Talking about the Birth Family since the Beginning: The Communicative Openness in the New Adoptive Family

Abstract

Communicative openness within the adoptive family changes over time and helps the child explore his/her history. We aimed to evaluate whether adoptive families communicate about specific adoption-related themes from the beginning of their lives as a family. We created an instrument to track the communication process during the first year of adoption, involving a sample of 537 internationally adopted children (313 males, 224 females, mean age of adoption: 4.9 years) at two time points: six (T1) and twelve (T2) months after adoption. Our results suggest that in the first year of placement, children express memories about the past but tend to not speak about their birth families. We discovered a significant difference (Wald test = 4.889; p = 0.027) in communication about the biological family between the two points. The presence of adoptive parents who speak about it impacts the child’s questions about the past (exp (B) = 2.452, p = 0.006) and whether the child speaks about his/her biological family (exp (B) = 2.373; p = 0.017). Then, in the first year of adoption, the presence of an adoptive parent who communicates openly helps the child to ask questions and share his/her thoughts.