Birthmother Perceptions of the Psychologically Present Adopted Child: Adoption Openness and Boundary Ambiguity*

• Author: Deborah Lewis Fravel,Ruth G. McRoy,Harold D. Grotevant
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2000.00425.x
• Published date: 01 October 2000
• Date: 01 October 2000

2000, Vol. 49, No. 4 425

Birthmother Perceptions of the Psychologically Present Adopted

Child: Adoption Openness and Boundary Ambiguity*

Deborah Lewis Fravel**, Ruth G. McRoy, and Harold D. Grotevant

Secondary analysis of interviews with 163 birthmothers revealed that the adopted child remains psychologically present. Ten indicators

of psychological presence were identified. Indicators related to roles were more salient the more open the adoption, and supernatural

referents were more salient when a birthmother once had mediated communication but now has none. Degree of psychological presence

was highest in fully-disclosed adoptions and lower in ongoing-mediated, confidential, and time-limited-mediated adoptions, respectively.

Valence was generally positive, but more so in fully-disclosed adoptions.

*We acknowledge with gratitude funding from the Department of Applied Health

Science at Indiana University, the U. S. Office of Population Affairs, the National Institute

of Child Health and Human Development, the William T. Grant Foundation, the John D.

and Catherine T.MacArthur Foundation, the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, the

Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, the Center for Research on Interpersonal Relationships

at the University of Minnesota, and the University Research Institute of the University of

Texas at Austin.

**Address correspondence to: Deborah Lewis Fravel, Department of Applied Health

Science, 400 East 7

th

Street, Poplars 615, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-

3085; E-mail dfravel@indiana.edu

Key Words: adoption, adoption openness, birthmothers, boundary ambiguity, presence, psy-

chological presence.

(Family Relations, 2000, 49, 425–433)

Throughout most of the twentieth-century in the United

States, adoption was based on a model of secrecy, a prac-

tice which continued until about the early 1970s. At that

time, in response to social forces and outcries from birthparents,

adopted persons, adoptive parents, and adoption practitioners

(Reitz & Watson, 1992), adoption practices began a gradual

transformation from the secrecy model to an open one, based on

increased levels of contact and shared communication. Contact

and information-sharing between birth- and adoptive parents af-

ter an adoption plan is implemented is called openness in adop-

tion, and the research reported here describes adoption openness

on the continuum of openness suggested by Grotevant, McRoy,

Elde, and Fravel (1994). Confidential adoptions include minimal,

non-identifying health and heritage information provided prior

to the adoption but with no post-placement communication be-

tween the adoptive and birth families. Mediated adoptions lie

midway on the continuum and involve ongoing exchange of non-

identifying information, indirectly through a third party, such as

an attorney or adoption agency. Fully-disclosed (‘‘open’’) adop-

tions include ongoing direct, identifying communication between

the birth and adoptive families.

It is now much more common for adoptive and birth fami-

lies to have some degree of post-placement contact with one

another in a mediated or fully-disclosed adoption. Nonetheless,

openness is still extremely controversial, and individuals and in-

stitutions still wrestle with the question of whether it is ‘‘along-

overdue innovation or a grave mistake’’ (Siegel, 1993, p. 16).

Proponents of confidentiality argue that confidential arrange-

ments best enable all parties to achieve closure and go on with

their lives, thereby reducing some of the stress associated with

adoption. Proponents of openness, however, argue that including

people and sharing information reduce stress for everyone in-

volved by eliminating uncertainty and questions about the

whereabouts and well-being of the other parties (Grotevant &

McRoy, 1998).

Boundary ambiguity is defined here as a condition that exists

when an individual’s physical and psychological presence in the

family are incongruent, thereby increasing the likelihood that the

family members may have difficulty determining whether that

person is inside or outside the family (Boss, 1988). Physical

presence is simply the person’s literal, bodily presence or ab-

sence in a family (Fravel, 1995). Psychological presence is ‘‘the

symbolic existence of an individual in the perceptions of family

members, in a way that, or to a degree that, influences the

thoughts, emotions, behavior, identity, or unity of the remaining

family members’’ (Fravel, 1995, p. 18); more simply put, it re-

fers to the person being ‘‘in the heart’’ or ‘‘on the mind’’ of

family members (Fravel, 1995). When an adoption occurs, the

child moves from one family to another, and it seemsreasonable

to assume that the child would remain psychologically present

to the birthmother, that is, in her heart or on her mind.

1

Further,

because of the very practices that define openness, parties to the

adoption would be variously physically present to one another,

according to level of openness. Thus, it seems almost inevitable

that some boundary ambiguity would occur in adoptions where

these two factors are present. The presence of boundary ambi-

guity has been associated with a variety of manifestations of

individual and family stress (Fravel, 1995); for example, when

a family has a member with Alzheimer’s dementia with theresult

that the person is psychologically absent but physically present,

boundary ambiguity predicts depression in the caregiver (Boss,

Caron, Horbal, & Mortimer, 1990). Bringing together the con-

cepts of adoption openness and boundary ambiguity has poten-

tial for heightening our understanding of the dynamics of adop-

tive and birth family systems, for targeting points and types of

intervention, and for other practice issues including pre- and

post-placement education. The study reported here is an initial

step designed to examine the physical and psychological pres-

ence of the adopted child, from the birthmother’s perspective.

Boundary Ambiguity

Boundary ambiguity exists any time physical and psycho-

logical presence are incongruent (Boss, 1988, 1999). It can occur

when someone is psychologically present but physically absent,

and other family members may be unclear about whether that

person is inside or outside their family. This type of boundary

ambiguity has been studied in the spouses and children left be-

hind when a soldier is missing in action (Boss, 1977); families

of business executives whose work often kept them away from

home (Boss, McCubbin, & Lester, 1979); families from which

an adolescent has recently left for adult pursuits (Boss, Pearce-

McCall, & Greenberg, 1987); elderly widows (Blackburn,