- "Internationally Adopted Adults Who Did Not Suffer Severe Early Deprivation: The Role of Appraisal of Adoption," published in Children and Youth Services Review (Volume 32, Issue 1 February 2010). A study of the psychological adjustment of 53 adults adopted from Greece to the Netherlands without early deprivation found their general well-being and self-esteem were comparable to the general population, though adopted men reported more depression. The average age at adoption was 9 months and the average age at the time of the study was 20. Factors related to lower mental health scores included search status (those who searched reported more mental health problems), no current partner (lower well-being); and a negative appraisal of adoption (more mental health problems and lower well-being). Note that this was a very small study and that these children had very good pre-adoption care, but the result support what almost all research shows, that adopted people compare favorably on psychological test with non adopted people.
- The University of Minnesota has been on the forefront of adoption research for years, which is one of the reasons I make an annual contribution to them. One of their best research projects is The Minnesota / Texas Adoption Research Project (MTARP), which studied the affect of openness in adoption on adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth parents. Summary
- “History of Early Neglect and Middle Childhood Social Competence: An Adoption Study” by Dr. Tony Xing Tan. Adoption Quarterly, 9(4), 57-72 (2006) Summary
- Preschool-age Adopted Chinese Children’s Sleep Problems and Family Sleep Arrangement by Dr. Tony Xing Tan and Dr. Kofi Marfo 2008 Summary
- Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project by Charles A. Nelson, III, Charles H. Zeanah, Nathan A. Fox,Peter J. Marshall, Anna T. Smyke, Donald Guthrie Science 21 December 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5858, pp. 1937 - 1940
This study compared the cognitive development of children raised in one of three settings: institution, foster home, or family of birth for cognitive development. The study was designed to compare abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. A control group of children born at the same maternity hospitals but living with birth families was also studied. Of the non-control group, there were 187 children less than 31 months of age residing in six institutions for young abandoned children in Bucharest, Romania. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned (drawing names out of a hat) to continued institutional care or to placement in foster care, and their cognitive development was tracked through 54 months of age. The cognitive outcome of children who remained in the institution was markedly below that of never-institutionalized children and below children taken out of the institution and placed into foster care. The improved cognitive outcomes observed at 42 and 54 months were most marked for the youngest children placed in foster care.
The three main findings from this study are: - Children reared in institutions showed greatly diminished intellectual performance (borderline mental retardation) relative to children reared in their families of origin.
- Children randomly assigned to foster care experienced significant gains in cognitive function.
- There may be a sensitive period spanning the first 2 years of life within which the onset of foster care exerts a maximal effect on cognitive development. The younger a child is when placed in foster care, the better the outcome. Indeed, there was a continuing "cost" to children who remained in the institution over the course of our study. These results are compatible with the notion of a sensitive period, but discovering whether such a period truly exists or determining the borders that delineate it would likely require a larger sample size with a broader age range at intervention onset.
| - “Behavioral Outcomes for Substance-Exposed Adopted Children: Fourteen Years Postadoption.” By Crea, Thomas M.;Barth, Richard P.;Guo, Shenyang.;Brooks, Devon. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry v. 78, 1, p. 11-19 (2008)
One counterintuitive finding is that children adopted from foster care were faring better than children adopted through private agencies or independently. The researchers hypothesized that this may be because families adopting from foster care had a realistic expectations of the challenges they were likely to face, and adoption research has consistently shown that realistic expectations are directly related to positive outcomes. Realistic expectations for children's behavior likely affects parents' perceptions of the severity of their children's problem behaviors.
This was an interesting longitudinal study of adopted children exposed to prenatal substance abuse . It was expected that substance exposed children would fare significantly worse than non exposed children and that the problem behaviors would increase as they aged. This study followed the children for 14 years. They found that substance-exposed children fared slightly worse overall, but their behavior problems do not appear to be increasing at a faster rate than those of nonexposed children. It appears that the behavior problems that result from prenatal substance exposure are consolidated early in life and do not generate ongoing deterioration. The report also found that children 3 years or older at adoption appeared to have overall poorer outcomes compared with children adopted at younger ages. - The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute release a report titled "Finding Families for African American Children: The Role of Race & Law in Adoption from Foster Care." The New York Times, Time, and The Washington Post ran articles on this report.
This report found that: - the federal laws passed in the mid 1990's to remove race as a factor in placements from foster care have not resulted in equity in adoption for African American children.
- The "color blind" interpretations of these laws run counter to widely accepted best practices in adoption.
- The laws call for "diligent recruitment" of prospective parents who represent the racial and ethnic backgrounds of children in foster care has not been well implemented or enforced.
| Researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology, and social work began to focus on transracial adoption in the 1970s and 1980s, examining children's overall adjustment, including self-esteem, achievement, and level of adjustment problems. Most used very small sample sizes and evaluated children at one point in time and at young ages; and some did not have comparison groups of children placed in same-race families. Also, almost all of these studies have been conducted on children adopted as infants or from other countries, rather than on children adopted from foster care. Generally, these studies found that children adopted transracially in the U.S. or from other countries had overall adjustment outcomes similar to children placed in same-race families (Grow & Shapiro, 1974; Kim, 1977; McRoy, Zurcher, Lauderdale, & Anderson, 1982, 1984; McRoy & Zurcher, 1983; Simon & Alstein, 1987; Feigelman & Silverman, 1983; Shireman & Johnson, 1986).
Research on transracial adoption has progressed over the past 35 years in methodological rigor and complexity. Overall, the current body of research on this issue supports three key conclusions: - Transracial adoption in itself does not produce psychological or social maladjustment problems in children.
- Transracially adopted children and their families face a range of challenges, and the manner in which parents handle them facilitates or hinders children's development.
- Children in foster care come to adoption with many risk factors that pose challenges for healthy development. For these children, research points to the importance of adoptive placements with families who can address their individual issues and maximize their opportunity to develop to their fullest potential.
Little research has examined transracial adoption of children from foster care, but the studies that do exist have found that while parents are equally satisfied, there is a higher rate of problems in minority foster children adopted transracially than in-race. Also, when children have issues, there is evidence that they have a stronger association with problematic parent-child relationships among transracial adoptions than in same-race adoptions (Rosenthal & Groze, 1992; Howard & Smith, 2003). | | An underlying assumption of past research was that transracial adoption was not a challenge for adoptees if there were no significant differences on overall adjustment measures between groups of transracial and in-race adoptees. However, recent studies - using more rigorous methods to directly measure the racial and ethnic experiences of adoptees and how these experiences may contribute to psychological adjustment - have found parents' attitudes and behaviors related to racial socialization affect their transracially adopted children's outcomes on a range of variables (Lee, 2003). | - When children in foster care cannot be safely reunited with their parents or members of their extended families, they need the security, stability and love of adoptive parents. To ensure that children of color are placed with families who can meet their long-term needs, this report makes the following recommendations:
- Reinforce in all adoption-related laws, policies and practices that a child's best interests must be paramount in placement decisions.
- Amend IEP to allow consideration of race/ethnicity in permanency planning and in the preparation of families adopting transracially. The original MEPA standard - which provided that race is one factor, but not the sole factor, to be considered in selecting a foster or adoptive parent for a child in foster care - should be reinstated.
- Enforce the MEPA requirement to recruit families who represent the racial and ethnic backgrounds of children in foster care and provide sufficient resources, including funding, to support such recruitment.
- Address existing barriers to fully engaging minority families in fostering and adopting by developing alliances with faith communities, minority placement agencies, and other minority recruitment programs.
- Provide support for adoption by relatives and, when that is not the best option for a particular child, provide federal funding for subsidized guardianship.
- To help families address their transracially adopted children's needs, provide post-adoption support services from time of placement through children's adolescence.
See my review and concerns about this report under my blog titled "Transracial Adoption Revisited"
For a well reasoned rebuttal to this report see the Stress Reactivity Study. The Minnesota International Adoption Project is one of my very favorite research programs, and I contribute to them every year to help them with their research. One of their ongoing studies is examining whether children adopted from difficult situations have a more “reactive” stress biology system due to their early experiences. In the fall of 2007 they published their results. For most of the children, although they may have had more reactive systems when they were adopted, after several years in their adoptive families, their stress systems have settled down. They were rather stunned, but also very happy with the results they found. Both the post-institutionalized children and the children adopted from foster care looked exactly like the birth children in their repsonse to stress in this study. | -
The Minnesota / Texas Adoption Research Project (MTARP) is a longitudinal research study that focuses on the outcomes of open adoptionsfor all members of the adoptive kinship network: birthmothers, adoptive parents, and adopted children. I highly recommend reading the key findings of this fascinating and well designed study. -
Eastern European Growth Project is a research project out of the University of Minnesota International Adoption Medicine Program. The project studied 120 Internationally adopted children from Eastern Europe between the ages of 6 to 48 months. The children were first evaluated within three weeks of their arrival in the United States and again at 6 months post-adoption. This project looked at the risk factors that would predict stunted physical growth. The results so far indicate the following risk factors: - If the child has a history of severe deprivation, it is more likely that they will be of shorter stature at the time of arrival.
- If the child is an older age at adoption, it is more likely that they will be of shorter stature at the time of arrival.
- If the child has a history of prenatal alcohol exposure, it is more likely that they will be of lower weight at the time of arrival.
- If the child has a history of prenatal alcohol exposure, it is more likely that they will have a smaller head circumference at the time of arrival.
Interestingly, they did not find a single risk factor that is able to predict growth stunting in all three growth measures (height/length, weight, and head circumference); also, failure in one area of growth (i.e.: height) can be predicted by more than one risk factor. Adoptive parents will be more interested in the second part of the study which focused on the factors that influence whether the child will “catch up” growth once home. The study found that most children demonstrated excellent catch-up growth in height, weight, head circumference within 6 months. Factors which might predict whether a child would catch up height were as follows: influenced the amount of - Female sex seems to predict better linear growth.
- Severity of growth stunting at the initial assessment seems to predict better linear growth.
- An increase in IGFBP-3 between the initial and follow-up visit is associated with better linear growth.
- Changes in IFG-1 levels and weight are not significant predictors of linear growth. Why girls did better than boys, and the role of IGFBP-3 both remain to be studied.
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