Today our toddler son overheard my husband talking with our daughter's first mom on the phone and so just had to call his birth mom, too. He told her about the egg hunt at church that morning and she told him she loved him, then he went about the rest of his day.

Sometimes I come across parents who are willing to send letters and pictures to their kids' first parents from the start, but want to hold off on direct contact until their child is "old enough" to understand the relationship. Sometimes that means 6 or 7 years old, sometimes 4 or so. They argue that contact before then wouldn't mean anything--the child isn't old enough to even remember. Why bother?

I've struggled to understand this line of thinking, because when I see something like my two-year old phoning his first mom, I see the building blocks of a real relationship. He won't remember this brief conversation twenty years from now. He probably won't even remember it a month from now. But in a few years when those long-term memories start to form, he will be drawing on these early years. He'll have the head start of familiarity. And at the most basic level he'll already know that his first parents are part of the constellation of people who make up his family. Why pass that up?

Originally posted at Production, Not Reproduction