How to Bond With Your Child's Birth Parents

Step One: Moving Past Your Anxieties & Worries

Each and every adoptive parent has anxieties of sooner or later losing their adopted child physically or emotionally to the birth mother and father. They worry that if they are analyzed against the birth parents, they may be thought to be inferior.

Opening an adoption by taking on the reality of the birth family necessitates that adoptive parents first deal with these fundamental anxieties. Like every fear to be conquered, it often really helps to get in touch with other people who have overcome similar anxieties. Joining a nearby adoptive family support group, taking part in classes online or adoption meetings, looking through books and articles, and talking to adoptees and parents in open adoptions are all techniques to overcoming the fear of losing your adopted son or daughter to the birth family bond.

Step Two: Developing the New Relationship

If you're thinking to yourself that there's no relationship with the child's birth parents because you don't know them, don't worry. You might not know them in a physical sense.  The whole concept of opening an adoption is to recognize, accept and ultimately embrace your child's bond and relationship to family members who were one time strangers to you.

Like every other relationship, open adoption is complex. If you are married or in a committed relationship, think about the following: The open adoption relationship is similar to having in-laws. They might not reveal a common belief system with us nor have made the same choices in life as we have made. Their religious beliefs and political views might be really different than our own. Yet we take the time to build a relationship with them since we have in common the love of a single individual. Your partner is linked to his or her family whether or not you like them.  They have a bond regardless of whether you accept it or not. An extension of this example is to recognize that your spouse loves his family in one way, and also you in another. They are both important types of love.

Building a relationship with your child’s birth family starts with the acceptance of the bond which exists between your son or daughter and his or her birth parents.  It is independent from the bond that you've got with your adopted child. One doesn’t replace the other.

Next, adoptive families must arrive at a degree of acceptance. This stage could be the most difficult. Recognizing that the relationship is present is one thing, while accepting that it will continually be part of your family dynamics, a crucial part, will take time. By concentrating on the objective of raising your son or daughter to be the most emotionally healthy individual possible, this goal will be better achieved.

The final step towards opening your adoption is to accept your child's birth family. It is at this stage that you're ready to bring your son or daughter into the open-adoption relationship.

To learn more about opening your adoption, please contact us today and we'll be glad to help you!