Tag Archives: birth grandparents

Kinship Adoption and Its Advantages

Naturally, all adoptions are about creating real kinship relationships, but the term “kinship adoption” refers to members of the extended birth family assuming a parental role. Most often, the kinship adopter is a grandmother. The next most common kinship adopter is an aunt. (The term kinship adoption is not referring to the common situation of a stepparent adopting his/her partner’s child. This process is usually referred to as “second parent adoption”.) There are many advantages to kinship adoption. The most obvious advantage is that, if the relatives are known to the child, the move will be much less traumatic than … Continue reading →

Book Review: After Adoption: Direct Contact and Relationships

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The book After Adoption: Direct Contact and Relationships, by Carole Smith and Janette Logan, fills a void in the adoption literature by providing real examples of how contact between birth relatives, adopted children and their adoptive families are arranged. The authors include comments from all parties regarding their feelings about these contacts. The authors, who are on the faculty of Applied Social Science at a British university, note that while there is an increasing presumption in favor of open adoption (in both the UK and the US), there is little substantive research as to its benefit. One interesting thing to … Continue reading →