Nina Discusses Post Adoption Counseling at The Cradle

Post-Adoption serves all the members of the adoption circle, which is adoptive parents, birthparents, and the adoptive child or the adopted person. Typically, what I do is provide either information to any of those people involved about the other people or help people connect. I would say the most common request we get is from adult adopted people, who don’t know anything about their background—their birth family history. This was the time of closed adoptions, and they really know nothing about where they came from or who their birth parents are or even what they look like. And often times they just want to know, they just want to learn something. It’s really about information sharing. The 2nd most common request we get is from adult adopted people who want to search for their birth family. For birth parents, one of the main motivators for them searching is to let their child know that they made this decision out of love, as well as to be able to be available to them if they have questions. I hear that from birth parents all the time, who contact us just to keep us updated with their address. They say, “if my child wants to contact me you can reach out to me. I don’t want to interfere with their life because I know I made this decision for them, but I’m available if they are.”

How Adoption works today
So sometimes we hear from women who ask us, “How do I move forward with my life after I make a plan of adoption for my child. And one of the wonderful things about The Cradle is that during the pregnancy and the decision to make a plan of adoption, or parent, we have the most amazing counselors that provide support, guidance and counseling to women to help them make a plan that is right for them. And if it is adoption, then learning about the family that they’re placing their child with and potentially having contact with either semi-open or open adoption allows for the birth parent to really know where their child is and know about who it is that is really rising their child. Not knowing anything can actually not allow them to have the closure that they need because they constantly wonder and worry. But for our women, our birth parents, birth fathers and birth mothers who place their child in an open adoption, knowing something it’s just more settling to them. There’s the possibility that it kind of helps them have the reassurance that maybe now is not the right time for me to connect, but later down the road. And because, for a birth parent, they were involved in selecting the family, that they feel more comfortable and confident that their child is being taken care of the in the way that they wanted.

In terms of a concern that birth parents have that if I place my child for adoption they’re going to resent me later or think that I didn’t love them, and that’s really the opposite of what we find. Birth parents when we do talk to them whether they’re current birthparents or birth parents that are getting placed, updated years ago, overwhelmingly they say they made this decision out of love. And my experiences I have found from adopted people that they know that that they say that, “I know this was decision that was made for me and my best interests.” And it’s overwhelmingly they know that it’s a decision that was made out of love.