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Openness Resources
Openness has become a hot button topic in adoption over the past couple years. Recently the Adoption Council of Ontario has been called upon to answer questions about the benefits and challenges of openness. Below is a compilation of resources that you may find useful during your journey to learning more about this important aspect of adoption and permanency.
Resources:
Focus on the Child: Openness in Adoption from Foster Care: A guide for assessment and planning.
What’s Inside:
Is Openness different when the child is being adopted from foster care?
Checklist for Assessing and Preparing for Openness in Child Welfare Adoption Planning
Tips and Strategies for Success in Openness Planning
Adoptive Parenting and Social Media: The best defence is a good offence
What’s Inside:
How can a parent prepare and oversee openness through social media?
Teaching your child about adoption and social media
Being open to openness
Checklist for Assessing and Preparing for Openness in Child Welfare Adoption Planning
What’s inside:
Questions addressed during intial considerations
Key information to know about the child
Key information to know about the birth family
Key information to know about the adoptive/kinship family
Identifying factors of support and barriers in openness planning
Tips and Strategies for Success in Openness Planning
What’s inside:
Pre-Adoption
During the Matching Process
Ongoing Openness
Child Welfare Information Gateway
Sibling Issues in Foster Care and Adoption
What’s inside:
Defining a sibling relationship
Legal framework for protecting sibling connections
The importance of siblings
Sibling relationships in abusive or neglectful families
Benefits of placing siblings together
Barriers to placing siblings together
Practices for keeping siblings together in placement
When siblings cannot live in the same home
Maintaining ties between separated siblings
Sibling issues within the foster or adoptive family
Child Welfare Information Gateway
Openness in Adoption:
Building Relationships Between Adoptive and Birth Families
What’s inside:
What is open adoption?
Trends toward increasing openness
Benefits of open adoption
Deciding whether open adoption is right for your family
Building and maintaining relationships with your child’s birth family
Using social media for contact with birth families
Child Welfare Information Gateway
Working With Birth and Adoptive Families to Support Open Adoption
What’s inside:
What is openness?
Trends in openness
Benefits of openness
Implications for casework practice
Implications for agencies
Adoption and the Internet
The Donaldson Adoption Institute
Untangling the Web: The Internet’s Transformative Impact on Adoption
What’s inside:
The internet’s penetration for adoption
The internet’s benefit for adoption
The internet’s risks for adoption
Search and reunion on the internet
Precautions for internet users
Conclusions and recommendations
Huffington Post
6 Keys Factor to Consider for an Open Adoption
What’s inside?
Worries and concerns are normal
Always have the child’s best interests in mind
The definition of “family” is changing
Communication and commitment are key
Contracts can’t be the last word
Support and resources do exist to help
The Guardian: Facebook has changed adoption forever
What’s inside?
“Social network sites like Facebook are changing what happens after adoption. At the click of a button, birth parents can contact their children – and vice versa – with far-reaching consequences.”
The benefits and challenges of direct post-adoption contact: perspectives from adoptive parents and birth relatives
What’s inside?
Abstract: Adoption in the UK primarily concerns the placing of children from the public care system, often against their parents’ wishes. Most such children have a plan for contact with their birth family, and a significant minority of children have direct (face-to-face) contact with parents, grandparents, siblings or other relatives. This paper reports findings from interviews with 55 adoptive parents, and 39 birth relatives, all of whom had experience of direct post-adoption contact arrangements. Thematic qualitative analysis was used to identify the main benefits and challenges of contact as reported by adoptive parents and birth relatives. The key challenges of contact identified were: having personal meetings in impersonal circumstances; managing highly charged emotions; negotiating relationships when you are both strangers and relatives; and managing control, risk and power issues. The four key benefits of contact related to: maintaining important relationships between the child and birth relatives; providing reassurance to the child and birth relatives; helping the child with issues of identity and loss; and helping the child to deal with their dual connection to the birth and adoptive family. Implications for workers supporting direct contact arrangements are discussed.
Social Media: Tips for Foster Parents and Caregivers
What’s inside?
“While social media has changed the way the world communicates, it has also created privacy and safety concerns. This page discusses the benefits of social media for children and youth in foster care and provides tips for parents and caregivers who want to help youth use social media safely. Advice for social media use by foster parents is also provided.”
Presentations:
Presentations from the “Open for Discussion” training day hosted by the Adoption Council of Ontario for families and professionals in May of 2015.
Openness and Adoption – Office of the Children’s Lawyer
Elizabeth McCarty
