Openness and Contact in Foster Care Adoptions: An Eight‐Year Follow‐Up*

Openness and Contact in Foster Care Adoptions: An Eight-Year Follow-Up* This study examines openness and contact in 231 foster care adoptions from the California Long-Range Adoption Study (CLAS), an eight-year prospective longitudinal study. Data were collected using three waves of mailed questionnaires completed by the adoptive parent. Findings indicate that while the practice of openness continues to evolve for most families, there is remarkable stability in levels of contact and communication with the child's biological family, especially in the last four years of the study. Key Words: adoption, adoptive parents, contact, foster care, longitudinal, open adoption. While the practice of placing children in open adoptions is still relatively new in the United States, it has become standard in some agencies (Etter, 1993). Despite the increase in open adoptions over the last thirty years, little data exist about openness among families involved in adoptions, particularly families who adopt former foster children (Berry, Dylla, Barth, & Needell, 1998). Open adoption typically refers to the maintenance of contact between adoptive and biological families following placement of adopted children. Contact can differ in terms of who initiates and is involved in the contact, including the adopted child, adoptive parents, biological parents, or other adoptive and biological relatives. Contact can also differ in form (e.g., information, pictures, gifts, letters, phone calls, face-to-face visits), frequency, and duration (Curtis, 1986). In short, open adoptions are unlike traditional, closed adoptions in that the latter generally involve the termination of all contact between adoptive and biological families and the former do not. Growing concern among mental health and child welfare professionals about the impact of closed adoption on adopted children has been a major contributor to the recent shift from closed to open adoptions. Advocates for openness often maintain that children in closed adoptions are likely to experience identity problems as a result of having no contact with or information about their biological families (Pannor & Baran, 1984; Baran & Pannor, 1993). An increase in the number of couples seeking to adopt and a decrease in the number of infants available for adoption (as a result of greater accessibility to abortion and less stigma of illegitimate birth and single parenting), also have contributed to the shift toward open adoption among mothers who place their children for adoption. The supply and demand in the adoption market, then, is more favorable to the biological mother who is able to wait for families agreeing to an open adoption, if that is her desire (Churchman, 1986; Bachrach, Adams, Sambrano, & London, 1990). These factors have contributed to a growth in openness among adoptions facilitated by a child welfare or adoption agency as well as adoptions in which children are placed in adoptive homes independent of agencies. National child welfare legislation (e.g., PL. 96-272, PL. 105-89) that encourages and supports adoptions of children by their foster parents also has furthered the shift toward openness. An emphasis on helping children to maintain "family continuity" as a principle aim of child welfare services (Downs, Costin, & McFadden, 1996) has led to the search for more ways to reduce the disruption children experience after placement in foster care or when their biological ties are severed. Open adoption is one such strategy. Indeed, adoptions of children from foster care are growing at a substantial rate and in pace with President Clinton's Adoption 2002 goal of doubling adoptions by that year. With the rapid increase in open adoptions has come a slowly growing literature on the effects of the practice on adopted children, adoptive parents, and biological parents (Belbas, 1986; Berry, 1991; Berry et al., 1998; Etter, 1993; Gross, 1993; Grotevant, McRoy, Elde, & Fravel, 1994; Kraft, Palombo, Woods, Mitchell, & Schmidt, 1985a, 1985b; McRoy, Grotevant, & White, 1988). …