Open and Closed Adoption: A Developmental Conceptualization

Given the annual increase in the multiple forms of adoptive practices within contemporary American society, research aimed at assessing the effects on the adoptees, their families, and the community of “open” versus “closed” adoption (communication versus no communication between biologic and adoptive parents) of healthy infants is sorely needed. Before this can be done, researchers and mental health professionals need to make sense of the myriad of findings in the adoption literature. With the goal of stimulating such research, the present article is comprised of: (a) a review of the contemporary, social scientific literature on adoption, which has focused for the most part on traditional, closed adoption; and (b) a description of a program of research on adoption that is generated from a theoretical orientation, which has already proven valuable in the examination of other developmental life transitions. Based on a holistic, developmental, systems orientation to person‐in‐environment functioning, this approach provides a developmental conceptualization of both open and closed adoption. Hopefully, the literature review and the research program described here will stimulate other investigators to conduct research on this important problem from their own perspective or from variations of research described in this article.