Transracial Adoption, Transcultural Adoption Blog

02/23/07

The most invested parent

Posted by : Erin H in Transracial/Transcultural Adoption Blog at 01:15 pm , 679 words, 82 views
Categories: Articles

I realize that I am a bit behind the curve on this one, and I bet that most of you have already read this, but I wanted to mention this article from last week that claims a study showed that adoptive parents are more “invested” in their children than biological moms and dads.

The study, published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.

“One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them,” Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study’s three co-authors, said in a telephone interview Monday.

“Adoptive parents face a culture where, to many other people, adoption is not real parenthood,” Powell said. “What they’re trying to do is compensate. ... They recognize the barriers they face, and it sets the stage for them to be better parents.”

Powell and his colleagues examined data from 13,000 households with first-graders in the family. The data was part of a detailed survey called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and other agencies.

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So what did you think about this one??

My emotions were mixed…

On one hand, it was nice to get a proverbial “pat on the back” as an adoptive parent from the media. It seems that the overwhelming majority of adoption-related stories in the media are ones that tell horror stories of one sort or the other. So this was a nice change of pace.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that I am any “better” of a parent, or more invested in my children now that we have adopted, than I was back when we “only” had our three biological sons… If we had never adopted, and still were the parents to just our three boys, I don’t think I’d like this study very much.

It does make sense to think that after all you go through to adopt that you would be a very dedicated and invested parent (although I know that is not always the case), and with that train of thought, it would most likely be the same for parents who conceive after struggling with infertility.

I really don’t like general sweeping sort of statements…such as “adoptive parents are more invested than biological parents.” I know really wonderful, dedicated and involved adoptive parents, and I know of some really not so wonderful adoptive parents. I know of wonderful, dedicated and involved biological parents, and I know of some really not so wonderful biological parents.

I also have to say that I hate these sort of things that almost set biological parents up against adoptive parents (or stay at home moms against working moms, etc.) I understand that the study was done to show that adoptive parents can be as good for children as biological parents, but it seems every time you get into comparing and choosing a “better”, you end up stirring up conflict, bickering and hurt feelings.

Choosing to adopt doesn’t make you a great parent. Neither does giving birth. It is the day in and day out loving, playing, teaching, caring, cleaning, tending, mending, hugging, kissing, cuddling, feeding, bandaging, reading…it is the being there…the being completely dedicated, invested and committed to loving and raising your child to the best of your ability.

At the end of the article they give this quote…

Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, welcomed the study’s findings, but cautioned against possibly exaggerated interpretations of it.

“It’s an affirmation that there are all sorts of families that are good for kids,” he said. “Adoptive parents aren’t less good or better. They just bring different benefits to the table. In terms of how families are formed, it should be a level playing field.”

My thoughts exactly.

3 comments

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: knit2purl2 [Member]

I'm leary of any research that is done to show that adoptive parents can be as good parents as bio parents.
It sounds to me like it was a foregone conclusion.

What were the parameters? What were the variables? The hypothesis and methods?

Did the researchers single out families where ALL the children were adopted? The article doesn't say.

It seems to me that there are many variables that are not addressed(or at least not mentioned in the article). How many of these children are from 2 parent families? Broken families? Single/never married mothers?

Are the adopted children singletons or are there siblings? If so, did they exclude families like yours and mine, where some are bio and some adopted? Do the parents (of any of the children) work outside the home or is one parent a stay-at-homer?

And, by sampling 1st graders, they've apparently left out the huge home-schooling population.
Talk about being invested parents~!

I'm betting that if that group were included, the conclusions would be different. Or maybe not, as there is reference, in the article, to the fact that this data would be used to further the cause of gay/lesbian adoption, which, as far as I can see, has nothing to do with how well any child does in any other parental situation.

Was the article poorly written or the research poorly designed or both?

Statistics can be used to 'prove' anything, especially when the population that is reading the article is given little information except the conclusion (as in this case).

Like you and Josh, Erin, we fit into the category of 'invested' parents before we adopted a child.
So did our daughter(who has both bio and adopted children).

My own conclusion is that the authors of the study wanted to prove a point...their point!

Permalink 02/23/07 @ 23:59

Comment from: chicago3 [Member]

I was curious about some of the questions knit2purl2 and others have raised about this study, so (since I had access to it), I looked over the study itself. Here are some more details that I found in the study (though I still haven't read the whole thing thoroughly): 1. In response to the questions about how the families were defined: The researchers defined families by the relationship of the parents to the kindergarten/first grade child who was the subject of the study. So, "adoptive families" in this study were families in which the parents had adopted that particular child, and "biological families" were families in which the parents were biological parents of that particular child. Whether the parents had other children and whether those children had been adopted or were bio kids didn't factor into how the families were defined. 2. The comparison was between two-parent adoptive families and other families. The parents in all of the adoptive families in the study were male-female married couples. 3. Once they controlled for sociodemographic factors, there was no difference between two-parent adoptive and two-parent bio families. So, adoptive parents and bio parents with the same sociodemographic characteristics invest in their kids to the same extent. 4. In general, the adoptive families were wealthier, the adoptive parents had a higher education level, and the mothers were older than in other families. These differences (especially wealth) seem to reflect the requirements many agencies or countries place on adoptive parents. 5. So, to me, this study seems to imply that investment in children depends on sociodemographic factors like wealth (which is a requirement, in many cases, for adoption) and on having a two-parent family in which both parents have the same relationship to the child (bio or adoptive). 6. It's important to consider what "investment" really means. The investment variables the researchers looked at were number of children's books in the home, whether the child has a home computer to use, whether the child goes to a private school, engaging in reading/math/other cultural activities with the child, number of extracurricular activities the child is involved in, helping the child with schoolwork, talking to the child about problems, eating together as a family, the number of parents in the school that the parents talk to, parental involvement in the school, and family attendance at religious services. That information makes a big difference in the way the study's findings should be interpreted. Often, in a newspaper article, it's impossible to do justice to the complexity of a research study. But the more information we have about the details of a study, the better position we're in to figure out what the study's conclusions really mean.

Permalink 02/24/07 @ 18:14

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Permalink 03/09/07 @ 18:07

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