Research: Is it a good idea for the biomom to hold the baby?

     As I mentioned in my last update, we now have more information about Anne's birth plan. The basis of a birth plan is for the biomom to have an idea of how she wants everything to look at the hospital. Who will be in the delivery room? Who will be in the waiting room to come in after the baby is born? Will the baby be taken out of the room or stay in? Will the biomom see the baby? Hold the baby?

Research: Decision making styles that could lead to a disrupted match

(I just found this in my draft folder-- not sure why it never published!)       
   One of the things that we really admire about our agency is that they will not match until halfway through the second trimester (or, more preferably, not until the third trimester) to make sure that the Emom has really had time to process her decision and is certain (as much as is possible to be certain) that she is comfortable with the plan she is making. Today, I received an email from an adoption listserve about a lawyer trying to find a match for a young woman who is due early March. This is the first week of July. It would be physically impossible for her to have known about her pregnancy for more than a few days. It took me awhile to put my finger on why this made me so deeply uncomfortable, but then it hit me. My research (including my dissertation) focuses largely on the decision to abort when faced with an unintended pregnancy. One of the areas that I have paid specific attention to is the women who come to regret this decision. An article that I have referenced frequently in both my writings and my lectures is one that I will admit is quite dated (nearly 30 years old), but has valuable information about the features of decision making that lead to abortion regret. After going back over this, I realized that many of the situations that I have looked at and said "I'm not comfortable with that" have features that are mentioned in this article. Now, of course the decision to abort and the decision to place for adoption are completely separate. But, wouldn't it make sense that the same type of decision making that could lead to someone regretting an abortion could also lead to someone changing their mind about the decision to place for adoption (or, worse, regret the adoption)? With that in mind, I am going to review the 4 decision making styles that can lead to regret.

Research: Are adopted children really at a higher risk for needing therapy and attempting suicide?

    I will return to the blog with something that is both controversial and hard to talk about-- welcome back, right? Between having 6 different family members visit over the past month, a mysterious stomach virus, food poisoning striking our house, and planning a trip back to the midwest to see family, I have been a bit preoccupied! There are no new updates with our homestudy-- the paperwork is on someone's desk in some family court legal office somewhere awaiting approval. So, onto the research!

Research: Adoptees discuss challenges, advantages, and disadvantages of open adoption

      The article I read this morning was fairly recent (2012) and taken from a small sample who gave in-depth interviews. It was titled "Growing Up in Open Adoption: Young Adults' Perspectives." There were only 11 participants, so the information can't be used to establish any type of trend, but they did give interesting details in recounting their experiences. The adoptees were ages 18-23 at the time of this interview, and had all been in an open-adoption situation. These participants all had very different experiences with their adoptions: some exchanged mail once a year, some had face-to-face visits, some of these visits were frequent and ongoing while some had only happened once during childhood, and some talked on the phone while others used social media. This article referred to the biomom as "birth mother," so that is the language that I will use in summarizing the article.

Research: Open adoption relationships, considering sexual orientation

         I found an interesting article to read this morning looking at open adoption dynamics, and comparing how gender and sexual orientation could possibly  influence those dynamics by including same-sex couples in the study. This was a qualitative study with a pretty small sample, which included 15 heterosexual couples, 15 gay couples, and 15 lesbian couples. The researchers were trying to answer 4 questions, during two separate interviews (one while waiting for palcement, and one 3-4 months after adoption):

1. Does sexual orientation and gender influence the initial motivation for open adoption?
• I'm not going to talk about this one, because there isn't any practical application for any of us who are going through this process. You know why you are motivated to pursue an open adoption. 
2. Are there any patterns of change to the open adoption relationship or development of the relationship that are different based on gender and sexual orientation? 
3. Do the challenges in developing a relationship with the birth-parents (that is the term they used, so that is the term I will use in this summary, even though it isn't my personal language of preference) differ based on gender and sexual orientation?
4. In what ways do adoptive parents expand their idea of family to include the birth parents, and is this influenced by gender and sexual orientation. 

       Here is what they found:

Research: Satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the amount of contact

       The article I read today is another one about teenagers. I know that it may seem odd that I am reading so many things about adolescents rather than younger children, since we will be adopting a newborn, but I think that there are a few reasons that I have been drawn to these articles. First, teenagers are able to better articulate complex feelings than children. Second, knowing whether there is happiness, contentment, and satisfaction with the relationship over a decade down the road can be a great motivation to work through some of the challenges and discomforts that may arise during the first few years of the open adoption when we are still working on forming a functional relationship with the bio family. Finally, my area of focus/specialty academically and professionally is adolescent development. I am interested in and drawn to this research-- it's just what makes me tick. So, without further rambling, this morning's article was taken from a 2006 edition of Child Welfare and titled "Adolescents' feelings about openness in adoption: Implications for adoption agencies."

          For this article, 152 adolescents who had an open adoption situation were interviewed. They were adopted as infants (the adoption was finalized before the first birthday) by a married couple, and were not in a transracial, international, or special needs adoption situation.
        The format of the study was to look at 2 groups, each broken down into 2 subgroups. Group 1 was those who had contact. They were then divided into those who were satisfied with that contact and those who were not. Group 2 was those who had no contact. Just like with group 1, they were then separated into those who were satisfied without having contact and those who were not.
   
Happy with contact  

Research: Curiosity and contact with the bio family

         The article I read today was titled "Contact in adoption: The experience of adoptive families in the USA," written in 2003.  This article was a summary of several research projects that used the MTARP dataset. The MTARP (Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Project) was a large, multi-year (longitudinal) study that focused on openness and contact in adoptions. It was a unique data collection, because it surveyed adopted children, adoptive parents, biomoms, and agency caseworkers. All adoption situations involved a child who was adopted before his or her first birthday from a private agency, and any situation that involved a transracial, international, or special needs adoption was excluded from the study. Several different studies have been conducted using this dataset, thus the availability of a summary article.

The adoptive parent's role in communicating about the adoption

Research: Is it healthy for children to talk about their adoption?

       I've fallen a bit behind on my article reading, but hopefully can start getting back on track! Today's article was taken from the journal Adoption & Fostering  and is titled "The experience of adoption: The association between communicative openness and self-esteem in adoption."
        This study was done in the UK, so there are some cultural differences to consider, but the results are interesting. There were 2 groups of 11 year old, adopted children studied: the first group were adopted within the UK as babies, and the second group were adopted from Romania when they were 2 months- 3.5 years old. In total, there were 180 children in this study. Their parents were also interviewed for part of the study.
       (As a side note, this article refers to adoptive parents as "substitute" parents in several places. I found that word choice to be pretty offensive as a future adoptive parent.)
        This article opened with the idea that adoptive parenting includes a unique challenge: helping your child understand their origins and make sense of their beginnings. It is a challenge that must be faced, as the majority of adoptees will be curious about their origins. So, the study explored some of the factors that are related to ease or difficultly for children in discussing their adoption, to what degree openness talking about the adoption is related to family structure or feelings of difference (i.e., "I feel different than the rest of the members of my family), and if talking about adoption is related to self-esteem.
     
        Here is what they found:

Research: Are visits with the biomom good for teenagers?

          This is day 2 of my whole "be productive and read research while we wait" endeavor. The article I read today was from a 2008 issue of Adoption Quarterly entitled "Many faces of openness in adoption: Perspectives of adopted adolescents and their parents." This study only included 52 adolescents, so it isn't huge, but it did have interesting results.


 What is the biomom's role in their lives?

Research: How do adoptive parents feel about openness?

So, in the several weeks that we will be waiting for all of our homestudy paperwork to be processed, I've decided to do something productive: read research articles! I know, it sounds super exciting, right? I'm a bit of a nerd and I enjoy reading research, and I thankfully have access to research journals through my job. Yes, there are books on adoption, but very few incorporate recent empirical research. So, for those who don't think that reading an article a day sounds quite as exciting as I do (or don't have access to the articles), I am going to summarize them as I come across ones that have interesting information. So here we go!