Most of what you can find online about open adoption focuses on the beginning. The match meeting. The hospital. The first few visits. The careful, hopeful, nerve-wracking early phase where two families are figuring out how to exist in each other’s lives.
What you hear almost nothing about is what comes after.
Sarah and Devin came to adoption after Sarah’s chronic kidney disease made pregnancy too risky. They found Adoption & Beyond through a consultant recommendation and described their first impression in the exact words we hope every new family uses: organized, supportive, always there.
They were nervous about open adoption. Genuinely nervous. Social media has done what social media does best: shown them the worst-case scenarios. The contested placements. The complicated dynamics. The stories that didn’t end well.
What they discovered instead was something much simpler. Their son’s birth mother became, in Sarah’s words, family.
She and Sarah spent time together regularly. The relationship they built in those early years of their son’s life was warm, consistent, and mutual. ‘A lot of people keep telling us adoptions don’t normally go like this,’ Sarah said. ‘But we didn’t give up hope.’
Their story is a lesson in what open adoption can actually be, versus what the internet convinces people it will be.
The fear most families carry into open adoption.
Will the birth parent try to claim the child? Will visits be emotionally chaotic? Will our child be confused about who their ‘real’ parents are?
These fears make sense. They’re not irrational. They’re just based largely on the loudest, most dramatic versions of open adoption rather than the most common ones.
Here’s the quieter version that rarely makes the news: two families who love the same child, who’ve figured out how to coexist with warmth and mutual respect, giving that child something no closed adoption can provide. The ability to look in two directions and see love in both.
What makes open adoption work?
In the families we’ve walked alongside for 28 years, three things show up consistently in those where open adoption is thriving.
First: clear expectations from the beginning. The kind of contact, how often, and through what channels are agreed on early and understood by everyone. Not rigid. Just clear.
Second: a shared center. When both families are genuinely oriented toward what’s best for the child, the awkwardness tends to shrink. The relationship finds its footing. The purpose becomes obvious.
Third: flexibility. What works for a newborn may shift as they grow. The families that navigate this best are those who treat the original agreement as a starting point, not a contract in stone.
What Sarah and Devin want you to know.
‘I wish we would’ve known that open adoption is not as scary as it seems,’ Sarah said. ‘There are a lot of positives, but you’re not seeing that on social media. From what we experienced, it was just a very beautiful thing.’
That’s the sentence we want waiting families to tape to their refrigerator. Not as a promise that every open adoption will look exactly like theirs. But as a reminder that the version of open adoption that works beautifully exists, it’s real, and it’s worth staying open to.
Read Sarah and Devin’s Full Story
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