I wouldn’t do visits. I would do 2 letters a year. That’s just me though.

We signed to do an email/letter once a year with updates and allow a call to us from the birthmom if we feel it is appropriate.

My own peesonal opinion, none. We have an open adoption and a great relationship with our birthmother and our sons birth sister, BUT no one knows the future and we DID NOT want stipulations to what we had to or did not have to do with OUR son down the road. As long as we feel it is appropriate and in the best interest of our son we will continue our relationship but if we don’t feel it to be in his best interest we don’t want a social worker or court order telling us what we have to do. He is OUR son. We explained that to our birth mother and she agreed. Maybe she understood more bc she has a daughter and feels that way about her daughter but it worked out fine for us. In paperwork commit to as little as possible. That paperwork will be court ordered and binding after the finalization.

I am related to dad, but he is in prison more often than not, mom (his wife) is a little more togather than that but obviously if I am adopting her son has her own issues.

So far the only stipulations we have decided on was drug testing (home drug test at begining of all visits), supervised visits twice a year (depends on drug test results), pictures for all milestones and email/text/facebook updated at least 4 times a year.

Now all of the above is what we HAVE to do , but right now I update weekly with video and pics,  NO visits at this time(bio parents are in agreement with this for now), and I mail pics that are profesionally done to bio mom, bio dad, and most of bio mom’s family. (obviouslly bio dad’s family is MY family so they gets pics anyway)

I guess I am coming at this from a different angle, my agreement is tight, not tight enough…I wish that I had no visits with birth mom but couldn’t.  So she has 2 supervised visits a year in Feb and Aug for 1 hour each.  She is to put in writing 30 days in advance 3 dates that work for a visit and then pay for the supervisor.  2 consecutive missed visits (just or unjust cause for the miss) forfeits future visits.  She cannot call or see him outside of the visit.  Pictures cannot be taken during the visit. I am to send her 1 pic and 1 letter a year.  She posted the pic on Facebook last year so an addendum was attached to the agreement that no pictures of him can be on any public forum (Facebook, twitter, myspace, etc.) or future pictures will be forfeited.  I have the right to preview any gifts or cards sent to him and have the right to not give them to him if they are not appropriate (they are never appropriate).  She obviously has to be drug free for the visit.  If I find the visits are not in his best interest, either in his words or behavior the visits can be stopped ( I need his therapist to support this, it can’t be on just my word.)

During the visit, she cannot take pictures, bring other people, ask where he lives, ask about his bio dad, bring gifts without being previewed. The visits are so tight that they are painful for him and her. 

Better to have too many rules than not enough. Depending on how your relationship with birth parents are, you can always ease up in the future.

I never thought about no stipulations. I like your thought process behind that, Flournoy Family. I don’t think that would work good for our situation, but you do bring up some very valid points with your reasoning as to why you decided to do it that way. Our girls birth parents are very immature and manipulative. I don’t believe they would work well with no stipulations.

If you elect to allow a certain number of visits per year, how long do you follow that?  Forever?  What if the kids are 10 and the birth parents now decide they no longer want visits and you have to explain that to your children. I don’t want them to feel abandoned a second time. After our caseworker asked the question, she stated she did not feel it was a binding agreement anyway, as once the adoption is complete, the kids will be ours, and they can’t tell us what to do with our own children. Does anyone have any experience with how accurate that may be?

my understanding of the stipulations are that they are really just “ground rules” in our situation bio mom’s rights have been terminated by the state and bio dad has willingly signed his rights over to my husband and I.

The way I understand it is that since bio mom lost her rights BEFORE the stipulations were put in place that she can not really “enforce” them. I think it is more of a good faith agreement…. check with your kinship worker to verify that though.

We still don’t have a kinship worker. Sigh!

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a kinship worker. I’m in NC though and even though our adoption is kinship, we still have to go through the foster worker since there is no other way to adopt in NC except foster to adopt, sigh.
Anyway, I’m in a similar boat and have not been asked for stipulations at all. In fact, the worker for the kids (i’m adopting my 8 yr old twin cousins) says I don’t have to have stipulations and to just figure things out as we go. The twins already don’t like talking to BM so we will probably just do the letter and photos once a year with her. My cousin is their birth Dad and I’ve already told him he can speak to them on the phone sometimes and maybe visit once per year, but we live across the country from each other so I don’t have to worry about him just showing up.
I agree with everyone who says to stipulate as little as possible and agree to more as you go if you feel it’s appropriate.
Good luck to you!

Fiona we were not assigned a kinship worker until after the little man was living with us so maybe u will get one then. Also it took awhile I know that we could not get childcare approved until the kinship worker approved it. I want to say he had been living with us 6 or 7 weeks before we finally were assigned a kinship worker.

Deaun,

As far as no stipulations, I mean our adoption was filed & processed as a closed adoption. We.owe our birth mother nothing. We have complete & total control as to any relationship she has with our son.

Our adoption was a little different than most in that we did a private adoption, we had our homestudy done by an independent agent that our attorney recommended and when our son was born we had temporary orders that went into effect immediately that we were his legal guardians & had medical poa over him.  During the hospital stay we were banded, not birth mom & we were treated as his parents, including receiving a hospitality room by the hospital so he could room in with us.

We brought him home at 27 hours old & birth mom signed her paperwork at 48 hours (she was still in the hospital).  Her rights were terminated at 72.hours by the courts & we met with our social worker post placement when he was 3 weeks old and our adoption was finalized by the courts at 30 days old.

We jumped through a few hoops and paid.more to do such an extensive process but we had been through a failed adoption just 13 months earlier with the SAME birth mom, so we felt it necessary to take every step possible to ensure a successful adoption

Like I mentioned before we now have a good relationship with her but our attorney & social worker said if we put stipulations in place and did not see them through we could be in violation of a court order. We didn’t want to open ourselves up to that possibility.

Oh and we don’t have a kinship worker. After our finalization we never heard anything from anyone again about our adoption except our attorney for final payment and about 6-8 weeks after finalization we received his birth certificate from the state w our info on it.