The Adoption Disadvantage?

Lorraine

I'm wading once again into the issues that being adopted raises and for the sake of peace in our bickering family, the divisive issue of primal wound shall be left out of the equation. 

Years ago I had a very public spat with Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor who never appears to know of an international adoption she doesn't applaud, over the research showing that adoptees have more psychological and behavioral problems in general than the non-adopted. We were both guests on the PBS NewsHour and she called all such research: "Garbage." Her exact word. 

Despite her haughty dismissal, such research continues to accumulate--and now a new study found that adopted children tend to have more behavioral and academic problems in kindergarten and first grade than children raised by their biological parents. According to a research brief from the Institute for Family Studies, "young adoptive children" [a phrase new to me] were more likely than biological ones to get angry easily and fight with other students." This is only one of the differences psychologist Nicholas Zill found when he examined a longitudinal study of 19,000 students conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics beginning in 1998.