be doing a new adoptive parents when it comes to encouraging contact with our daughter’s first mom.  We’re adopting an eleven month old little girl from Seoul this month (we travel in a few weeks), and it’s very important to us that we do everything we can to encourage the possibility of having a relationship or contact with our daughter’s Korean mom and Korean family.  We want to be sensitive to her first mom’s wishes, but we also want her to know that we’re out here and that we’d love to have an open relationship if she’s interested.

We’re writing a letter to personally place in our daughter’s file when we visit the orphanage, but what can we do or say in that letter, and in future letters, that will offer the best chance of contact?  What do you wish your adoptive parents might have done, and when?  I don’t want to push too far or too hard, but I also don’t want to wait until our daugher is grown and leave the choice of having an open relationship to her–by then the possibility of contact with her Korean mom may not be there.  If you wish your parents had made an effort to contact your first family, how far do you think they should have pushed?  Would it be too much to write to the maternity/single mothers home where we know she stayed and leave a letter for her there?  I’ve known some parents adopting from Eastern Europe who have used private investigators to make contact…I don’t know if that’s an option for us, and I’m not sure if I feel it would be appropriate.

From the adoptee perspective, how would you have wanted your adoptive parents to act/write/pursue when it came to makign contact or encouraging contact with your first family?