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When adopting an older child chances are highly likely that your child remembers members of the birth family and may want to have ongoing contact with the birth family. Likewise, birth family members may want to continue contact with your child.
This can be a threatening option, or it can be a great way for you to learn about your child’s early life. Contact can range from siblings to grandparents or even birth parents.
The first thing is to assess the appropriateness of the various family members in your child’s life. Some of this may have already been determined by social services during your child’s time in foster care.
Another thing to evaluate is how much contact is going to be best for your child. Can your child handle in person visits, phone calls, letters, or some variation of these? Some children want as much contact as possible, others want little to do with their birth family. The family may want more contact than your child is able to handle.
Here is an example of what we dealt with. Sammy’s paternal grandparents were very active in his life. They gave us a wonderful gift of photos from the time of his birth until he joined our family. He lived with them on and off between foster home and birth parents. They were an instrumental part of his life and denying that would not be good for anyone. Initially, we did in person visits, and even did a couple of visits in their home. At first we thought this was a good thing. They were asking for contact, as was Sammy. However, a few days after one of the visits, Sammy came to us with cuts all over the back of his hand. He had taken the glass out of a picture frame and used it to slash his hand. His actions told us what his words could not. The visits were too confusing for him. He was always afraid he was leaving us and returning to his grandparents. We met with our worker and his grandparents and discussed what had happened. We all agreed that we needed to scale back the contact. They exchanged letters and some phone calls for a number of years. Now it is at a point of my sending letters to the paternal grandmother (grandfather has passed away) with an update of how Sammy is doing. With him being in a residential treatment center other contact is difficult.
As you can see, we have done many different “levels” of contact and it is all based on how Sammy is doing. His grandparents would have liked more contact and we were fine with that, but Sammy was unable to handle it. It’s up to you to evaluate what your child can handle.
Giving your child this gift can be a gift to you as well. As with our case, you may gain photos of your child that you might not otherwise get. You may gain information about your child that is otherwise missing, such as when your child started walking, what his first words were, medical history in the family and so on. I’m not saying you should have contact with the birth family simply for that, but it can end up being a side benefit.
In some cases keeping contact with the birth family is a requirement of the adoption, and in other cases the decision is solely yours. This is something you should consider before you make a commitment to continue contact.
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