2008 survey

• Challenges to Openness-

  One of the most important aspects of the survey was identifying common issues that get in the way of openness. This graph looks at the top five issues among all respondents (it's actually six because there was a tie).

  

  What these issues tell us as a support site:

  • Our members need help learning how to communicate and listen effectively. Perhaps we need to start reviewing books that speak to this or interview experts who can help? For agencies and adoption professionals, communication workshops might be a great addition to their services.
  • Speaking of communication, our members need specific help in sharing their emotions, learning to set boundaries and asking for more from each other.
  • I'll talk more about the "lack of support from extended family" in the next post but clearly this is something post-adoption services needs to address.
  • We also need to think of ways we can support folks after the visits -- learning how to cope with the upswing in grief, pain or guilt. Openness can sometimes make the hard parts of adoption undeniable.

  Now to break down the issues by respondents:

  • The top two issues for first parents was having to hide feelings and being afraid to ask for more contact.
  • The top two issues for adoptive parents was differences in communication styles and difficulty in setting boundaries.
• Contentment with Contact-

  The participants of this survey were certainly a specialized group as evidenced by how respondents answered the question "who initiates contact?".

  Here's how the results broke down:

  78% of the first families responding say they do. (66% say the adoptive family does.)
  84% of the adoptive families responding say they do. (59% say the first family does.)

  Clearly the people who chose to respond to the survey and who are likely to participate on the board are people who are proactive about building and maintaining their open adoption relationships.

  The next question was whether or not respondents felt satisfied with their level of contact. Here are the results:

  

  As you can see, many of the respondents want more contact. Exact numbers: First parents 41% and adoptive parents 39%.

  When asked if they felt their child's other family was satisfied with the level of contact the results looked like this:

  Yes.  43% (first parents: 55% adoptive parents: 42%)
  No, they want more contact. 14% (first parents: 9% adoptive parents: 14%)
  No, they want less contact.  2%  (first parents: 7% adoptive parents: >1%)
  I don't know. 40% (first parents: 29% adoptive parents: 43%)

  The number appears to be higher in adoptive parents because there were a higher number of adoptive parents answering whose children have no contact with their first families, including parents who adopted internationally.

  What struck me is that people generally assume that their child's other family is content although a large number of respondents on both sides who answered this survey want more contact.

  Of course, people who answered aren't representative of the adoption community. They are people who are identifying themselves as wanting some measure of support around openness, which means they value those relationships on some level -- even if they are frustrated or struggling. But this does give me hope that as families learn why openness is a good thing for adoptees (as the research is showing), they will look to make more contact.

  The lesson I'm learning here is that it may be worth it for families to reach out to their children's other family members, especially with information about why openness matters.

• Types of contact-

  Most of the respondents had direct contact with their child's other families. For adoptive families this was 69% and for first families this was 77%. (13% of adoptive parents and 14% of first parents answering the survey have no contact at all.) Types of contact broke down like this:

  

  I was a little surprised by how many families are meeting each other in a neutral location. I also took note that a number of families are having direct contact but aren't having visits. For OpenAdoptionSupport.com, that means I need to think on ways to help families maintain what are essentially long-distant relationships (even if they may live near each other). I am hoping to find site contributors who are currently living in these kinds of open adoptions.

• Timeframe of open adoption experiences-

  One of the questions I asked was, "How long have you been part of the adoption triad?" The answers varied according to where the respondent was in the triad. Adoptees, as I said, were generally responding as adults (out of 22 people who identified as adopted persons, 15 said they had been part of the adoption triad for greater than 21 years). Adoptive parents tended to be "younger" in their adoption experiences than first parents. The breakdown looked like this:

  First parents
  Less than a year 7%
  Between a year and five years 31%
  Between six and ten years 36%
  Between eleven and fifteen years 9%
  Between sixteen and twenty-one years 9%
  Greater than twenty-one years 7%

  Adoptive parents
  Less than a year 19%
  Between a year and five years 58%
  Between six and ten years 16%
  Between eleven and fifteen years 3%
  Between sixteen and twenty-one years 3%
  Greater than twenty-one years 1%

  The questions submitted through the Ask a question feature reflect these differences. Adoptive parents tend to be working on establishing their relationships with their children's first parents while first parents are often asking about how to revisit those relationships further down the road.

  I was a little surprised by how low the "less than a year" number is on both sides. Perhaps it's a reflection that openness can get more complicated as our children begin to ask more of us and of their family relationships.

• Further criticism of the survey-

  The second criticism wasn't included in the official survey results because the woman was unwilling to come back and take the survey. She did, however, email her concerns to the person who shared the survey address with her and gave that person permission to forward them to me and have them included in the results. Her concerns were about the language used. As an adoptive parent, she was unhappy with the use of the word "family" to describe her child's biological relatives. She said, in part:

  the author refers to [my child]'s genetic relatives as her 'first family' and her 'other family.' [she] doesn't have any 'other family.' we are her family. if any of those people walked into my house she wouldn't know who they were. and we were her 'first family.' she left the hospital with us. ... i REALLY cannot complete that survey. ... we aren't usurpers, we didn't take what belonged to someone else. we aren't the 'second' family. 

  I realized when I first made a decision about what term to use for first/birth families that this might be a hard sell for some users and might even lose some community members. However, I hadn't expected a response this extreme.

  While her email didn't make me feel like I ought to rethink how I used language in the survey or on the site (especially because I think adoptive parents are over-represented in the discussions already and so it serves the community best to be explicitly welcoming to first family members) it was a reminder that it has an impact on who participates here and so I thought it was an important part of the survey.

  It's also a reminder that every single person who comes to this site is coming from a different place and that many of us are struggling with very entrenched issues about family and loss and love. It makes us pretty vulnerable.

  Next I'll get into the nitty-gritty of responses.

• Criticism of the survey-

  There were two pointed criticisms about the survey. I'll share the first today and the second tomorrow.

  The first was from an adult adoptee currently in reunion. She first shared her concerns with me in the forum where I posted a request for survey respondents and I asked her to please fill out the survey and share them there so they would be part of the official record.

  She wrote, in part:

  "This survey seems to be all about adoptive parents and their views/emotions. In my view, that is one of the greatest challenges to building an honest and open adoptive system."

  While I do feel the survey did an adequate job of addressing the views/emotions of both first and adoptive parents, I think she has a valid point that it did not do such a good job of addressing the views/emotions of adoptees. This pointed out to me a need for OpenAdoptionSupport.com to do more to bring adoptees into our discussions. My challenges here are these:

  • Widespread openness in adoption is relatively new so there are fewer adult adoptees who have experienced openness than those who grew up in closed situations;
  • While there are similarities between reunion and openness, they are not the same. OpenAdoptionSupport.com does share some reunion resources but the focus is on people navigating open relationships;
  • I am unsure if there is another way to serve adoptees in open adoptions who are minors other than serving their parents.

  I am open and interested in discussing this with the community. What else could this site do to help support adoptees living with openness? How can we do a better job of helping our kids?

• Who Answered Our Survey-

  I want to thank everyone who took the time out to answer the survey questions last month. I'm going to begin sharing the information here and hope that it will help us understand how we can grow this community to best serve each other.

  I'm going to follow the trajectory of the presentation I gave on March 29th in Portland, OR at the American Adoption Conference and will use some of the same slides as well.

  Requests to answer the survey were posted here, at my own blog, at several other blogs including the Adoption.com first parents blog, in at least one livejournal community and (according to the folks who posted there) in some messageboard communities. 289 people answered the survey with this breakdown of respondents:

  Note: At least two adoptive parents (as apparent from their answers) answered the question as adoptees. Possibly other people misidentified themselves as well but those are the only two I caught. Without correcting for misidentification the exact numbers of respondents are:

  Adoptees: 22

  First Parents: 55

  Adoptive Parents: 199

  Extended First Family: 2

  Extended Adoptive Family: 4

  By far, most of the adoptees who took the survey were adult adopted persons who grew up in closed adoptions. Because of this we got very little data about open adoptions from an adoptee perspective. (Those who did talk about first family contact were usually -- but not always -- talking about post-reunion contact.)

  Also quite a few adoptive parents were answering from the perspective of parenting in closed international adoptions.

  Tomorrow I'll bring up some of the criticism participants raised about the survey.