School of Social Work, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA.
Soc Work. 2013 Jan;58(1):43-52. doi: 10.1093/sw/sws053.
Unlike in the past, most adoption agencies today offer birth parents and adoptive parents the opportunity to share identifying information and have contact with each other. To understand the impacts of different open adoption arrangements, a qualitative descriptive study using a snowball sample of 44 adoptive parents throughout New England began in 1988. Every seven years these parents who adopted infants in open adoptions have participated in tape-recorded interviews to explore their evolving reactions to their open adoption experiences. This article reports the results of in-depth interviews with these parents now that their children have reached young adulthood. This longitudinal research illuminates how open adoptions change over the course of childhood and adolescence, parents' feelings about open adoption, challenges that emerge in their relationships with their children's birth families, how those challenges are managed and viewed, and parents' advice for others living with open adoption and for clinical social work practice and policy. Findings reveal that regardless of the type of openness, these adoptive parents generally feel positive about knowing the birth parents and having contact with them, are comfortable with open adoption, and see it serving the child's best interests.
与过去不同，现在的大多数收养机构都为亲生父母和养父母提供了分享身份信息和相互联系的机会。为了了解不同开放式收养安排的影响，1988 年开始了一项使用新英格兰地区 44 名养父母的雪球样本的定性描述性研究。每七年，这些通过开放式收养收养婴儿的父母都会参加录音采访，以探索他们对开放式收养经历的不断变化的反应。本文报告了对这些父母的深入采访结果，因为他们的孩子已经进入了青年期。这项纵向研究阐明了开放式收养在儿童和青少年时期是如何变化的，父母对开放式收养的感受，他们与孩子亲生家庭关系中出现的挑战，以及如何应对和看待这些挑战，以及父母对其他开放式收养者的建议，以及对临床社会工作实践和政策的建议。研究结果表明，无论开放程度如何，这些养父母通常对了解亲生父母并与他们保持联系感到满意，对开放式收养感到满意，并认为这符合孩子的最佳利益。
