Adoption is beautiful and wonderful and joyous … and painful and heartbreaking and exhausting. While open adoption is commonplace and encouraged by most adoption professionals today, that was not always the case. Further, even with open adoptions, there is still a wide range of emotions felt by the parties to an adoption over the course of time. The decision to place a child adoptively is often one of the most difficult decisions in a birth parent’s life while accepting a child into his or her family is often one of the most joyous occasions in an adoptive parent’s life.
One very important role for adoption professionals is education: educating the prospective adoptive parents, educating the biological/legal parents, and educating the public. Adoption is not all “rainbows and sunshine.” While families and friends should be supportive of the adoptive process and should welcome adopted children into their hearts and homes with open arms, they also must allow the adoptee to express genuine feelings without discounting or undermining them. Every experience is unique.
Click below to read the HuffPost article, “This Is What No One Tells You About Adoption.”