For a long time, when they “decided” to have their child adopted, the birth (or biological) parents generally remained without news. Today, mentalities having evolved, open adoption, that is to say during which adoptive and biological parents build a lasting relationship centered around the good of the child, is practiced more and more. But is it really beneficial to the child as common sense may suggest?
That’s what a team of communications researchers from the University of Missouri sought to find out. And according to the results of their study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, encouraging relations between adoptive and biological parents promotes good relations between the child and his adoptive parents. Their work is particularly focused on when the child is old enough to learn about adoption.
To reach this conclusion, Haley Hortsman, assistant professor of family interpersonal communication and study co-author, and her colleagues analyzed 165 adoption stories.
Communication, essential for children and parents
“We have realized that the best way for a child to learn his true parentage is for the two families to jointly tell him the story of his adoption when the time is right,” says Haley Horstman. She adds that freeing up communication allows adoptive and biological parents to create a healthy environment that benefits everyone.
By analyzing the communication process, the researchers found that the adoptive parents act as the “guardians” of the relationship between their child and his biological parents. Haley Hortsman concludes that “the two families don’t have to be best friends, but they can try to maintain a good relationship with each other, even if it takes effort.” And communicating is like everything, it can be learned.
In his book, Thinking about adoption: pastoral gender governance, Bruno Perreau explains that in France, modern adoption, in the sense of creating a bond of filiation, took off at the end of the First World War. It was then a question of “dealing with the losses of war”. The legislation evolves, always in the direction of the facilitation of the adoption, until 1976 when the finality of “making a family” is definitively enshrined in the law.
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