Adopted kids take after their first parents, not their adoptive parents

Geneticist Robert Plomin says children take 

after their biological parents, not adoptive. 

Kids take after their first parents, not their adoptive parents, in cognitive skills, interests and personality traits. They even resemble their first parents in seemingly non-genetic traits as television watching and likelihood of getting divorced. This comes as no surprise to first parents who have met their lost offspring, but it's heartening and reassuring to have our impressions supported by scientific research.

In "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are," Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King's College London, is the latest researcher to conclude that babies are not balls of clay, shaped by their parents after birth, but come at birth with imprinted traits from their biological parents. In essence, he posits that parental nurturing has little effect on the adults children grow up to become.

Plomin's research echos that of earlier scientists, including Judith Rich Harris who stated that adopted children do not resemble their adoptive parents in intelligence, character or personality; and Steven Pinker who wrote "The doctrine of a blank slate is a totalitarian's dream". To them, the nature/nurture argument was over, and nature had won.

To us who live adoption, we understand that the desire of adoptees to learn their origins, and the intense grief of mothers who lose their children, is proof that the bond between us is driven by natural forces that is not broken by time or distance.

Adoptee and birth family synchronicity: Quirks run in families

Jane, Julie, Lucy

A couple of weeks ago I took a cruise with my two sisters, Lucy and Kate along the California coast. We live in different parts of the country--Lucy in Orange County, CA, Kate in Central Illinois, and me in Oregon. During a stop in San Francisco, we met up with my youngest daughter Julie for a dinner in Chinatown. While showing off our deftness at manipulating chopsticks, Julie noticed that she, Lucy, and I had identical nail polish, a sort of shell pink. We hadn't planned this, didn't discuss getting a mani before our trip; still out of the scores of colors at Vietnamese nail salons in different cities, all of us picked the same color.  (Kate's nails were natural.)