Most adoption agencies today allow a child's biological and adoptive families to know one another and maintain contact. This move toward openness instead of secrecy presents opportunities and challenges. The study reported here explores young adult adoptees' reactions to growing up in open adoptions. Findings reveal their preferences for self-determination, facts, and access to their birth families. They view challenges in open adoption relationships as opportunities to develop identity, expand family, and process feelings. They see each open adoption as unique, needing occasional recalibration. Findings indicate agencies should offer education and services throughout the process. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE •Agencies should help parents promote adoptees' self determination regarding access to contact with and information from their birth families.• Agencies should help adoptive and birth families recalibrate contact as needs change, rather than sever it permanently.

Adoptions today increasingly include contact between adoptive and birth families. What do these "open adoptions" look like? How do the participants feel about them? This article, based on part of a longitudinal study that first examined adoptive parents' perceptions of their infants' open adoptions seven years ago, explores the parents' reactions now that their children are school age. This qualitative descriptive research revealed changes in the openness in the adoptions over time and identified four dimensions along which open adoptions vary. Findings showed parents' enthusiasm for the openness in their adoptions, regardless of the type and extent of openness. Implications for social work practice, education, and policy are explored.

In open adoptions, birth and adoptive families exchange identifying information and have contact. Although most adoptions today include some form of openness, much of the public remains wary of this. The purpose of this study was to explore, longitudinally, adoptive parents' perceptions of their children's open adoptions. This article reports the findings of tape-recorded interviews with 31 adoptive parents who were first interviewed when their children were infants and toddlers, again 7 years later, and a third time when their children were adolescents. The study found adoptive parents were committed to maintaining contact with the birth family even when discomforts and challenges in the relationships occurred. These findings can be used to guide agency policies and clinical practices that enable a wide range of open adoption options.

Little has been written about attention-deficit hyperactive disorder from a family systems perspective. The authors describe the impact of this neurologically based disorder on family functioning and explore the utility of systems theory in addressing families needs. Suggestions for widening the levels of intervention beyond traditional treatment parameters are offered.