Intentional kinship through caring relationships, heritage, and identity: adoptive parents’ inclusion of non-biological and non-affinal relationships on family maps
Costa, P.A. and Gubello, A. and Tasker, Fiona (2021) Intentional kinship through caring relationships, heritage, and identity: adoptive parents’ inclusion of non-biological and non-affinal relationships on family maps. Genealogy 5 (4), p. 85. ISSN 2313-5778.
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Abstract
Structural open adoption has been beneficial to adoptees in integrating their birth heritage and identity. Adoptive parents also may sometimes seek out others who are neither related biologically nor through partnership to support their child in developing an integrated sense of identity. To what extent do these intentional kinship relationships become incorporated within the adoptive family network and how do adoptive parents view their role in their child’s life? Qualitative data on family inclusion of non-biological and non-affinal kin are reported from interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual adoptive parents (n = 25 families). Analyses of verbal and visual data from family map drawing interviews indicated that adoptive parents from the different types of families similarly included intentional kin in their conceptualization of their child’s family. Adopted children’s foster carers, family friends, other adoptive families, and other children and adults were specifically included on family maps to facilitate children’s knowledge of different aspects of their birth heritage and adoption story. The implications of open adoption policy therefore move beyond considerations of only birth family contact. In practice, open adoption procedures convey a broad message to families that appear to widen adoptive parents’ conceptualization of kinship.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Author contributions: The individual contributions were as follows: Conceptualization: FT & PAC; Methodology: FT & PAC; Formal analysis: PAC, FT, & AG; Investigation: PAC; Data collection and curation: PAC; Writing-original draft preparation: PAC, FT, & AG; Writing-review and editing: FT & PAC; Visualization: PAC & AG; Supervision and project administration: FT; Funding acquisition: FT & PAC. |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | open adoption, LGB parents, intentional kinship, foster care, family relationships, family representations, genogram |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS) |
| Depositing User: | Fiona Tasker |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jan 2022 06:28 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 18:14 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/47210 |
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