About
OUR HEARTS CONNECT
STAY CONNECTED
Our Hearts Connect truly provides a place for open communication. It helps make adopting a smoother and more supportive experience for everyone. The birth mom, the adoptive family, and the adopted child all benefit from having an Our Hearts Connect relationship.
Private, Secure Communication
The adoption triad includes the birth family, adoptive family, and the adopted child.
Private, Secure Communication Portal
Even the most open and intimate post-adoption relationships should have boundaries that make everyone in the adoption triad* feel comfortable and safe.
While we have many ways to share photos and communicate with friends and family online, other platforms don’t really for the unique needs of this relationship. It would be incredibily awkward to have your birth mother as a Facebook friend or following your Instagram feed.
This is why we’ve created Our Hearts Connect. We want you to have an open, intimate relationship with your adoption triad…but in a limited, private, secure and appropriate way. No other platform makes that possible.
Get Connected Today
Your adopted child has a beautiful, warm extended family watching them grow, learn, and experience the world. Our Hearts Connect isn’t just about keeping in touch with each other; it’s also about creating a record of this network of love & encouragement that every adopted child can look back on and know that this is what love looks like.
With Our Hearts Connect, there’s no limit to what you can share as you create that record. Include: photos, videos, stories, scanned drawings, school awards, you name it.
Sharing videos & photos, commenting on them, telling stories, experiencing this life together is how you will record your child’s life of love within Our Hearts Connect.
Post-Adoption Communication
Most modern-day adoptions include some degree of post-placement contact and communication, or openness, between birth and adoptive parents. We call this open adoption.
Open adoptions benefit everyone involved: the birth family, the adoptive family, and the adopted child.
Open adoption helps to mitigate birth mothers’ feelings of pain and loss, resulting in greater emotional well-being. They are more likely to feel assured of the child’s welfare because the contact they have with the adoptive parents typically fosters trust that their child is in a safe and caring home. Without this contact, birth mothers often feel isolated, have unresolved feeling of guilt and self-blame, and feel uncertain of the well-being of the child. Greater certainty of the child’s well-being may alleviate the birth mother’s grief, and contribute to her sense of peace regarding the decision.
Openness in adoption allows adoptive parents to gain knowledge about their child’s medical and mental health histories, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and reasons for adoption. They may also feel more secure in their parental role because adoptive parents feel that birth parents have given them explicit consent to parent the child. In addition, adoptive parents and birth parents communicating securely and privately on this site can foster a healthy long-term relationship that benefits the adopted child.
Adopted children need space and time to connect and bond with their adoptive parents. Additionally, they often need information and some contact with biological parents. Determining the timing and extent of information sharing and communications is a challenging responsibility, primarily for the adoptive parents, but one that can be supported by the biological parents.
Newley adopted children need space and time to connect and bond with their adoptive parents. Additionally, as they get older and/or have more questions they often need information and some contact with biological parents. Determining the timing and extent of information sharing and communications is a challenging responsibility, primarily for the adoptive parents, but one that can be supported by the biological parents.
Making Openness Easier to Manage
While communication and openness are clearly important, families still want to maintain appropriate boundaries around this new and unique relationship. Exchanging letters mailed to your home address could become problematic. Accepting an invitaion to the birthmom’s Facebook page is not ideal.
Our Hearts Connect is designed to solve the challenge of intimate, personal communication in a carefully controlled, secure environment.
How it Works
The adoption provider who assists with the adoption typically recommends a plan for Post Adoption Communication. This is referred to in Our Hearts Connect as the PAC.
Your personalilzed Post Adoption Communication plan is baked into your Family Group within Our Hearts Connect. Any tasks or updates are assigned, reminders are sent automatically, and you can mark them as complete when they’re done.
For example the adoption provider may recommend that the adoptive family send pictures and a message based on a schedule such as:
- Every week for the first month, then
- Monthly for the first 6 months, then
- Every other month up to 1 year, then
- At least twice a year after that. Â Including special occasions such as birthdays and holidays
Our Hearts Connect will automatically send out an email reminding the adoptive family to post their update. Â When the post is completed, an email will be sent to the birthparents who can view the post and respond if they choose.
Adoption Reunion Facilitation
Reunification Can be Tricky
Whether an adoptee is searching for his or her birth family or the birth family is searching for the adoptee, the process of reuniting can be filled with anxiety, excitement, uncertainty, and challenges. This process is often facilitated or supported by adoptive parents and adoption service providers.
Our Hearts Connect can help in two ways:
Post Adoption Communication plans and a platform like Our Hearts Connect will help maintain a relationship between birth and adoptive families with boundaries that allow them to have a long term healthy relationship.
If there has been no contact between the adoptive parents and biological relatives the adoptee is faced with additional challenges:
1. Finding the biological family include methods such as:
Contacting the adoption agency or attorney that facilitated the adoption.
DNA Search
Facebook and other social media.
2. Connecting with them in a receptive and non-threatening way.
3. Establishing a way to connect and communicate that is comfortable for all parties. Our Hearts Connect can help with this!
Frequently AskedQuestions
The adoption reunion plan creates a short-term, 3-month account for the adoptee and birth family to communicate.
You can share photos, videos, important files such as medical history.
These conversations happen within our safe, easily accessible, private space.
Fantastic! After your 3-month period, we will invite you to join Our Hearts Connect as a lifetime member with a $50 discount. Essentially, this makes your reunion plan free.
No problem! You’ll have two options for changing access to your account.
We can leave the photos and files you’ve shared in place and simply remove the ability for either of you to post, add new content, or communicate directly within the platform.
There is always the option of reinitiating your account for either or both parties.