I have seen a few references to and snippets from to a new study "Bridging the Divide: Openness in Adoption and Post-adoption Psychosocial Adjustment among Birth and Adoptive Parents" Journal of Family Psychology, (possibly not published yet) 2008

If anyone has access to the full study, I would be interested in reading it and it looks like it would be of interest to most of our members.

I was able to find the study here: here at the Pittsburgh Mother & Child Project page. You can download the study right here as a .pdf file.

Why do we advocate for open adoption? What is the definition of a successful one?

I didn't set out to have either an open or closed adoption..when my dd's first mother was pregnant, I remember asking her if she had an idea of what kidn of contact she wanted, and she always said I don't know..but I felt a need to get a better idea, so she said for sure she would like pictures a lot the first year..

we ended up having in person visits once a month for the first year, and I was finding it difficult to maintain that from a pragmatic time perspective, and also an emotional/energy standpoint.

For the next 3 years we have been getting together pretty consistently about every 3 months..we used to email a lot more, but we are both busier..we always are sending each other those funny forwards about angels, etc.

One of the hardest things about having an open adoption is the lack of immediate support in the general community .. if something uncomfortable happens, I have learned I can't just tell any friend..myparents are supportive but my MIL is still weary of the whole concept, but has respected our choice. So, I have learned to deal with a certain amount of stress about it "looking like its not working"

In fact, I have a cousin who told my mom she would not consider adoption because of our situation. I have another cousin who adopted from Korea and thinks we are nuts. Its hard but I have grown from learning to be true to my self.

when people ask me "WHY" I can tell they assume that it is some "concession" we "agreed to" in the negotiation of our adoption, which is not what it was like at all.

I think my motivator was the desire for good kharma in the building of my family. Yes, its complicated and effortful to have a real relationship with my dd's birth family (as it is for them as well) but it feels so much LESS right to not continue contact..it just feels wrong.

Truthfully, I wonder at times if it does help birth families? or adoptive parents?

My gut is that its ultimately about honoring a child, and where their story began..and like all parents, we do our best.

I feel we, as an open adoption support group, need to address the oft quoted, but unverified and un-cited statistic: "an estimated that 80% of all open adoptions are closed"

I see this stat on blogs, forums, answer sites etc. and have been unable to find the source for this. You can Google search it to see the prevalence.

So, my questions are:

A) If it is a reliable, verified fact, what is the source so we can properly cite it, then what can we, as advocates of open adoption, do to change it?

B) If it was made up, or misinterpreted, how can we correct the perceptions of those that believe and repeat it?