Contact with birth family in adoptive families headed by lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual parents

Birth Family Contact Experiences Among Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Adoptive Parents With School‐Age Children

“…Thus, for some lesbian parent families, contact decreased over time. These results are somewhat in contrast to those of Brodzinsky and Goldberg (), whose findings may reflect a larger sample of families with children representing a wider age range (infancy to adolescence) and thus included different assessments of time between placement and post‐placement. This difference in findings could potentially be explained by variable contact dynamics over time and across children's developmental stages (Grotevant et al, ).…”

“…The majority of parents reported feeling satisfied with birth family contact when children were school‐age, which aligns with other research, again primarily among heterosexual adoptive parents (Siegel & Smith, ). Satisfaction was not contingent on having current contact, nor did it differ by parental sexual orientation, which is also consistent with the findings of other studies (Brodzinsky & Goldberg, ; Farr & Goldberg, ). Previous research has suggested that adoptive families with contact report greater satisfaction (Farr & Goldberg, ; Farr, Grant‐Marsney, Musante, Grotevant, & Wrobel, ), but we did not find this pattern.…”

“…Our results indicated that, regardless of parental sexual orientation, contact with birth family was the norm, rather than the exception. Most adoptive parents had some form of contact postplacement and were satisfied with it, which is consistent with what has been found in similar samples (Brodzinsky, ; Brodzinsky & Goldberg, ; Vandivere, Malm, & Radel, ). Aligned with other research (Grotevant et al, ), the status of contact over time, as well as who was involved in current contact, and its type and frequency, showed considerable variability.…”

“…Most reported some birth mother contact ( generally by e‐mail or phone; visits were least likely), most had legally finalized their adoption, and few described plans to withhold information from children (Farr & Goldberg, ). Aligned with expectations about families of choice, Brodzinsky and Goldberg () discovered that, among families who had completed private, domestic adoptions of children who were between infancy and adolescence in the United States, lesbian parents were more likely to have face‐to‐face birth family contact than heterosexual parents (with gay fathers between the two). There were no differences among family types—lesbian, gay, heterosexual—however, with regard to whether there was birth family contact at placement (59.7% of families) or postplacement (52.2% of families), and in types of contact.…”

“…On the basis of previous research with adoptive families, we expected that the status of birth family contact would be more likely to decrease than increase from when children were in preschool to elementary school (Crea & Barth, ; Dunbar et al, ). We also hypothesized that birth mothers would be the most common birth family member with whom adoptive parents had contact, but the types and frequencies of contact were seen as more exploratory given mixed evidence from other similar studies (Brodzinsky & Goldberg, ; Farr & Goldberg, ; Von Korff, Grotevant, & McRoy, ). We expected that social media would be a commonly reported method of birth family contact, given the level of saturation Internet usage has reached in the United States and other industrialized nations (Fursland, ; Perrin & Duggan, ), including among LG adoptive parent families (Black, Moyer, & Goldberg, ).…”