Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 85 for the Nelsons. I'm Lanette.
And I'm Shaun. In today's episode, we have a conversation with Dr. Abbie Goldberg.
Yes, Abbie is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts.
And she is a scholar who's been studying adoption and adoption related issues, especially in
context of families for years. And she really knows her stuff. It was really an honor and
a treat to be able to talk to her and learn from her. I really appreciate her take on
many of the questions that we posed and looking through that in a scholarly lens. And you
know, supporting a lot of things that we've heard both from adoptees and, you know, first
parents or adoptive parents, but coming from someone who's studied this in a scholastic
environment helped to put new words and meaning to some of the conversation that we've had
before. Absolutely, me too. So we'll go ahead and cut to our conversation with Dr. Goldberg
right now. We are here on the show with Professor Abbie Goldberg. Professor, thank you so much
for being here with us. Thank you for having me. To start off, can you tell us a bit about
who you are? So I'm a professor of psychology, clinical psychology at Clark University. I've
been there for 18 years. And I'm also the director of women and gender studies. And
I'm an affiliate faculty member at the UCLA School of Law, the Williams Institute. That's
awesome. Very cool. And what are your specialties, like your areas of expertise and study? So
I've been really focusing on diverse families for most of my career. So LGBT parent families,
adoptive families, I teach classes in human sexuality, ethics, I teach a true crime class,
psychology of sexual orientation, research in diverse families. So really anything related
to families, sexuality or gender. And that's a wide umbrella of a lot of this. Amazing.
It is. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here with us. So to start off, could you share
maybe some of the biggest findings that you've found about adoption and what you think people
in the adoption community need to know based on your research? That's a huge question.
It is. It's probably a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I've been doing research for about 20 years
related to diverse families with a focus on adoptive families. And one of my projects
is the transition to adoptive parenthood project. So I've actually been studying a group of
families for now about 17 or 18 years. So I've been following them before they adopted
all the way till now they're teenagers. So what I've really learned across sort of these
many different sort of transitional points is pretty broad, right? And it really depends
on what kind of adoption they did. What did they adopt from the child welfare system?
Did they do a private domestic adoption? Was that adoption open? Did they adopt internationally?
Did they have a trans-racial adoption? Do their children have special needs? Do they
have access to adoption competent services and providers? All those things make a big
difference in terms of how, what challenges parents face and what kinds of experiences
they have as a family. So fascinating. So from your research, do you have any big takeaways?
What do you think adoptive parents should know as they're trying to decide what sort
of adoption they might be best suited to help with or what they should be informed about
before? So are you talking about people who are thinking about adoption? Yeah. Maybe more
perspective. Yeah. Yeah. So prospective adoptive parents should really understand that whatever
they, you know, it's really like all parents, whatever you think you're getting into, it
might actually be something different. So really being prepared for the unexpected,
doing a lot of inventory of yourself around what kinds of, you know, how flexible are
you, you know, to what extent do you think you can parent a child who might have different
challenges or different needs, all the while knowing that even if, say, you restrict yourself
to no prenatal drug exposure or no children over one or whatever, you still may end up
with a child who has certain challenges and really be ready and prepared to take that
on. Most of us as parents, regardless of whether we adopt or not, there's something about our
child, usually many things that are not what we expect and maybe wouldn't even be what
we would choose that our child has mental health challenges or our child is trans or
our child maybe has a disability or our child, you know, struggles with, you know, social
challenges, right, is bullied, right? These are all sort of routine challenges that the
parents face. So when parents are thinking, prospective parents are thinking about adoption,
they really want to be thinking both about what do I think I can handle, but also be
really prepared to know that whatever restrictions they place, they may get something that is
not what they expected. And of course, as always, you really need to be thoughtful about
race. And the reality is, is that most children who are available for adoption are of color.
And if you are a white person thinking about adopting, you really need to be doing the
work of not just I'm open to say a child of color, but what am I willing to do? And what
am I ready to do? And what do I need to know before I do that? You know, am I willing to
move to be in a more diverse community? Am I willing to sort of do the work to send my
child to a more racially diverse school? Am I willing to talk to different communities
in order to better understand and prepare myself?
That's excellent. Thank you. Yeah, from all of these different interviews that we do and
the people we talk to, something that just keeps coming back to me is that there is always
so much more we need to be learning. And I mean, we can feel like we're prepared and
we're at the spot where we are understanding things and maybe more informed, but there's
always more to learn, which can be really overwhelming. But it's a long process. It's
a big journey.
I think that even the most well-meaning, which are many prospective and adoptive parents
really need to be ready to say, I don't know, and I need to learn more. And that approach
will serve most parents very well as opposed to sort of saying, I've got it. You know,
I don't need any outside support. I don't, you know, I don't need any experts, but rather
an openness to, there's a lot that I don't know. And an openness to listening to the
child and what is the child telling you. So, you know, you may have an idea of what's best
for your child, but you know, your kid is going to evolve into a person that is going
to tell you maybe that you're wrong and maybe they need something different than what they
thought that you thought that they needed.
Yeah, thank you. So based on your research, are there any potential benefits or potential
drawbacks to open adoption?
So I think that, you know, we've learned a lot from now decades of research on open adoption.
And the takeaway is that openness is really important and that openness isn't just one
thing to everybody, but it can mean a lot of different things. It can mean different
things at different stages of the life cycle. It can mean different things in different
contexts. So for example, you know, some families, they have open adoptions where, you know, they
meet the birth parents and they exchange letters or emails, but there isn't a whole lot of
in-person contact. Some families, the parents of the ones having contact with the birth
family up until a certain point when children maybe have contact. Sometimes it's not birth
parents, it's birth siblings who maybe were placed in other families for whom those children
may have contact. Sometimes the contact is more through social media. You know, people
may live far away and in-person visits may be challenging. But what we know is that children
benefit from knowledge about their origins and contact with the people that they are
genetically connected to. That denying children that ability to have that when it is a possibility
is really usually much more about the parents' needs and concerns and anxieties and not really
about what the child needs.
Absolutely. Thank you. So how challenging is that in research to be able to have this
vast expanse of what is considered an open adoption and trying to figure out the benefits
or different scenarios when it looks so different in so many different families? How do you
tackle that?
That's a great question. So we usually think about different components of openness. So
we think about in-person when we think about written communication, we think about, you
know, sort of video, audio. These are all different kinds of adoption, kinds of openness.
And then we think about not just what's happening between adoptive families and birth families,
but what's happening within the family. So that is what's called communicative openness.
So does the adoptive family talk openly with the child? So we have a little bit of a framework
for understanding the things I was just talking about, visits and emails and phone calls.
That's what's called structural openness, right? The amount of openness going on between
the two families. And then communicative is really about what's happening within the adoptive
family. And we know that both of those things are related to sort of outcomes, but communicative
openness is even more clearly related to outcomes. So really across the board, when parents are
openly talking to their kids, they're not shying away from questions about their adoption,
they're speaking hopefully respectfully about birth family members, but that positively
influences the child. The child learns that they can ask questions, they can seek out
information, their parents will support them in searching if they need to. Their parents
are fine with them expressing complicated feelings or ambivalence about their adoption
and the loss. Everyone's acknowledging that there's loss in adoption. So that openness
really benefits folks. And so when we study adoption in these different ways and over
time, we can get a better sense of how it's affecting families.
Fascinating. So this is something we've had people talk with us about before, but I've
never heard the terms. I love those terms of structural openness and communicative openness.
And we spoke with one adoptee who said her advice to adoptive parents was if you can't
have an open adoption, because sometimes it's out of our control. And if someone doesn't
want contact, we can't make a biological parent have contact with us. If you can't do that,
she said her advice was, if you can't do that, at least have an open dialogue, which it sounds
like that's communicative openness. And what we know is that even if you can't have
an open adoption in structural sense, birth mom is unavailable or emotionally not ready
for contact, maybe eventually will. Sometimes birth family members die. And so that really
cuts off the possibility of contact in a very concrete way. But we know that having that
communicative openness can really offset the loss of that more tangible forms of contact.
So, number one, yeah, it would be, you have to talk about it. If you're uncomfortable
talking about it, and if you really want your kid to express gratitude for their adoption
and tell you what a great person you are for having adopted them and never say that they
miss their birth family or long for their birth family, then you should not adopt.
Yeah. Well, I think that's a really empowering way to look at it too, where adoptive parents
do have control over the communicative openness in their home. I love those insights that
you share. Those. Thank you. Thank you. So what would your advice be for building trust
in relationships, particularly adoptive parents with biological parents adoptees with both
biological and adoptive parents? Well, taking the first one, I think historically
adoptive parents and birth parents have often been pitted against each other. And that's
really unfortunate because the whole point of an open adoption is it is a collaborative
arrangement where everyone is putting the needs of the child first, and everyone is
really centering around the child. So number one, my advice would be, you know, in order
to build trust, it needs to be about that the child, it needs to be about what they
need now and then in the future. So even if an adoptive parents say feels threatened
by the birth family member feels like, you know, oh, she's kind of pushy. She wants to
see the child more than I initially thought. You know, it's a challenge to that sort of
it's a dance of boundaries, but really always sort of giving the benefit of the doubt and
trying to maintain a kind of positive, appreciative, respectful tone towards birth family and recognizing
that adoptive parents have a lot of power. And that sometimes birth family members, you
know, if they quote unquote, like, you know, act, you know, behave, but quote unquote,
behave badly, but they act in ways that the adoptive parents don't like, that can be an
expression of feeling a lack of power. And adoptive parents should recognize they do
hold a lot of power and should really use that really use a lot of grace in how they
approach the birth family who is experiencing their own loss and experiencing their own
sense of anxiety about, you know, you said you want an open adoption, but what does that
really mean? Yeah. That's so beautifully said. It's a really challenging dance, right? Where
the biological parents really don't have any power after those papers are signed or that
adoption is finalized and it's just at the mercy. And so sometimes they can interpret
behaviors from the adoptive parents in ways that, you know, adoptive parents think, well,
I, you know, I don't know why they acted that way. You know, of course we're going to let
her, you know, see the child, but you know, the, the, the birth parents may be operating
from a place of anxiety and they're very concerned that if they say or do the wrong thing, that
the adoptive parents will punish them and we'll never let them see the child. Which
would be heartbreaking. Yes. And we hear stories about that so often. And it's, it's not a
good idea for adoptive parents to get involved in any kind of power struggle in that way.
They should always be thinking of, am I going to be able to explain to my child why I did
X, Y, and Z? And I need to always remember that, you know, in 18 years, right? Like they
can do what they want. And so I need to sort of set the stage for these healthy relationships
and model that so that I'm all good when it comes to, you know, I don't have to feel shame
or embarrassment or regret around how I've treated these people.
I think that's a beautiful piece of advice. Thank you. So what about supporting open dialogue?
Do you have any thoughts on sharing challenging origin stories where say maybe an adoptee
was conceived in a way that's really traumatic and how, how do you talk about that with this
child as they grow up? Because it's their story that's challenging. Yeah. So, and I've
actually done some of the only research on, you know, talking to children about difficult
origins, especially conception through rape or incest, which is often regarded as one
of the most challenging conversations to have with a child, more so than, you know, your
birth parents, you know, had a drug problem or had mental health issues. You know, what
we like to say is it's, you know, you need to always operate according to sort of what's
developmentally appropriate, but you don't lie. So maybe, you know, you share something
in the early, you know, in the child's life around, you know, maybe you share that the
relationship, for example, between the birth mom and the birth father wasn't a loving one.
And that is sort of dropping that, you know, stone, right? That sort of breadcrumb. It's
not a lie. It's honest. It's hard, but it's truthful. And you don't want to sort of say,
yes, they were in love and they had you out of, that's not, that's not true. If it was,
if you're, we were conceived through rape, that is not a true statement. And the general
sort of belief from adoption clinicians is that children really eventually deserve access
to all information about their birth family and birth story, even if that information
is difficult, that children deserve information about their origins. Many of us, you know,
can imagine situations where, you know, or recall situations where we learned of something
painful. And we wish we had been told earlier, right? We wish that we hadn't been kept from
us. So secrets really don't help anybody. So by adolescence, by late adolescence, children
should have their full story.
Excellent advice. Now, what about with adoptees who might have some special needs or some
developmental delays, how, any differences in how you would address that or about the
same?
In terms of talking to children about their special needs?
Talking about their stories.
Talking about their stories. Well, I think most children know that they have special
needs. I mean, it starts to become pretty apparent. I think there are situations where
it's sensitive information because, for example, a child may have had prenatal drug exposure
or alcohol exposure, and then parents may struggle with how they convey that information
in a way that's respectful and thoughtful and doesn't harm the child's perspective
of the birth family while also being honest about, you know, maybe some of the reasons
why a child might struggle. But again, it follows the same, you know, developmentally
appropriate kind of guidelines.
Thank you. So have you done any research regarding bonding and adoption?
Yes, it inevitably comes up that both parents and children do talk about sort of the process
of forming an attachment and the process of forming a bond. What specifically were you
interested in?
I would love to hear anything that you have learned, but maybe more specifically, like
how you can cultivate a strong bond or things that might impede that or get in the way.
What adoptive parents might need to know to strengthen that bond and avoid some potential
pitfalls?
Yeah, I think that, again, that really depends on the age of the child. It depends on what
the circumstances of placement are. So, you know, if you adopt a child who's four years
old, who's had multiple child welfare placements, your process of bonding to that child is going
to look really different maybe than a child who's placed as a newborn or a child who's
coming into your home as a teenager. So I think, you know, if you're dealing with talking
about an older child, then there are some unique challenges that bond and bond really
starts with trust and really being a very present caregiver for that child and assuring
them that you're not going to leave them because a lot of children have worries about abandonment.
They may act out because they're fearful that the caregiver will leave. They may have felt
like they've been left many times before. So really being that secure, dependable, you
know, person who is not going to leave and being really consistent with that while also
setting boundaries and all that for appropriate behavior. If you're talking about an infant
or a newborn, I think it's a little bit different because you're not there. There aren't those
more overt signs that that child might have a challenging time bonding, but it can be
the case that a child does not and a parent, by the way, does not bond immediately. It's
really important that even biological parents may not immediately bond with their children.
And so bonding might not just be, oh, the child doesn't want to bond with me or I don't
feel bonded. Maybe that the parent is themselves not feeling bonded. And so what can help is,
you know, really time, patience, and really being honest and, if necessary, you know,
talking to a clinician who is adoption competent and who normalizes that, that many parents
and many children, it's not this sort of magical immediate connection.
Yeah, I think being open to getting that kind of help is a huge key. Thank you. All right.
Are there any other considerations that you think those considering adoption should be
thinking about based on your research as they consider different situations?
You know, again, they're really being aware of, you know, the fact that children may have
various challenges that they don't necessarily immediately present with or not necessarily
obvious. Having some knowledge of the adoption resources in your community ahead of time
so that when you do run into challenges, you potentially might say, oh, we have a provider
who's adoption, you know, competent or knowing that there's therapists out there who have
training and there are some therapists who have had, you know, training in adoption competency.
Awesome. So you said that you studied all kinds of diverse families. And so in adoption,
there's all kinds of diverse families. Have you had any key research findings or anything
that you've looked at with how these diverse families might address being different from
other families in their community and different thoughts on how they can work through that?
Yeah, very general. But I'll try to kind of bring it down to what I can speak to. So it's
very important if we're talking about multiracial families, parents where there are children
of different races, maybe from each other or from the parents. I think where parents
choose to live is really important. So being surrounded by other racially diverse and or
multiracial families going into communities and whether it be churches or schools or other
community organizations where maybe they're actually underrepresented. So if you're a
white parent, like putting yourself in a position where you're the minority is actually pretty
important so that you are not always you don't always get to be comfortable and your kids
are uncomfortable. So, you know, getting to know other multiracial families, fostering
a sense of pride, learning about your child's race, ethnicity and culture in meaningful
ways, you know, that go beyond just eating certain kinds of food, for example. For parents
who are LGBT and who adopt again, really important is connections to other LGBT families and
feeling, you know, being able to have your child see other families like their own is
really important. And also that your child is experiencing hopefully overt stigma at
school. So being able to be in environments where gay parent families, transparent families
are affirmed to the extent that that's possible.
Anything else from your from your research that you would like to talk about that has
really stood out to you or made an impact on you personally?
No, I think that the biggest thing is that families need to be flexible as they move
through their child's life cycle that, you know, what is a challenge at age one or five
or seven? It's always changing relationships with birth families changes across the life
cycle as well. Actually, what I always say like the only thing that you can count on
is change that regardless of whether you have a really good relationship with birth family
or great relationship with your child or child's doing really well in school, like any of those
things can change and they don't it doesn't mean bad. I mean, it doesn't mean that things
are worse. It just means that having some amount of flexibility and adaptability is
really, really important and just kind of knowing that things will continue to change.
So you've talked about this group that you've been doing research with for the last 17 years.
And so you've watched these adoptees grow. Have you seen any trends in that group? I
don't know if you can speak to that yet or in that research that stand out as potential
things that might be helpful for adoptees to know about growing up as an adoptee?
Yeah, I mean, adolescence is a challenging time. Kids understanding of adoption changes
as they move through the life cycle. And so when kids are little, they're often, you know,
they don't really fully understand what it means to be adopted. They say it in a very
positive way. I'm adopted, right? When kids get into elementary school and middle school,
they start thinking about it more in terms of, okay, other families are biological families.
My family's adopted. I'm different from others. You know, I'm different. So they start making
those comparisons. By adolescence, there's also a lot of, you know, adolescence is all
about who am I, right? My identity. And so it's heightened, right? I'm different from
maybe we're different from other families, but also now I'm realizing like I'm really
different from my parents, not just in race, but maybe like height or when I got my period
or, you know, what I'm good at. My parents are big bookworms and I'm really struggling
with reading, right? So there are all kinds of ways that it becomes more stark, those
differences and children are figuring out who they are and they're having a lot of questions
about birth family. So that's where if you don't have an open adoption, kids can start
the search process or become more curious, asking questions. And so we know that adolescents
can be a time of challenge for adoptees. Yeah, absolutely. And so as both sets of parents,
biological and adopted parents try to help adoptive work through those challenging times,
are there any particular things that might be helpful in addition to, you know, listening
and being available and like being aware that this is a challenging time? Any other potential?
I mean, it's ideal if the birth family is at least there's somebody who's available
because kids will have questions. So I think it's like listening and hearing their questions
and answering their questions. Of course, in communicate, hopefully in communication
with the adoptive family, right? If the kid is asking a lot of questions that are like,
hmm, that's kind of important for these parents to know. I think just being present for all
the complicated feelings that kids have and not trying to steer them away from them. So
if a kid is saying, I feel a lot of loss or I feel really confused or, you know, I wish
I was with my birth family, right? Like, I don't feel like I fit in here. Knowing that
that's just part of development and that there should be a lot of kind of, you know, again,
centering the child and not taking it too personally would be kind of the best piece
of advice. Yeah. And so any thoughts on how you can create that kind of psychological
safety where adoptees can feel safe saying whatever they need to to their parents and
that's where communicative openness comes in and something that you should be doing
from the time you're little is, is talking openly about, you know, similarities, differences,
not over emphasizing it, but acknowledging it. Acknowledging a whole range of feelings
that might be present for the adoptee, encouraging them to talk about again, the less positive
feelings and really being emotionally, you know, creating that emotional, emotionally
safe environment by validating their feelings and appreciating that they're sharing more
complicated feelings. It starts earlier. You can't just have an adolescent decide that
suddenly you're going to have an open relationship with them. That's something you should be
fostering full time. Right. Well, this has been super helpful. Thank you so much, Professor
Goldberg. So, so glad, happy to help out in any way.
Well we just want to give a huge thanks to Dr. Goldberg and for spending some time with
us and sharing a lot of her knowledge with us. Yeah. You know, my very, very favorite
takeaway from this that I just keep thinking about even now, weeks later is she talked
about structural openness and communicative openness and the difference between those
two types of openness. And I thought it was so fascinating that the communicative openness
can be even more impactful than the structural. It reminded me of when we chatted with Devaney
a few episodes ago and she talked about, you know, if you can't have an open adoption at
the very, very least, you need to have an open dialogue about it. And it just really
resonated with me. It rang true. And I of course feel like that structural openness
is also really important and worth advocating for and really prioritizing. But what a great
reminder that there's another piece in that puzzle that we need to be working toward too.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. One of the takeaways I have from this episode, and I don't think
this is something that I didn't know before, but maybe just ringing maybe more true is
that every child is going to be different. And if you're a prospective adoptive parent
going into an adoption situation or looking to adopt reality is never going to meet your
expectations. And that's true. And we've, I mean, she said this in that episode and we've
have tons of friends with biological children as well that, you know, things aren't going
to be exactly how you picture them. And as an adoptive parent, especially that's probably
true. And so just being okay with the unknown and really at the end of the day, focusing
on the wellbeing of this child and making sure that we're giving them everything we
can, even though it may not look like what we anticipated or hoped. Yeah. I love that
playing more flexibility, being more comfortable with that ambiguity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So
many great things that we learned from her. So big thank you to Dr. Goldberg for chatting
with us in this episode. We are wrapping up our third season of the podcast. We have one
more episode coming out in two weeks, and then we have a special November is national
adoption month and we have a special format for the podcast coming out for November. We'll
chat more about that on our next episode. But you're going to see us in your newsfeed
a little bit more regularly in the month of November. Yep. We're excited for it. Thank
you so much for being here with us and for listening.