Beyond Telling: A Phenomenology of Adoptive Mothers’ Adoption Communication Openness with Early Adolescents

Abstract

Adoption communication openness (ACO) presents a common challenge in families. Three focus groups comprised of a total of 17 U.S. adoptive mothers were facilitated. Using a phenomenological approach, participants described their ACO experiences with their early adolescents (aged 10–14 years), which were thematically coded. Inductive analysis revealed the complexity rooted in being communicatively open. Four key themes emerged: a) the breadth and depth of this experience, b) the work entailed, c) the emotionality involved, and d) the grief and loss embedded in it. These results strengthen our understanding of the lived experiences of adoptive parents, magnifying the call for further research into what drives ACO and the need for consistent pre- and post-adoption services and clinical work.

Keywords:

• Adoptive parents
• early adolescence
• adoption communication openness
• phenomenology
• grief and loss

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants for their willingness to share so candidly and emotionally about their personal experiences of parenting, in general, and adoption communication openness, in particular. Allison Goderweis Smith assisted with code-checking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Despite the nascent prevalence of alternative terms (e.g., first parent, first family) the terms birth mother, father and/or family were used throughout in a nod to the participants in this study who used this term almost exclusively.

2 We chose to capitalize minority racial/ethnic identities (e.g., Black) and lowercase white. We do this to respectfully honor the shared sense of identity and community, including discrimination experiences, of such groups, and in recognition of the fact the word white does not (Crenshaw, 1991).

3 As several families had more than one adoptive child living in the home which did not fit the criteria of early adolescence care was made to only code segments of text pertaining to the early adolescent adoptive child adopted prior to age three. In addition, care was made to not code segments of reminiscent text regarding early adoption communication experiences that occurred early in the adoptive experience, (e.g., tales of how they first told their child they were adopted).

4 The terms “parent” or “mother,” “maternal” or “parental,” and “parent and child” are used to refer to adoptive parent and adoptive child unless otherwise stated (e.g., “birth parent”) not as a way of privileging this relationship but rather to conserve verbiage.

5 Cognizant of the guidelines established in Lo et al. (2019), identifying pronouns have been changed to the gender neutral they, them, theirs to add an additional layer of anonymity to these reported results.

6 All children reported on by their mothers were adopted before the age of 3.

7 This discussion around identity development was elicited without any prompting from the investigator.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Kathryn Louise Chellgren Endowment, University of Kentucky.