ADOPTED CHILDREN, BY THE NUMBERS: Lisa Belkin

at the NYT "Motherlode" blog:

Whenever the subject here is adoption, readers point out that while the difficult cases make the news, most adoptive families are happy, and most adopted children are healthy and well adjusted.

Today is the final day of National Adoption Month, and a fitting time to take a look at the report “Adoption USA: A Chartbook Based on the 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents,” which was released recently by the Department of Health and Human Services. Based on interviews with parents of 91,642 adopted children, its authors describe the report as “the first-ever survey to provide representative information about the characteristics, adoption experiences, and well-being of adopted children and their families in the United States.”

Among its findings: the overwhelming majority of families whose children came to them through adoption are doing just fine.

Eighty-five percent of the children were described as being in “excellent or very good health,” the same as the general population. Eighty-one percent of the parents described their relationships with their child as “very warm and close,” while 42 percent said those relationships were “better than ever expected,” and only 15 percent said they were “more difficult” than they had expected.

In some categories, adopted children can be considered measurably better off than the average American child. They are, for instance, more likely to be read to daily when they are younger (68 percent compared with 48 percent), to be sung to or told stories every day (73 percent compared with 59 percent) or to participate in extracurricular activities as school-age children (85 percent compared with 81 percent).

That does not mean that there are not bumps and difficulties on the adoption path. ...

Similarly, while “only a small minority of adopted children have ever been diagnosed with disorders such as attachment disorder, depression, attention-deficit disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or behavior or conduct disorder,” the report says, the percentage of each of these appears higher in the subset of adoptive children than in the general population.

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Labels: adoption

posted by Eve at 10:49 PM VOTE

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