Opinions

Professor Grand,

I am corresponding with you to express my disappointment with your interview in Debra Brennan's Labours of Love. In the article you state that all post adoption support groups do is discuss how to manage unmanageable behaviours. What gives you the authority to make such a blanket statement? Have you attended a post adoption parent support group meeting?

I attend the London and Middlesex Post Placement Support Group meetings and am an active member of the Canadian Coalition of Adoptive Families. Our support group does much more than talk about what is wrong with our children. We regularly remind parents that even though every part of their life was put under the microscope during the home study, while a foster parent and during adoption probation - we are only human and do not need to be perfect. We encourage our members to find time for themselves to do an activity they like and go on dates with their partners.

You say that the grief of infertility and unresolved and we are still trying to mould our children into mini models of us. I think the opposite is true. We have moved past infertility if that was even an issue! Many people in our group and other groups I have contact with were driven/called to be Adoptive Parents and some even have biological children resulting in a truly blended family. Any parent who tries to make their child a mini version of themselves needs to re examine his/her priorities. At group we encourage mesuring success differently then society especially in the education system. We are thrilled to have our children and grateful that someone, usually overworked social workers, deemed us to be the best parents available for a unique child. All children open the minds of their parents to new and amazing discoveries. Adopted kids just seem to be better at doing so.

According to your interview you state that open records are critical because of the right to a history and in cases of illness. Yet those of us who adopted through the child welfare system have special human beings that we ignored by their birth parents on some level. How do you tell a child of any age that her birth mother loved her very much - when while the child was in foster care the birth parent missed 1/2 of the scheduled visits in the first 19 months of your life and didn't see you at all after that? Or that your birth dad agreed to sign his parental rights away, but didn't ask about you from the time of his last visit until after your adoption finalized (a thirteen month time period).

As for the medical piece - assuming the birth parents loose their relationship with the respective CAS they are under no obligation to tell CAS anything later in life even if diagnosed with a hereditary or familial disorder and may even deny it if asked. We can get the medical information available on our children at the time they are adopted and unfortunately even that tends to be incomplete because the birth parents don't tend to reveal everything to the social workers.

While I sympathize with you in that your step adoption over wrote the first six years of your life, I think step adoption, private adoptions, public adoptions and for that matter even international adoptions are all different and the situation depends on whether openness is a good idea or not.