Source: The Rudd Centre, Adoption Research Program
Future of Adoption Publication Series – essential reading for IROs
Adoption practice, especially with regard to separating birth and adoptive families, has changed dramatically in the past several decades and the latest publication in this Future of Adoption Publication Series addresses the issue of contact. Two papers address change in adoption practice and the research evidence underpinning these changes and a third provides principles for the development of written post adoption communication agreements.
- Harold Grotevant addresses ways in which open adoption practice requires us to rethink family, from being a nuclear family that has simply added a child to an adoptive kinship network that connects a child’s families of birth and adoption.
- Elsbeth (Beth) Neil addresses how birth family contact can be planned and supported when children are adopted from care. Grotevant and Neil lay out the evidence base regarding this change in practice, drawing on their respective longitudinal research projects (Grotevant’s in the US and Neil’s in the UK).
- In the third paper, Marla Allisan, adoption attorney and former adoption agency founder and director, provides principles for the development of written Post-Adoption Communication Agreements, which she used in her practice to help articulate and clarify commitments regarding contact that both birth and adoptive parents make at placement.
A full range of publications from the Rudd Centre’s ‘Future of Adoption Publication Series’ can be downloaded at source: HERE
niromp.org 