Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 82. We're the Nelsons. I'm Shaun.
And I'm Lanette. And today we are so excited to bring an episode that I have been just so anxious and excited to share with all of you.
Today's conversation is with Professor Michael Grand. He is a Canadian psychology professor and he is the father of the term the adoption constellation.
So we were really excited that we were able to connect with him and that Lanette was able to have a conversation with him.
It was really fun for me to listen as it kind of meanders through so many aspects of adoption through this scholarly lens.
It was really, really fun and I hope, I mean, I think that you'll enjoy it too.
Yeah, I loved this interview. Hands down one of my very favorites that I've been able to do.
It was so rewarding and cool to hear from Professor Grand from his perspectives.
And you'll get to hear, I don't want to spoil anything, but his different perspectives as he's gone through his career and his personal life and how adoption has kind of connected through all of that.
It's really neat. I really, really enjoyed talking to him. He is fantastic.
Well, we are super grateful to Emeritus Professor Grand and hope that you really enjoy this episode.
Alright, we're here on the podcast with Professor Michael Grand.
Professor, thank you so much for being here with us.
Pleasure to be here.
To start off, can you tell us about yourself?
Whoa, my life and adoption or my life in general, which would you prefer?
I'd love to hear whatever you'd like to share.
Okay, well, I've been a university professor for 43 years, now retired as Professor Emeritus.
I headed up the graduate training program in Child, Clinical and Adolescent Psychology at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Canada.
I did my degree, my PhD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
And first taught at the University of Birmingham and then came back to Canada and came to the University of Guelph a long, long, long time ago.
Probably before most of your listeners, in fact, were even born. So it's been a while.
And I got into adoption and there were actually two routes that led me to adoption.
The first route as a professional route was the fact that a graduate student early in my career came to me and said, I want to do a study on search and reunion.
I said, absolutely not. I will not supervise you on such a topic because I know nothing about it.
And she harassed me for about six months like a little terrier grabs the pant leg and won't leave.
And I said, OK, OK, enough already. I'll read the literature and then I'll see whether I have anything to contribute to such a study.
So I started reading the literature, particularly the work of David Kirk, an early writer, one that's not mentioned very much in the field.
But he actually introduced the concept of openness to the field of adoption, a very important writer.
And all of a sudden I recognized, although I didn't know the lyrics, I knew the melody.
And I knew it at a very deep level. And now I'll tell you the personal side.
The personal side came from the fact that my father died when I was when I was a very young boy.
And my mother remarried. And in those days, particularly actually still today, I was adopted by my mother's second husband.
Who turned out not to be a very nice character, but that's a story for another day.
And it was a closed adoption. Now, no one thinks of step adoption as closed because you're living with a biological parent.
But when social workers say to the family, do not talk about his original father.
And I was six at the time, so I had a bare memory of him. My brother was two and a half and remembered nothing of our dad.
Essentially, he was wiped out of history as his family were wiped out of history.
And since they conveniently for my stepfather were on the other side of the country, the decision was made that I would never have any contact with him again.
And it always bothered me that I was the son of someone else, but had been denied access. I had denied history.
I had been denied a medical history. I had been denied a relationship with others who knew him and shared DNA with me.
And so at the age of 19, I got on an airplane. I just got up one morning and said, that's it.
I'm not going to put up with this nonsense any longer in my life.
And at the age of 19, I flew across the country to Vancouver, found my grandfather and spent two wonderful weeks with him.
The mistake I made, and I want to share it with all of the people who will be listening to this podcast, is that as a 19 year old, I never wrote down what he said to me.
And memory has a way of slipping through your fingers. And sadly, there were things he told me that I didn't retain.
There are many things I did, but I wish I had written every word out.
In those days, we didn't have portable tape recorders or cell phones where you just hit record or whatever.
You had to write it down and I never did. I regret it to this day.
But I've spent most of my life recapturing as much of a relationship with my father's family as I can.
So it left me in a really interesting position professionally.
Because here I was doing research in full adoption. I was a step adoptee.
And there have been those who have said, well, you really don't understand because you're not one of us.
And then I say, well, maybe you should listen to what my experience has been and maybe you'll hear that there are more similarities than differences.
And it allowed me a certain objectivity, not a lot, because it touched me personally too.
But it gave me enough, a little bit of distance to be able to enter the field with perhaps a more critical eye.
I don't mean critical in the hostile sense, but in the objective sense of thinking about what the key issues were in the field.
And it's allowed me to write not only and to do research, not only in adoption, but also to write about step adoption.
What I've called the stepchild of adoption is step adoption, because literally there are four times as many step adoptees as full adoptees.
And yet we no one talks about it.
I think I published the very first study on step adoption.
There aren't very many out there.
And it's also led me to write about the children of assisted reproduction, because they face so many of the same things that those of us in adoption have faced.
And the field, not only the morality, the ethics, but also the psychology of that experience is being ignored in the service of providing a child for an infertile couple or an infertile individual.
And, and I think that there's great harm being done, because it's treated as a technology and not as a life altering experience that has implications across the lifetime.
So, that's a complicated answer of who I am.
I'm also a chef and I'm also a cross country bicycle rider does long distance rides of anywhere up to several thousand miles at a time so.
And I'm a father and a grandfather and a husband and I have the world's best dog.
I love it.
And he's the big huge beautiful poodle and I'm in the woods, almost every single day hiking with him so that's a little bit of who I am.
Thank you so much for sharing.
All right, there's so much I want to ask you about.
So, initially your interest in this research topic was really sparked by that graduate student, it sounds like.
Correct.
I was researching and then it grew and I did not know I knew a lot of this about you I've been researching but I did not know that you've done work in assisted reproduction and the psychology of growing up without biological family in those situations
and that's something I've wondered about a lot because we don't talk about it very much.
Well, I don't want to put I don't want to be commercial here but if if if anyone wants to read what I've written on it is summarized in the my book the adoption constellation.
And I believe the second last chapter is on the similarities and differences between assisted reproduction experience of the offspring, and those who have lived the life in adoption their lives and adoption.
Thank you so much. I actually have that book on the way, so I'm excited.
Well one this month well that amazing. All right, so, could you provide a bit of an overview of your research and the specific focuses of your work as they relate to this big area of adoption and step adoptions, and etc.
Well I've never been limited in terms of staying in only one spot at a time and, and I guess in many ways my research covers the whole domain of experience and adoption as I said to you before my first study was on search and reunion.
It was done with Jeanette Cardiff.
And so looking for that study they'll see that it doesn't exist under the name, Michael grand.
And the reason for that is that at that point in my life I was using my adopted name, which was Michael soble.
And that was only after a study I did on step adoption which my biological brother and I, he said I want to be part of the study I said you can't be part of the study, we're too close, we need distance for me to do this.
And, and he said well interview me anyways because I want to know what you're asking. And we were in our, our 50s. I was in my late 50s he in his mid 50s.
And, and at the end of our conversation we said why in the world are we carrying the name of this man who was so abusive to us.
Why aren't we carrying our father's name.
So we took huge big bags of gold down to the provincial capital and, and my brother and I and all our kids change the night I said my kids you can call yourself whatever you want.
You can call yourself Tom Dick and Harry for all I care it's your choice I'm not going to impose a name the way a name was imposed on me.
But if you want to live an authentic life.
You have to be authentic in the world.
You have to make that choice.
I'll tell you a very brief I know I'm getting off topic but it's for me fascinating. I wrote an email to my department saying I changed my name and taking back my original name that I was born with my father's name.
Every woman in the apartment came and gave me a hug.
I understood what it meant to hold on to an identity with a different name or not. And not a single man said a word to me.
And I thought to myself these guys probably think I've just thrown away my reputation.
But if the word means anything it doesn't matter whose name is attached to it.
I got off topic. So I did I did work I did work in. I did work in search and reunion, and it's become some something of a citation classic because every time someone does a study in search and reunion, they can count this study is one of the very first studies
in the area was done with Jeanette Cardiff of blessed memory who sadly passed away just after we finished the study and I miss her to this day, she set me on the right path.
She made me authentic both in who I am and the work I do, and I appreciate everything she did for me.
My work was in all sorts of places we started looking at the psychology of of women who found themselves pregnant and not wanting to be pregnant because in the earlier days of adoption we were talking about infant adoption of kids who had not been taken into
to care by the state for protection. Today, that isn't the case. And we did some studies on the demographics of adoption, and to demonstrate in fact that a majority of kids are now coming out of care, and they're now older kids who are being placed for adoption
they come from far more difficult backgrounds than finding yourself a either a middle class young lady at university who found herself pregnant and didn't want to be so, because it was socially sanctioned to be a single mom, or you came from a less resource
rich environment in terms of economic and psychological support and, and you just couldn't raise the child, even though you wanted to.
So we looked at the demographics and saw major shifts in the field from starting around 1980 infant adoptions of healthy young and I'm going to say it straight up because it is what it is healthy young white infants, and all of a sudden now we have kids that come across
the entire spectrum, mainly of kids who have been traumatized in some fashion or another and are struggling with multiple issues of which adoption is a primary one but not exclusive one.
Because they also have to deal with the issues of the circumstances of their early beginnings and sometimes they're continued experience well into adolescence.
I then became involved with it.
I started working with a sociologist.
He, he at the time was a new PhD and I just come to the University of Guelph, also with an interest in in adoption, he had a couple of adopted kids he was an adopted parent he had.
His name was Carrie daily, and he had done his early research on infertile couples and the struggles they had in in wanting to have a child and not being able to give birth to a biological child.
And that led us to something called the National Adoption Study which was a cross country study of just about everything, attitudes, attitudes, legislation we did a legislative analysis.
We looked at attitudes towards abortion adoption single parenting.
And we looked at all of the factors that led to the, I hate to use the term but I think it actually does describe it the business of adoption.
That is, who was making money off of the lives of people who needed assistance in trying to find some place of security, consistency and support.
We looked at both public and private agencies we looked at private practitioners and and group practices and and we, we did a very in depth analysis of what was going on in Canada.
I must admit it was interesting we tried to publish this originally and the leading family journal scientific journal in, and it's, it's based in the United States but it's, it's a leading journal in the world.
And one of the reviewers said why do we want to publish this is Canadian.
Well, I fought back pretty hard and it took a while but that that work found its way into that journal and was distributed across particularly North America, the English speaking world.
We then got into some work on step adoption.
And, and also I remember there's some other stuff.
Plus, there's, you know, you're asking me to talk about a lifetime of work.
In some sense I'm jumping all over the places as as my colleagues my students and I got down to different ideas, we looked at CID reunion.
You know one of the problems in reunion and I like to use the term reunion only as first encounter.
And I use the word reconnection as the next step, because once you've met now you have to decide what kind of relationship you're going to have and how it's going to continue or not.
And has many of your listeners I'm sure aware, sometimes meeting with with first families, particularly the biological parents doesn't go very well.
And there's so much in our society that reflects shame and nonsense, well, put it plainly, nonsense about people find themselves, listen, people have urges people have sex people have babies.
And it almost almost always falls on the woman.
And because of that, particularly in that you might hear me struggling with language because I don't think there is good language.
I won't use biological mother, because it sounds mechanical.
And I think I'm, I'll stick with first mom, because she was the first person to mother that child.
It doesn't mean that the adoptive mother is second or second rate, it's just, I'm simply saying in as a temporal statement.
So, what we found was that many people who have been adopted in their reunions struggled with trying to form a relationship.
And in my own clinical work as a therapist, doing family, particularly family oriented work.
I often say to my clients, stop trying to go through the front door go through the side door.
You're trying to barge your way into this person's life, and she has enough baggage that it may be very difficult for her to do so, but her children, her other children, your sibs who may be either full or half sibs.
They may be much more open to that relationship.
So we did some studies on sib relationships and sibs and reunion.
We found the sibs were very important in the reunion process, far more than I had ever expected to see.
And that extended into looking at some stuff on aunts and uncles and cousins.
And sometimes when you can't go through the front door to meet the first family, the first parents,
then you go through the side doors and you go through the back door by going around them until everyone else says, hey, this is a really nice person you gave birth to.
You should try getting to know them and the shame is dissipated because there are no secrets left.
And particularly with DNA testing today, there are no secrets left at all in terms of determining who might in fact be a biological parent.
So, so much for being closed and not open about that experience.
One of the interesting findings in the study on reunion was we found that, you know, we always talk about openness in adoptive families.
Right. It's always the, it's as far as the conversation ever goes.
We found that the more open the first parents were with their children, the more successful the reunion.
That when you tell the secret that there was another child who found, who was placed into another home,
that child eventually knocks at the door, either metaphorically or literally, when they knock at the door,
if there's been openness in the first family, there's a far more successful reconnection to that family.
Yeah, that makes sense. That's amazing.
And nobody's talking about it, but in fact, I think that may be one of our most important findings over the years is the importance of openness in first families, not just openness in adoptive families.
Absolutely in adoptive families, but also in first families.
That's incredible. And it sounds like that might be partially due to the shame.
Absolutely. It's due to the shame. There are sometimes the partner doesn't know. Sometimes the first father doesn't know.
And they can be in relationship even.
So, you know, one of the things I've learned over the 50 years of working in adoption is that there's no one story to tell. That everyone's story is unique.
Everyone's story has factors that are influenced by both their history, their genetics, the circumstances in which they were raised, both in their first and their subsequent families.
And we have to appreciate that all of these things play a part in what it means to having been adopted and to carry an adoptive identity.
So we found some interesting things over the years.
I did a study with a graduate student when I was on a sabbatical in California that comes to mind. We were looking at the disintegration.
This study, I don't know if she published it or not.
The disintegration of the adoption, falling apart.
There's a higher rate of falling apart in the US than there is in Canada.
The US seems to have a more of an attitude, if it's broken, throw it away.
That may apply to material goods, but I'm afraid it may also apply to people as well, which is a sad reflection of who we are.
One of the things we found was that one of the, there were a number of important predictors of whether a family would fall apart as an adoptive family.
One of them was obviously the quality of the marital relationship, not the relationship with the child. The quality of the relationship with the couple.
Another major finding in that study was that we found that if either member of the couple had a traumatized background and failed to deal with it as a personal issue, not as an issue with their children or their spouse or whatever, but for themselves.
If they hadn't dealt with that issue and dealt with it with some kind of positive outcome, then there was a much higher chance that the adoption would break down.
And when people screen for adoptive couples, I don't think they screen very carefully for the trauma history of the adopting couple. And yet we found that if these issues had been buried, they would come to the fore when the adoptee walks through the door and starts challenging.
Whether challenging just as any normal kid challenges in a relationship or because of something unique to their, the person's experience. But either way, this became an important issue.
There's one other study I wanted just to briefly mention to you because I don't know why, but this morning I want to talk, I find myself talking to you about things I don't think people are looking at and paying attention to.
And here's one I bet you've never heard before.
The importance of adoptive grandparents.
I love that. I don't hear very much about that in the academic world or in trainings, adoption trainings, and our family, it's a huge thing. But yeah, I would love to hear what you've learned.
I have never heard anyone but myself talk about it.
And here's what we found.
We found in the study that we did with adoptees asking as adults.
What were the factors that were important for you to be able to say this was a good experience.
So we looked at the differences between those who said my adoption was horrible, didn't work.
And those who said it was a listen, I understand the circumstances in which I came into this family but it was a good experience and I'm grateful that I grew up here, because it was it was it worked for me.
And one of the things we found was that the role of adoptive grandparents, grandparents, grandparents, and I must say by the way that in developmental psychology.
The literature has almost nothing to say about the role of grandparents in development.
You're only dealing with, with the, the caretakers mom and dad, mom and mom dad and dad whatever the single parent whatever it happens to be. They never talk about grandparents, grandparents, provide legitimacy of who's in the family and who isn't.
And grandparents provide most of the time unconditional love. And then they send the home, the kid home to be disciplined by the parent. So there's a moment of just that a place where you can relax and breathe.
Fascinating. So okay, you're right I have not heard anyone talk about this about adoptive grandparents. We talk often about the importance of having biological grandparents involved in our family we have lots my kids will tell people
Oh I have 16 grandparents because they have a time and their siblings biological grandparents adopted all of them really and so it's been amazing, but really interesting that the adoptive grandparents also.
Yeah. So just think of the circumstances in which they can play a role.
You're introducing the children.
And I've had people report to me what they say is, this is my grandson john and this is my granddaughter, Mary, and this is my adopted grandchild bill.
They've just said sorry but, but you're not really a member of this family.
Or before as a grandparent ages and says you know it's time I want well I can enjoy watching them wear them. I want to distribute the family jewels.
This was my grandmother's this was my aunt's this is my mother's and I'm passing these things on to you.
And if they get distributed only to the biological grandchildren but not the adopted grandchildren.
They will say something.
It says you're not really a member of our family.
And no matter what the adoptive parents do.
The elders the ones who define culture tradition and identity in the family.
They're the ones who will say you're in or out.
And I think it's time we spend a lot more time considering the wider adoptive kin, which led me to the development of a concept.
You've seen it in the title of my book but the adoption constellation. Yeah, that was my next question. Did you coin that term was that I did.
And I'm going to tell you where I coined it.
I first presented that in a bar.
I was giving a talk in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. Okay.
Okay, if you don't know where that is.
Find Google Maps and find it on Google Maps.
And I was a keynote speaker along with Sharon Roja.
I don't know if you know Sharon Roja but Sharon Roja is one of the most outstanding adoption educators in America.
If not the world, and she was the founder of the seven core issues in adoption.
A new a new piece.
A new book has been written by Sharon and
Allison Maxam.
Originally from the Kinship Center in
California, an important adoption center for kids who come from very difficult, abusive backgrounds.
Anyways, I was giving this talk and believe it or not there was a huge bar and they had us up on the stage of the bar talking.
And I coined the phrase why because everything else just irritated the living daylights out of me.
To think of a dyadic relationship between an adoptee and a adoptive parent or a dyadic relationship between an adoptee and an adoptive and a birth and a first parent seem not to capture anything of the richness of the context that I've been talking to you about this morning.
Along came some folks and said well let's talk about the triad. We'll have the adoptive mom, the, the first mom and we'll have the adoptee.
But it's always an equal lateral, yeah, an equilateral triangle, equal distance between sides sharp corners, maybe representing conflict.
And let's be real.
For most of the history of adoption, the, there isn't equal power distributed between those three parties at all. It's almost all in the hands of the adoptive parent.
At times the adoptive parent may not feel that power, that power is there.
I needed something that captured the wider interactive experience of all of these elements in, in the constellation of one's life. And just like an astronomical metaphor that says the planets have gravitational pull on each other and stars have gravitational pull and, and
moons have gravitational pull and sometimes a star shines very brightly and sometimes it doesn't have that luminance.
And sometimes relationships are more important in early or later periods in one's life.
But not all the time. So for example the birth family disappears for a while from the adoptive family, even in so called open adoptions.
And sometimes then you have to work very hard to bring them back into the gravitational emotional pull between people.
I've talked to you about grandparents and siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. They all have an effect.
Teachers have an effect. Every single time a teacher says let's do a family tree.
The dreaded checkout person at the supermarket who says, oh she doesn't look like you at all, has she adopted?
Bingo. All of a sudden the child has a very different sense of who she is in the universe.
When that's said by a total stranger who has no right to say those things at all.
Legislators who say to you adoption cannot be open.
Or legislators like I've been blessed to be able to work with in both in Canada and the US.
Who say everyone has the right to know their history.
No one has a right to a relationship. If you don't like me and you don't want to have anything to do with me, you have that right to say no.
But no one should ever be denied their history, their medical history, their psychological history, the historical facts that have led them on the journey they've been in.
And so I needed a concept that captured all of this. Not the triad. It's a silly concept because it blocks out so much that is influencing the life of the adoptee.
Where are the friends? How do friends deal with the issue that you may not look like the surrounding community?
And what kind of attitudes do they have? What does the pastor in the church say about adoption?
And about unwed motherhood? And the devil's offspring?
If they're preaching that kind of nonsense.
So all these people are part of the constellation and each of them, you change any one of them and the whole thing changes.
You change the law, the entire shape of adoption changes.
Fortunately in most legislation today we no longer say as if born to.
Which hides the historical truths. It isn't born to.
So I think this notion of the adoption constellation in which different parts of the constellation have different influence at different times, different pull on emotional relationships,
can there are black holes, there is even a black hole in this because that's the deficient narrative. That's the narrative of not knowing who you are and you can't tell a story about who you are.
Where you've come from. And why you've been on the journey you've been on.
So there are even black holes of information in the adoption constellation. And if you, I'm sorry I'm pushing my book again, but it's a place where I've summarized part of this.
And if you read the first chapter of the book, you'll see a discussion of the adoption constellation to get some feeling for how these various and sundry parts of the experience of everyone in adoption
has pulled in and influences the experience. You can't just think about a single parent and think that that is the source of the lived experience of being adopted.
Everybody plays a part.
I love that and it rings true. Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to expand this because I think perhaps if anything in my contributions in adoption has been more than anything else, forming new concepts and language to think about the experience.
One of the concepts that I've become quite intrigued about is the concept of the adoptive narrative. The story one tells of one's life because every human being tells a story about who they are.
Some narratives are factually rich.
And each part flows from part to part in a cause and effect manner.
I can say this is how I began and this is how I arrived where I am.
When you have lived a life which includes abusive experience of extreme and emotional tension in trying to survive in the world.
Oftentimes many pieces of that narrative disappear.
There are little bits and pieces of who you are in terms of telling this story, but they don't fit together well and they don't flow from spot to spot.
And as a matter of fact, in most states and provinces in North America, the adoptee does not have the right to know the names of the foster parents.
And some of them had good relationships with foster parents and only when they were moved out of the foster home did in fact their life go south.
They want to recapture that. They want to revisit those people. They want to be able to tell that full story.
And yet, because they were of the age, because as I said to you, even as a 19 year old, I didn't write it down, parts of my story got lost.
That the narrative and the coherence of the narrative, how well it fits together, affects how we walk in the world.
When we walk in the world, even if it's not a good story, but if at least it's a complete story,
then it influences how we feel and how we react to the world and the important people in the world we live in.
So I think we have to spend a lot more time. Let me give an example.
We've talked about the change in demographics and how kids are coming from very challenging backgrounds.
Do they have a life book that follows them?
Recording who they've been with, where they've been with, how long they've been with, who the people were, were there pictures of those people, the child's reactions to those experiences.
Do we have a medical record that follows them?
All we have are social worker protection documents and court documents. That's no story.
That's no story at all.
Maybe that child had a dog, he remembered.
That dog snuggled up with him every night in the foster home and that was the one creature that he could cry with and feel warmth and caring and love, unconditional love,
and feel that he was important in the world because that dog loved him and he loved that dog.
That needs to be in that book. That has to be part of the narrative.
If you think about adoption, most adoptees are missing chapter one of their life.
Most first parents are missing chapter two.
What happened after the child was placed, which is why I've always been an advocate for as much openness as safety will allow.
I think we need to pay much more attention to the production of this narrative. That leads us to openness and communication.
It's not just whether you will tell things. It's how you tell them.
Early on in our very first study, we found that it wasn't just whether the family was open to telling the story of the adoption,
but what the emotional valence of the telling was. Was it told with contempt or anger?
Was it told with quiet compassion?
We even found it wasn't important how often you talked.
It was whether the adoptive parent was thought to be available for that conversation if the child needed to have that conversation at any time.
Interesting. Did you see an impact or a difference in how first parents were spoken about?
I'm so glad you raised that.
We were, especially in the earlier part of my career, I would hear over and over again,
it reported to me that the parents said, you should be so grateful that we've taken you into this home.
You're not living with that slut in the back of a 49 Chevy.
I'm being overly dramatic here. Please forgive me if I don't mean to offend anyone.
I'm talking about the disparaging way in which first parents are spoken of.
Most people try and do the very best they can.
Sometimes it's not good enough, but most people try and do the best they can.
There are very few inherently cruel folks.
There are people who do lots of cruel things because they can't do any better than that,
which isn't good enough for our children, but still.
When you insult the first family, you insult the DNA of the child.
If you insult the DNA of the child, you've just driven one more nail in the coffin of your relationship with that child.
There has adopted parents, and I think our education around this is a lot better today than it was when I started in the field in the late 1800s.
I think one has to be cognizant of the fact that that child is related to the DNA you're describing, and you're talking about the person at a very deep level.
Without respectful conversation about birth family, I think you are heading down a troublesome road.
With your personal experience in adoption, what is the research that you've worked on that is the most personally poignant to you?
It's a hard question.
I think I wouldn't be incorrect in describing myself as a person of strong passions.
To be honest with you, the piece of research I was working on at any given moment was, for me, the most important piece of work that I was doing,
because it had my entire attention and focus.
Sometimes I think I'm a little hard to work with because I get very obsessive-compulsive about this stuff.
I can't stop thinking about it, and I want to make sure it's absolutely the best that I can do.
I don't think there's a particular study.
I think I would have to go with my very first study with Jeanette, the one on search and reunion, only because I was granted the opportunity to fulfill a life that had meaning for me.
Jeanette helped to set me on that trail because I didn't have the courage to go there myself at first and recognize that I should be doing this kind of research.
I think that's the most important thing, and because of her persistence, her deep compassion for adult adoptees who had no right at the time to know their full life narrative.
90% of this country adoptees can get their original birth certificate with the name of their birth parents.
I mean, always birth mom, sometimes birth dad.
And they're allowed to get their original adoption orders as well.
And that's now available for adoptees and step adoptees. I actually got mine only to discover there was a mistake on my adoption record.
My birthday was incorrectly put down by a year, because I'm a January baby and everybody was used to using the year before.
And so they wrote down the wrong date by accident, and only I spotted it, I guess because of my attention to detail.
But it led eventually, all this work, all this work is for naught.
If it doesn't have an effect on the ground.
That I never wanted to be an academic who published for the sake of seeing his name in print.
As a matter of fact, I never wanted to be an academic, and it was only by accident that I became one.
That's another podcast, so I won't go into it.
But the important point is that I always tried to take my work to the streets.
And so I've dedicated a lot of my life to public education, to offering therapy to all parties to the adoption.
I'm now doing work as well with people who have just discovered through DNA that the kin who they thought were their biological kid turned out not to be so.
That particularly that whom they thought their dad was turned out not to be so that it was someone else.
They're discovering new family and all the issues of trying to make connection with them.
It's become important as well.
But for me, I guess my proudest moment has been the fact that we've changed legislation so many places.
The dominoes are finally starting to fall, finally.
And there have been some real impediments in the United States, even to the fact that judges in Canada have said,
well, if it wasn't good enough for California or New York, why would we want to do it here?
So they're having an influence even across the northern border.
But we finally broke in the back of that.
And so in Canada and almost every province, there's openness at the age of adulthood.
And in the United States, I get reports all the time that it's happening.
It hasn't happened everywhere, but it's starting to happen in DNA analysis.
It said to the legislators, you have no place to hide, boys.
And it is boys primarily. You have no place to hide.
We have the right to know and we will find out in spite of you, even if you won't give us access to our original records.
So that's a big change.
And I'm proud that I've been part of that movement, that I've combined research with activism.
And I have a chapter in the last chapter of my book on how to become an adoption activist
and how to work with legislators, how to dress and how to have a business card,
how to create documents that will convince folks that they have nothing to fear.
The sky has not fallen in a single state in the United States where openness exists.
Not one. We don't ever see reports of horror stories of reunion.
Some don't go well. Some go very poorly.
But everybody has the right to know who's even to have the right to know who's slamming the door in your face.
So I think when I look back on my career and I'm in the last stages of it now,
I'm proud of the fact that my work has contributed to that movement.
That's awesome. So you also have looked at openness throughout your career.
And have you looked much at openness agreements like the legally binding open adoption?
I'm trying to remember what they're called.
Openness agreements.
And so that's one thing that I know there's a push for more legal movement on.
Have you looked at that very much?
I'd like to give a really straightforward answer.
And unfortunately, I don't think I can.
And the reason is that we found that informal openness agreements actually seem to be adhered to better than written ones.
Mainly because they allowed people to be less contentious and have room for negotiation.
That doesn't mean negotiation can't go south, that things won't work out.
But there seemed to be more flexibility and a willingness to try and find solutions when it was slightly less formal.
Having said that, there has been a push, as you say correctly, to have formal legally binding documents.
Here's the problem.
Adoption is the transfer of parental rights from either another family or the state to a new family.
And the state does not have the right to intervene to say, with whom can you have a relationship?
And so it's been difficult to establish legally binding openness agreements.
And it has led to abuse.
The most primary kind of abuse that we've seen is abuse in which couples will promise the world in terms of openness and deliver very little thereafter.
Once they have the legal right to say no.
And I wish I had an easy solution for this and I don't.
Except to say that I think the more openness at the beginning of the adoption, both prior to the adoption and during its early days,
I think the better the chance for everyone to see that they have nothing to fear from each other.
I mean, people have to behave themselves.
The first family have to recognize that legally the legal parental rights have been transferred.
And they have to respect that.
On the other hand, the adopting family has to respect the fact that the reason that they were chosen,
when I was talking about the Kid Big Chose Ms.
They were the chosen ones.
That when they were chosen, it was under with the understanding
that in fact there would not be a that means would be found to keep a relationship.
And it's not always easy to keep that relationship.
Lots of activists don't like to talk about the fact that many first parents at some point say, I can't do this anymore.
I need to separate and find a new journey for my own life.
It doesn't mean they can't change their mind.
It doesn't mean that they can't leave the door open to be of a continuing relationship.
Doesn't mean you can't leave a forwarding address all the time.
So when it's time to have that reconnection, that in fact it takes place.
I think we should be working much harder to appreciate the importance for the child.
I assisted with an adoption in which I said I will not help you without openness.
There has to be an open relationship between you and the adopting family.
I'm sorry, the first family.
And from the time the child was old enough to use a telephone, she had a telephone in her room
that any time she wanted to phone up her first family, she could pick up the phone and talk to her first mom or to her sibs.
And it didn't mean that years went by with no one ever picking up the telephone or ringing.
But it was always there and I think we have to create those kinds of situations where we make the possibility of reconnection always open.
As I said to you, up to the level of safety.
There are a few circumstances where we just can't do it because sadly the people cannot protect the children.
Other than that, I see no reason not to.
So, well, you have done some incredible and very impactful research throughout your career.
Thank you so much for talking with me about it.
Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about today?
Not unless you want to talk about my dog.
What's your dog's name?
My dog's name is Farfel. He's a great big apricot poodle.
He's 68 pounds and he's just a big goofy, big goofy guy.
And he is one of the world's great therapy dogs.
That's amazing.
He's a wonderful dog.
This has been very good to speak with you today.
I have not sat down to think about my career.
You know, you're always so busy in the day to day that you don't think about the long term.
So I appreciate the opportunity for the conversation.
Thank you so much, Professor Grand.
Well, we want to extend a huge thanks again to Professor Michael Grand for being willing to meet with us and to be on the podcast.
We're so grateful for him.
Yes. You know, some people you just feel like this connection to and you just really love being around them.
I feel like that is Professor Grand.
He just has this light.
He's so enjoyable to listen to and talk to.
And I just kind of got like those, for lack of a better word, kind of Dumbledore vibes, right?
Is that totally tacky to say?
Just wise.
Yes.
Kind, genuine, just yeah, really such a treat to probably because we also were just listening to Harry Potter on a road trip.
Probably our kids are pretty into it right now.
But yes, I loved chatting with him and I loved this idea of the adoption constellation, which we've explored, but not as in depth on the show.
And so I really loved diving into that more.
And the thing that really stood out to me was thinking about, I mean, all of these different people in our adoptees constellations, especially, but about how grandparents,
he talked about how they have this role in helping children to feel like they're accepted by the family.
Particularly, particularly the adoptive grandparents.
Yeah, the adoptive grandparents.
That really struck me.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I had never thought of that, though, and never heard anything about that.
Yeah, I think in his example, you know, introducing your grandchildren.
And if you are labeled as my adopted grandchildren, then that separates you.
That creates a distance and it changes your identity.
And it trickles into the family culture and how others in the family perceive you, too.
Yeah, very interesting.
So I guess the advice is for those of you who are going into this for the first time, perhaps considering adoption or those of you who are in a relationship right now with your child
and your parents and there may be some, you know, weird vocabulary going on and maybe weird sentiments toward a child that has been adopted.
Like, let's address those now so that we can do everything that we can to set our children up for success.
Yeah, I love that.
Well, and in our interview with Ellie a few months ago, she's an adoptee.
She talked about that as well.
She talked about how sometimes different members of the family didn't use vocabulary that made her feel as accepted and the impact that had, even though she had an open adoption.
Yeah, words matter.
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting.
And of course, I loved how we talked about the importance of openness.
It's really what we focus on a lot here.
Yeah, and I guess on the same thread of just the adoption constellation in general, making sure that friends and teachers and other members of the connections to our children.
Yeah, like ecclesiastical leaders.
Yeah, like making sure that trying to create an atmosphere where they're safe, where those individuals in the constellation understand words that we use and that we don't use,
where we help them know that they're part of their larger experience.
Yes, and it's really challenging, right?
Because you don't want to micromanage your child either.
Yeah.
And we can't micromanage their experience forever.
But yeah, doing what we can to lay good groundwork.
Yeah, where we can have an influence in positive ways without being helicopter parents, perhaps, and micromanaging.
Yeah, creating an environment that's safe and setting them up for as much success as possible.
Yeah.
So a reminder that Professor Grant's book is called The Adoption Constellation.
It's available on Amazon.
And I am going to read it too.
I'm really excited.
It is on my reading list.
I hope to get it read in the next few weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah, such a treat to talk to him.
Super nice guy.
Just really grateful for his willingness.
So grateful to each of you for continuing to listen to this podcast.
And we're so grateful we can be an asset to the adoption community.
Yeah, and learning with everybody.
I love how much we're able to learn with every episode.
For sure.
All right.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.