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.