FOR decades adopted children have been allowed to maintain contact with their birth parent by letter and by sending photographs on birthdays and at Christmas, amid fears that face-to-face meetings might prove to be too stressful.

New research, however, suggests that meetings with birth relatives are in many cases positively helpful to adopted children, their adoptive parents and the birth parents.

Beth Neil, of the Centre for Research on the Child and Family at the University of East Anglia, who conducted the research, said that, as it was usually down to the adoptive parent to maintain written contact between the child and his or her birth family, a number of problems arose.

“We found that, for adoptive parents, communicating in a written medium with a complete or virtual stranger about an emotional subject was often very challenging, even to articulate and well-intentioned adoptive parents,” she said.

Dr Neil, who will present her findings at the Second International Conference on Adoption Research today in Norwich, studied 168 children from ten adoption agencies who had been adopted below the age of 3 and were aged between 7 and 9 at the time of the study. She also interviewed their birth families and adoptive parents.

She found that indirect contact by letter between adoptive and birth families was more often than not problematic, not least because the two families simply did not know what to say to each other. “In many cases, adoptive parents reported that they had received little or no response from birth relatives to the updates, letters or photos they had been sending,” she said. “In other cases, adoptive parents had received a response but were unhappy with it, either because the birth relative had not included information they would like to hear or because they included information the adoptive parent felt was inappropriate.”

Face-to-face meetings with birth relatives tended to be a more positive experience for all parties, contrary to the popular belief that children’s emotional and behavioural development is compromised by contact with their birth family.

Dr Neil found that adoptive parents who engaged in face-to-face contact with birth relatives were able to communicate more with their child about adoption, were more tuned into the child’s feelings and were more understanding of the needs of the birth family.

Though many birth relatives did not want the child to be adopted, the majority were better able to accept and support the adoption if they had met the child and the adoptive family and seen how well the child was doing.

“We found that post-adoption contact does not necessarily confuse or disturb adopted children, and that birth relatives having face-to-face contact find it easier to come to terms with the adoption compared with birth relatives no longer in touch with the child,” Dr Neil said.

Where contact meetings were structured as “whole family events”, with the adoptive parent present, adoptive parents gained a great feeling of security.

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