Maintaining relationships: Information for adoptive families

Understanding and supporting connections in adoption

In adoption, it’s important for children to feel safe, understood, and connected. Knowing about their life before adoption, including the people who cared for them, can help children build a stronger sense of who they are.

When it’s safe, well managed and supported, staying in touch with their birth family members or other important people from their early life can support their emotional wellbeing. These relationships can help your child feel more secure and valued as they grow.

Modern adoption encourages gentle, open, and respectful ways of keeping these connections, guided by your child’s needs. This approach helps everyone involved, yourselves as adoptive families, your child’s birth relatives, and most importantly, your child, feel supported and heard.

Maintaining relationships after adoption

Maintaining relationships, sometimes called contact, means keeping a connection between your child and the people who were important to them before they were adopted. This can help your child feel safe, understood, and connected to their story.

There are different ways to stay in touch:

Direct contact: This might include meeting in person, phone calls, or video chats.
Indirect contact: This could be letters, emails, or sharing photos, videos or voice notes and updates through the adoptive parents.

Every child is different, so the plan for maintaining relationships is made carefully. Your child’s social worker and social workers from ACE will work with your child’s birth relatives and yourselves as adoptive parents to decide what methods of maintaining relationships is best for your child. The child’s safety, wellbeing, and emotional needs are always the most important part of this decision.

This approach helps your child feel supported and helps everyone involved build trust and understanding over time.

Why staying connected matters

It’s important for adopted children to know where they come from and to understand their heritage. This helps them build a strong sense of identity and emotional wellbeing as they grow.

When it’s well supported, maintaining some form of relationship with birth relatives can support this understanding. These connections, whether through letters, photos, or visits, can help children feel more secure, valued, and connected to their life story.

Having a maintaining connections plan that reflects your child’s needs and can adapt over time often helps children make sense of their experiences. It supports them in developing a healthier sense of self.

We also recognise that maintaining relationships can be emotionally complex, for yourselves as adoptive parents, for your child’s birth relatives, and your child. That’s why support, sensitivity, and open communication are key to making these relationships work in a way that feels safe and respectful for everyone involved.

Adoption England have produced two videos that may be helpful:

Benefits of staying in touch for adoptive parents

Maintaining relationships with your child’s birth family, can offer valuable benefits to yourselves as adoptive parents as well as for your child.

It can help you to:

Learn more about your child’s background and heritage, beyond what is written in reports.
Understand the reasons behind your child’s adoption in a deeper and more personal way.
Manage any worries or uncertainties about your child’s connection to their birth family.
Promote openness and honesty when talking with your child about their adoption story.
Show acceptance and respect for your child’s birth family, which can help your child feel more secure and valued.
Build trust and strengthen the relationship with your child, as they see you supporting their identity and connections.

These benefits can support your child’s emotional development and help them grow up with a clearer, more confident sense of who they are.