Talking about the Birth Family since the Beginning: The Communicative Openness in the New Adoptive Family.

Alessandra Santona,Laura Gorla,Giacomo Tognasso,Daniela Russo,Carla Luisa Miscioscia

doi:10.3390/ijerph19031203

Alessandra Santona, Laura Gorla + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19031203

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Abstract

Communicative openness within the adoptive family changes over time and helps the child explore his/her history. We aimed to evaluate whether adoptive families communicate about specific adoption-related themes from the beginning of their lives as a family. We created an instrument to track the communication process during the first year of adoption, involving a sample of 537 internationally adopted children (313 males, 224 females, mean age of adoption: 4.9 years) at two time points: six (T1) and twelve (T2) months after adoption. Our results suggest that in the first year of placement, children express memories about the past but tend to not speak about their birth families. We discovered a significant difference (Wald test = 4.889; p = 0.027) in communication about the biological family between the two points. The presence of adoptive parents who speak about it impacts the child’s questions about the past (exp (B) = 2.452, p = 0.006) and whether the child speaks about his/her biological family (exp (B) = 2.373; p = 0.017). Then, in the first year of adoption, the presence of an adoptive parent who communicates openly helps the child to ask questions and share his/her thoughts.

Highlights

Communicating about adoption has always been considered an essential aspect for adoptive families [1,2,3,4].Researchers have defined communication about adoption-related themes as openness in adoption [2]
We considered the first year after the adoption to assess whether the adopted children asked questions and shared memories about their past before being adopted
All areas investigated aim to understand the outcomes of adoption by exploring all its aspects, but in the current study, we focused only on communication about adoption

Summary

Introduction

Communicating about adoption has always been considered an essential aspect for adoptive families [1,2,3,4].Researchers have defined communication about adoption-related themes as openness in adoption [2]. Communicative openness (CO) involves looking at all adoption issues [1,5,6,7], and changes over time; it is a dynamic and flexible process. For this reason, it is necessary to study its development and how it evolves throughout the adoptive family’s life cycle [8,9]. Many aspects are discussed together in the CO process: the child’s past life with and without the birth family, life in institutions, the adoptive parents’ desire to meet the child, and the first period together as a new family [11]

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