this woman’s work

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.