Technology and Adoption related stuff.

neilled

I've been reading this forum for a while and there's alot of talk about tracing children, birth parents, adopted siblings. Much of it seems to involve trawling through huge volumes of documents, by hand.

But I thought I'd post about the way technology is changing the face of adoption and those in contact with their parents.

Firstly let me reintroduce myself. I'm 21, from northern ireland, adopted at the age of 13 mths and currently studying in Dublin. I've always known that I was adopted from overseas, which country and had contact with my birthmother through letters every six months or so. A number of years ago I went back to the country of my birth and met her and my half siblings - an contact continued, through letter and email.

But now a new development has reared its head and that is technology - in my case i will single out skype and or similar voice over ip systems that allow webchat and webcam use.

I've been using skype for a while now - the house I'm staying in dublin has broadband and so have my parents back home and work - so we've got skype running for free calls, all well and good and I use it to keep in touch with friends overseas. A few weeks ago I got an add on skype - it was my birthmother wanting to use it to keep in touch.

I recently went and grabbed one of three's little skypephones (a prepay handset that has skypechat and calls built in for practically unlimited amounts of calls and chats for €10 prepay topup a month) and have found that i'm messaging not only my parents on a regular basis but a few times a week my birth mother and half sisters.

So whats the point in all of this you ask? Adoption rates in Ireland (from within Ireland) seem to be going down, theres less pressure on young single mothers to give up their children (and rightly so) and most adoptions seem to be between family members (parents dead, aunty or uncle, grandparent adopts) or a new partner adopting. A majority of adoptions by childless couples I would imagine are going to tend to be from overseas. As I've begun to discover, technology may potentially vastly increase the contact that an adopted child may have with their biological parent/parents and put them infront of a webcam perhaps on a weekly basis. Whilst I welcome the contact, it being on a regular basis is something new to get used to, and its something that opens alot of interesting possibilities (or potential problems if not managed correctly) for the future.