Narrating Adoption: Resisting Adoption as “Second Best” in Online Stories of Domestic Adoption Told by Adoptive Parents

Maintaining Open Adoption Relationships: Practitioner Insights on Adoptive Parents’ Regulation of Adoption Kinship Networks

“…An increasing number of communication scholars are turning attention to adoption research; however, this research typically focuses on closed adoption (Colaner & Kranstuber, 2010;Kranstuber & Kellas, 2011), adoption reunion (Scharp, 2013;Scharp & Steuber, 2014), international adoption (Docan-Morgan, 2011;Suter, 2008), and foster adoption (Suter, Baxter, Seurer, & Thomas, 2014). Some communication research has emerged on open adoption, but this work tends to focus on societal discourses of adoption (Baxter, Norwood, Asbury, Jannusch, & Scharp, 2012;Baxter, Norwood, Asbury, & Scharp, 2014). Thus, despite a robust literature on adoption communication (Suter, 2014), we know very little about the communication that creates and sustains open adoptions.…”

Relational Dialectics Theory: A New Approach for Military and Veteran‐Connected Family Research

“…Following Baxter's () lead, the second wave of RDT family research has used the theory to explore normative (civilian) family forms and concerns such as sibling relationships (Halliwell & Franken, ), college‐aged mother–daughter relationships (Harrigan & Miller‐Ott, ), older parents' relationships with their adult children (Wenzel & Poynter, ), remarriage (Wilder, ), and forgiveness within family relationships (Carr & Wang, ). A growing number of RDT‐informed scholars are focusing on nonnormative civilian family relationships and concerns such as adoptive families (Baxter, Norwood, Asbury, & Scharp, ; Norwood & Baxter, ) and queer motherhood (Suter, Seurer, Webb, Grewe, & Koenig Kellas, ), as well as the negotiation of transgender family member identities (Norwood, , ) and familial estrangement (Scharp & Thomas, ). These latter studies have centered their analyses on RDT's “critical underpinnings” (Suter & Norwood, , p. 294) by exposing problematic cultural assumptions and master narratives, as well as “critiquing marginalization, by a wariness toward totalization and normalization, and by hope to open space for voices that are muted or dismissed” (Suter & Norwood, , p. 294).…”

A Tale of Two Mommies: (Re)Storying Family of Origin Narratives

“…Adoption backstories-or the version of how the family came to be that parents share with individuals outside the family-have been found to function as counterstories (Baxter, Norwood, Asbury, & Scharp, 2014) challenging the master narrative by envisioning a new view of legitimate family that pays homage to both biological and nonbiological family relations. Finally, stepfamily origin stories are situated at the intersection of canonical family origins (Galvin, 2014) and the deviation from the master narratives about the lasting nature of nuclear families (Jones, 2003).…”