As the stigma attaching to illegitimacy has faded, more and more unwed mothers have chosen to keep their children rather than place them for adoption. The results for children of this trend may not be favorable. In an article recently published in Early Human Development, researcher Dana E. Johnson of the University of Minnesota surveys international research on adoption conducted over the last thirty years, research documenting the positive effects of adoption.
For instance, a recent Swedish study cited by Johnson tracked adopted children from birth to young adulthood, revealing that adopted children enjoy a number of advantages over children in long-term foster care and over children living with birth mothers who originally had registered for adoption but subsequently changed their minds and kept their babies. Although the Swedish study did show that adopted adolescents have "lower adjustment scores and lower mean grades than classmates," it also found that adjustment and academic performance was even "more problematic" among the foster children and among the adolescents living with birth mothers. And while "young men who remained with their birth mothers or were in long-term foster care scored significantly lower than the control groups on most IQ subtests," the young men who had been adopted had IQ scores that were "the same" as those of controls.
Similar advantages of adoption stand out in a British study comparing adults who had been adopted as children with adults from similar birth circumstances who had not. In the British study, researchers found that "at age 33, both men and women in the birth comparison group were in less favorable social and material circumstances than the majority of the adopted children."
The pluses of adoption show up even more clearly when the focus shifts to children who have been institutionalized or who have been exposed in utero to illegal drugs.
Numerous studies have shown that institutionalization poses serious risks for children's normal development. Recent research, however, shows clearly that adoption of children who have spent time in institutions can "reverse some of the deficits associated with early childhood institutionalization." Whether the focus is cognition, brain growth, behavioral abnormalities, or physical growth, institutionalized children show remarkable improvement if adopted. For instance, although a cognitive development in the "retarded range" is observed in more than half of the children (ages 0 to 42 months) leaving Romanian orphanages for adoption in the United Kingdom, these children make such "rapid progress" that when tested at age six, all age groups scored "in the normal range," with particularly favorable outcomes among those adopted when less than six months old. Indeed, "children adopted from institutional settings before 4-6 months of age appear to be virtually indistinguishable from domestic control groups in growth, cognitive skills, behavior and social skills, and attachment behavior."
Recent research has also established favorable outcomes of adoption for children exposed to cocaine and other drugs in utero. In part because it "reduced the impact of parental drug exposure," adoption has been shown to yield "a better outcome than that of children exposed prenatally to cocaine and raised by their birth mothers." A long-term study of adopted children exposed to drugs in utero revealed that although these children were "more likely to have had difficulties within the educational system" (such as repeating a grade or being enrolled in a class for the learning disabled), they "generally functioned within the normal range and almost identically to non-drug-exposed adopted children in most areas." Almost three-quarters of the drug-exposed adopted children (71%) earned "good to excellent grades." Perhaps more important, more than 97% of the adoptive parents of these children "felt close to" their drug-exposed adopted child.
Available research also substantiates the power of an adoptive family to provide "a remarkable environment for healing emotional and physical trauma" for children who have suffered "severe neglect or abuse in early life."
No wonder that one leading researcher judges "adoption [to be] more favorable for children than any social program that I know," asserting that "the modest difficulties experienced by children who are adopted are far outweighed by the significant benefits they receive from having a permanent family."
Researchers have, in fact, traced the advantages of adopted children to "the adoptive parents' strong desire for the child, superior financial resources, and a strong desire to build a relationship with the adopted child." Johnson further suggests that for the adopted child, "an adoptive family is comparable to a birth family in its ability to create an environment that produces competent adults who can celebrate the joys and overcome the adversities of life."
