Adoption in the Tipping Point
In the mid-1970s, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado led by Robert Plomin, one of the world’s leading behavioral geneticists, recruited 245 pregnant women from the Denver area who were about to give up their children for adoption. [No, this entry is not about the coercion inherent in being chosen for a study like this before placement. -- Dawn] They then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a batter of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving the same sets of tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a similar group of 245 parents and their biological children. For this comparision group, the results came out pretty much as one might expect. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more simlar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years then they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, goes on to say that peers are a bigger influence than parents, which I’m not so sure I agree with but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’ve been reading The Baby Thief and thinking a lot about the blank slate theory and how it’s harmed kids in adoption (actually I think it’s harmed kids raised with their biological family, too).
I know that some of our training at the agency had to do with meeting our kids without expectation and being ready to embrace the people that they already are and would become. But I’ve been thinking about some of the Open Adoption survey results (yes, I’m behind in posting them over there) and thinking about how many of the folks who are struggling are struggling in particular with their relationships not being what they hoped/expected them to be. I know that one of the reasons that our open adoption has worked so well so far is that we like Pennie and she likes us and that part of this is that our backgrounds are very similar but also we have similar sensibilities about a lot of things. Like we both come from families that yell and have a sense of humor and who tend to the artistic. It’s not just that we have similar cultural touchstones (despite a 14-year age difference); we also tend to lean the same way about things.
I think about this with Madison.
I know my kids will be different than I am; like Noah’s current love affair with standardized testing. I’m already girding myself for the teen years when he’ll assert his differences more strongly and I’m curious about the ways Madison will be different. In some of her differences I see similarities to her birth family (her level of energy and her extroversion and her quick-silver mind). She does seem like a Brand New Energy in our family but it’s like Brett and me getting together, you know? Not being related doesn’t preclude closeness and familiarity does help things along (we have had her since she was 3-days old, after all).
I don’t know. Day-to-day it’s just not that big a deal but I read studies like this and I’m curious about how it’ll be. And I’m interested in what it means for adoptive families and in particular for adoptees themselves. Does matching potential families to each other as relationships (i.e., Pennie to us and us to her) make more sense in the long-run not just for openness but for the child who will be placed? Do hopeful adoptive parents who are seeking placements need better training when they are adopting children whose families look nothing like their own? And how do we do that without setting kids up in other ways? I mean, when we start talking about genetics and behavior and all that especially in adoption it’s awful easy to trip lazily down the ugly eugenics path.
I’m just thinking on my keyboard between jobs. I don’t really have anything clever to say about this.
I just put both books you mention in this post on hold at the library. Can’t wait to read them.
“Do hopeful adoptive parents who are seeking placements need better training when they are adopting children whose families look nothing like their own?”
Yes. I think hopeful adoptive parents need this training. I also think we (adoptive parents) need help sometimes to realize and acknowledge the ways in which we are similar to our child’s birth family, or may be similar to a birth family of a child we may adopt. Coming at adoption from two different sides (placing a child, wanting to adopt a child) it may appear that there is little overlap in adoptive and birth families’ experiences, personalities, etc. But I think that could be too simplistic.
Well…interesting questions you raise. Nat is JUST LIKE me. But see, I think her mom is a lot like me too. And I guess there are a couple of notable ways that she is not like me (extroversion, is a big one, but my (biological) mother is an extrovert too and I most certainly am not).
Anyway, I have been assuming so far that Nat got a double-whammy of nature and nurture when it comes to her smart, pig-headed bossiness.
As for matching families for the relationship quality, I think that’s a great idea but would not be possible in some many circumstances that I doubt it would be all that useful as any kind of rule of thumb. People may try to do that a little bit now with profiles and meetings and all.
But so often openness happens not because of careful pre-birth (or even post-birth) matching, but because something a bit more closed opened up over time and then you get what you get, you know?
That’s sort of where we stand with Selina’s mother.
I completely think this is true. We were (are) so much like Mal’s first parents that we used to call Bert “the ghost of Christmas future” to K. They had the same glasses, rode the same obscure bike, read the same books. They both had the same sense of humor, politics, and general outlook on the world. I can remember the four of us speaking on an adoption panel and K saying we all would have been best friends had we not been involved in adoption together. I think that familiarity went a long way in making OA work for us.
As Mallory has aged, I’ve seen what a benefit this is for her and us. She has a lot of reinforcements of natural inclinations through our nurturing. And the ways she differs I understand because I know where they come from. That doesn’t mean we don’t clash over those differences some time, after all she is a teenager. I also really celebrate these differences. She is more motivated than the rest of the family. She can stay on task. She is physically cooridnated.
I think here shyness and her food prefernces and her too cool indie attitude could have been a real issue in another family.
I do think there are negative aspects to this though. There are times my son has negative behaviors and I think “just like his first father.” Then I worry about his life in general and worry that it will turn out like his first father’s, no matter what I do. It’s a crummy attitude. It’s one thing to recognize the role of genetics, it’s another to treat them like predestiny. I try to get over it quick.
Oh, and I do think peers have influence. Not all, but significant. It’s one of the reasons I’ve kept my kids at the same school where I known everyone for 9 years . It’s also one of the reasons for the times that I’ve helicoptered a little. I do think other kids can encourage my kid to engage in risky behaviors. I know, I did it.
Like you, I have both bio and adopted kids (one each, both girls). What gets me about your excerpt is the gee-whiz tone–no kidding, adopted kids come with personalities! My kids had basically the same experiences as infants–same books, same story times, same music classes–not because I was consciously trying to do an experiment but mainly because I’m lazy, and they could not be more different, in their personalities, interests, skills, and developmental trajectories. One thing I particularly appreciate about open adoption is knowing where my daughter got all that stuff (athleticism, mechanical skills, energy) that clearly didn’t come from us.
It reminds me of a story I read in the New York Times a few years ago. Adopted kid, played football all through high school and college, grew up to be a big football fan. Gets a call out of the blue from his birth father (who turns out to have married his birth mother and had a bunch more kids) and guess what? He’s the head coach of the New York Giants. Adoptive mom, a tiny, unathletic person, says “well, that explains a lot.”
That’s a lot to think about - I agree! In our case, the similarities between our family and Alena’s other/birth family are more apparent now than they first were. And odd things, too - things you wouldn’t think of putting in a questionnaire, like M’s and my shared love of Tim Burton, or the fact that M’s dad’s family were rockhounds (like my parents). Our interests in music and travel…it’s just weird. But back when we all first met, we had no idea we had so much in common.
Do I think that peers have a big influence, sometimes more than parents? You bet. Not just in adoptive families, either. It keeps me awake at night sometimes.
This just drives home how important it is to embrace and love your child, no matter who they are. To be a good parent, you don’t have to be like your child. It’s easy to nurture a child’s wants and dreams without necessarily relating to them. Adopted children often are able to have more doors open to them than they would in their biological families (I know that won’t be a popular view, but in many cases, it’s true, even if it’s not PC).
I’m the first Renee, and I just wanted to say that I did not post the second comment from Renee. That’s not me, and don’t want you to think that I think adoptive families give their children more opportunities than their biological parents would. If my daughter’s birth parents had chosen to parent her, they would have done a fine job. I do agree that you should love your child no matter who they are, which goes for both adoptive and bio parents.
your post was the tipping point in getting me to finally read this book. hee hee.
i agree of course about how significant genetics are in determining who we are. but/and i have always thought that this is an area that (good) adoptive parents have a head start in. getting that our kids may be really different from us, that is. how many kids being raised in their biological families are damaged by expectations of them purely based on genetics? perhaps i am utterly naive (and i’m sure that i am, my son is only 3), but i think that being a good parent is being aware of who your child is- who they REALLY are- and that takes A LOT of continual paying attention, whether they are biologically related to you or not.
that said, i am not dimishing the pain of an adoptee who stands out like a black sheep in his adoptive family- i just don’t think this experience is unique to being adopted.
When, I was getting ready to place, one of the benefits of open adoption I heard was that families would be more closely matched in temperament and interests. I agree with that. I also loved both of Malcom Gladwell’s books but preferred The Tipping Point.