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Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents, according to a new national study challenging arguments that have been used to oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoption.
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.”
I’m all for using this information to support gay/lesbian parents ability to adopt but later the study points out that adoptive parents are “better” than single parents and families with step-parents (where — I wonder — does this put single adoptive parents? Or adoptive parents who are also step-parents?). Better how? They’re more devoted to their kids. (I’ll add that a different researcher might have put a different spin on it by playing on that stereotype that adoptive parents — especially older ones who spent a lot of time yearning for said kid — are worse helicoptor parents.) You know this will be used against a single woman contemplating making an adoption plan; after all it’s “proof” that her kid will be better off with someone else!
Like I said — I’m all for legitimizing families however they are made and whatever people join up together to make them but not at the expense of other families. This is the more important piece of the study:
The researchers said gay and lesbian parents may react to discrimination by taking extra, compensatory steps to promote their children’s welfare.“Ironically, the same social context that creates struggles for these alternative families may also set the stage for them to excel in some measures of parenting,” the study concluded.
I’d rather hear loud and clear that gay and lesbian parents are fabulous parents — since people really ARE trying to get in the way of their families — than have this adoptive parenting stuff make the headline.
So I’m with Adam Pertman on this one:
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.”
source: Study: Adoptive parents more invested - Kids & Parenting - MSNBC.com
helicoptor parents…i like that term. thats my mother in law as she parented my husband is a grandmother to my sons.
i remember one time she yelled at me for allowing the kids to do something. she said they might hurt themselves. i said “good, they will learn it hurts and they wont do it again”. i though she was going to report me to dcfs.
agree with all else you said
Thank you. So darn annoyed right now.
I’m very impressed by Adam Pertman and have learned a lot from reading his book, Adoption Nation.
[...] The last of those points was what was bothering me, though I couldn’t initially figure out just what that annoyance was at the time. Thanks to Dawn, I was able to go, “Ah-ha! There we go,” and begin to understand my extreme distaste for what the study will mean in the future. You know this will be used against a single woman contemplating making an adoption plan; after all it’s “proof” that her kid will be better off with someone else! [...]
I typically love Adam Pertman’s quotes so he borders on hero status for me lately. I say “borders” because you know, after all he’s only human.
But you’re right, of course. I do like the affirmation of adoptive parents, but the article gives one a bit of a “wait a minute . . . can’t it just say that we’re just as good?” feel to it.
Perhaps, gay or straight, adoptive parent’s are more conscientious because they know the child deserves it. The child has been battered by the system. That’s what brings out the best in us, not the sexuality.
I think it depends on the particular kind of adoption. Very respectfully, and not to take away from anyone else’s adoption, our son was adopted at 4 months old and while he was in an orphanage in Vietnam, he had a foster mother and was cared for by her practically 24/7. When she wasn’t able to take care of him, there were other caregivers for him. (I do realize that this was an unusual circumstance for an orphanage there; it was a small orphanage and probably the reason why he and the other babies got such individual attention.).
I think the “batter by the system” kids are probably those who come to adoption from foster care, and for them, that may be the case. I can’t speak to that since I’m not parenting a child who came to us from foster care.
Overall, though, I just think that like Pertman said, I prefer to think of biological and adoptive parents as being on a level playing field. We all want to parent our children to become happy and healthy adults, I would hope. That’s what we strive for. And I did see on — I believe it’s Jenna’s birth parents’ blog — a comment that indicates that, once again, the media has taken one small part of the report blown that part up, and not reported on the entire report. I haven’t looked at the entire report so I can’t really speak to that. I will at some point though.
I think Pertman is spot on. I really don’t like the overall feel that the media, at least (and possibly the report — ?) gives of pitting adoptive vs. bio. parents. I can’t say that I’m a better parent that I would be if I had given birth to a child. I have different issues than I would have if I had given birth. DIFFERENT. That’s the key word here, not BETTER. Just DIFFERENT. We don’t need more things that separate us out into better or worse; we need more things to bring us together to be the best possible parents we can all be to our kids. Celebrate the differences; don’t rub them in the others’ faces. Sheesh!
All of that is not directed at you, Amy, but at the media and the people who conducted the report, if that is indeed what they were saying. Gotta read that whole report.
Frankly I didn’t really understand why they extrapolated to queer families in the first place. Since the study isn’t about that, it seemed like a real set up for a backlash attack. There is plenty of research ABOUT queer parenting that validates queer families. They didn’t need to spin this one that way.
I’d just as soon leave it at adoption, and remove the “better” language altogether.
Since when does spending money = good parenting? I know that was just one of the measures, but I thought it was pretty spurious.
I read the report, and one of the conclusions not reflected by the headlines was that the effects of adoption on parenting were diminished when the wealth and age of bio vs adoptive families was regressed out.
In other words, if you compare adoptive parents to other parents their same ages with their same financial resources, the differences are not as conspicuous. Still there, but not as glaring. Makes sense, given that the 130some adoptive families were being compared to 13,000 bio formed families. So there’s going to be a lot more diversity across the moms of 4 years olds, for example, but if you group them into “under 25″ and “over 40″, you’ll see some patterns that are about the age of the moms. Same with income and parental education, of course.
Shorter IU study: If you could pass out drunk and wake up with an approved homestudy, you’d probably not notice any differences. (I kid, I kid, I know many adoptive parents expected to be blessed by a little bundle of joy or three during the course of their daily lives…but for those of us who always knew it would be a fight to raise any kid, these studies are funny. People who have to work to get kids spend more time with them than people the kids happened to? Who’d a thunk?)
I think it is a fallacy to say that because adoptive parents worked harder to get their children - that they want to spend more time with them, or are better parents.
This seems to ignore a huge segment of the population - the segment which battled successfully with infertility sometimes for *years*, who [under the reasoning used] would be ‘just as good’ as adoptive parents and ‘better’ than ‘mainstream’ parents.
I haven’t read the study, but I think that anytime a study attempts to prove causation/correlation between a result and a predicated attitude (implied or explicit) - it weakens the study. Because you can almost always find another group that has the same predicate attitude.
Now, if the study found this attitude held by anyone who wanted to become a parent, but for some reason couldn’t for a prolonged period of time…biological or adoptive - it would seem to indicate a much stronger correlation. But that doesn’t seem to be what is being argued.
Thanks for bringing this study up Dawn, it does make one think. And I do [sadly] believe that many adoption agencies will try to ‘prove’ adoption as the best plan based upon faulty reasoning based upon superficial reading of this study. Which really sucks.
[...] 13 02 2007 Thanks to Dawn, I realized why the study going ’round the internet today really got under my skin. I wrote [...]