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PART ONE LOOKING BACK ON ADOPTION
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Chapter 1 ADOPTION IN RETROSPECT
This book is about the adoptive experience as it appears in retrospect to young adults who were adopted as children and as it is perceived by their adoptive parents. The information is based on a project undertaken and carried out by the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and largely funded by that organisation. The aims of the project were to compare the experience of families where children had been adopted by foster parents with others where the children had been received directly for adoption, and to learn something about the role played by various other factors in the long-term outcome of the placements.
Questions galore arise even among professionals when adoption is discussed. What is the nature of adoptive family life over the years and what does it mean to those personally involved in it? What are its satisfactions and disappointments? How do adopted people feel about the family they were given, the opportunities they were offered? Do they fulfil their adoptive parentsā expectations? Are they reasonably happy and well-adjusted adults? Does it really matter whether the adoption grew out of a fostering relationship or was a permanent arrangement right from the start? For years, placement agencies have counselled parents to tell the child of his adoptive status, but even now too little is known of how or when adopted children actually learn that they once had other parents. In fact, much of adoption theory and practice is still based on impressions gathered from the limited experience of individual social workers or on follow-up studies made early in the familyās life together. Later, the people who could answer these questions, that is, the grown-up adopted people themselves and their adoptive parents, have seldom been asked because of the difficulty of finding a sample that could be studied systematically.
The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children was particularly interested in learning how foster parent adoptions turn out, since its work had resulted in a good many such adoptions. It seemed that these families might be willing to share their experiences for the benefit of future adoptive families, thus making a systematic study possible. The Foundation, formerly known as the Foundling Hospital, had been a real pioneer in fostering, as it had boarded out babies from the Hospital from its inception over 200 years ago. Indeed, the famous eighteenth-century artist and benefactor of the Hospital William Hogarth and his wife were fostering some of the foundlings at the time of Hogarthās death in 1764. Until modern times the children were boarded out only until they were 5 years old; then they were returned to the Hospital for education and training. When the Hospital finally discontinued institutional care, children were boarded out indefinitely unless their original mothers made a successful application to reclaim them, but beginning in 1947 some of the children began to be legally adopted by their foster parents.
In 1972, when the Foundation registered as an adoption society, over 500 foster children had already been legally adopted with the tacit approval of the agency and the active work of foster parents in securing the consent of the natural mothers. When it was found that more than 130 of those who had been legally adopted were now over 21 years old, the Foundation felt these young adults and the people who had adopted them, if they could be found after so many years, might be willing to take part in a study of how these adoptions had turned out. By sharing the recollection of their own personal experiences they could benefit many children in the future whose long-term care would be planned jointly by social agencies and natural parents. Many children in Britain and elsewhere continue to be placed with people who initially only plan to foster them, but later adopt them if natural parents give their consent. The number of such adoptions may increase, since the Children Act, 1975, now makes it possible for people who have fostered a child for five years to apply to the court for an adoption order without the placing agency necessarily agreeing to the plan. Little is known about how foster parent adoptions turn out, whether they are more, or less, satisfactory for adoptive parents and children in the long term than direct adoption in which natural parents are prepared to relinquish their rights and responsibilities and the adopters are prepared to commit themselves fully as parents to the child right from the start.
The Thomas Coram project with the author as its director was carried out by social workers primarily for other social workers and the families and children they serve. These are some of the questions the project originally sought to answer.
Is adopting oneās foster child more or less satisfying and rewarding than adopting a child directly from an adoption agency?
Does being placed first as a foster child affect the long-term satisfaction or adult adjustment of the adoptee?
When there are long delays in legalising the adoption, does this affect the satisfaction of adopters or the satisfaction and adult adjustment of the adoptee?
What is the effect on the adoptive family of contact between birth parents and adoptive parents, for example, during a period of fostering prior to adoption?
If the adoptive experience is satisfying to the parents is it likely to be satisfying to the adoptee as well?
Are adopters and adoptees who perceive themselves as alike in some respects more often satisfied with their experience than those who see no such similarities?
Are the method and timing of the revelation of the childās adoptive status important factors in his adult adjustment?
Are adopted people wanting to meet their birth parents usually those who are not satisfied with their experience in the adoptive family or not well adjusted as adults?
Are parents likely to blame heredity when an adopted child shows behaviour or personality problems while growing up?
Have things which social workers have traditionally considered important proved to be so?
As plans for a study progressed, the possibility of exploring additional aspects of adoptive family life led the project down various paths, some more rewarding than others, but all mainly concerned with family relationships, expectations and achievements.
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Chapter 2 EARLIER FOLLOW-UP RESEARCH IN ADOPTION
Child adoption is a subject which captures the imagination and a good deal has been written about it in recent years. Much of this has been based on a personal experience of adopting or being adopted, but some of it has been written after long experience of placing children for adoption or as the result of research. The research has tended to be concerned with the relative importance of heredity and environment, the development and adjustment of adopted children and the isolation of factors important in predicting success or failure in adoption. With a few exceptions the research has taken place while the children were still young, usually before adolescence. Research involving adult adoptees is still quite limited.
The earliest studies were concerned with how well adopted children had been able to overcome early deprivation and the poor backgrounds from which they had been ārescuedā. Would environment triumph over heredity and a poor start in life? The earliest follow-up research into the long-term outcome of adoption was Sophie Theisās well-known American study How Foster Children Turn Out, published in 1924. This study involved all the children who had been placed by the New York State Charities Aid Association (a voluntary agency), who were between 18 and 40 years old when the study was made and who could be located ā nearly 800 in all. Many had come from very āundesirableā backgrounds or had led very deprived lives before being placed, often as school-aged children. They and their foster parents were interviewed and agency case records consulted.
Theis concluded that many children from āvery undesirable backgrounds (drunkenness, criminality, mental illness, etc.)ā were able to take advantage of opportunities when these were offered, and classifying her subjects on the basis of how well they were managing their lives as adults she found nearly three-quarters of them ācapableā, which she defined as ālaw-abiding, managing their affairs with good sense and living in accordance with good moral standards in their communitiesā. The āincapableā were those who were āunable or unwilling to support themselves adequately, who were shiftless or had defied the accepted standards of morality or order in their communitiesā. Adoption was very new in New York then and less than one-third of these foster children had been legally adopted, but it was found that this one-third tended to be better educated than the others and more often they had taken some kind of vocational training and therefore had some definite means of self-support. The fact of the legal adoption and that more of them had been placed with these parents before the age of 5 years were both thought to have contributed to this good result.
Further detailed research into the outcome of adoptions came 25 years later with the work of Skodak, Skeels and Harms, published in 1948 and 1949. This, too, was an American study and was concerned with mental development and its relation to the intelligence and educational achievement of parents. Adoption offered a situation in which this could be studied. āOrphanage infants, who had uneducated parents and poor backgroundsā and had been placed for adoption before they were 6 months old, were followed up with repeated interviews with adoptive parents and intelligence tests on the children until the children averaged 13 years of age. The intellectual development and educational achievement of their adoptive parents were studied too. At 5 years of age the childrenās intellectual development equalled or exceeded the mean of the general population. Although as the children grew older a limit to mental development seemed to be set by heredity, their mean IQ at age 13 was still some 20 points higher than their birth motherās IQ. From these findings it appeared that the development of intelligence could be modified very considerably by environment but within limits which had been established for the individual by his inheritance. The personal qualities of the adoptive parents were found to be very important to the mental growth of children as well as to their emotional stability.
During the decade of the 1950s adoption became much more widespread in both Britain and the United States, and those responsible for placing the children were keen to learn what factors or conditions were required for a successful outcome and whether such an outcome could be predicted. Two studies were published in Britain, one in 1953 by Lulie Shaw, who had interviewed 55 sets of Quaker parents when their adopted children were under 10 years old, and one by Robina Addis et al. in 1955, based on adoption agency records. During the same decade Ruth Brenner (1951) was following up children placed by the Free Synagogue Child Adoption Committee in New York City, and in 1957 Dr J. R. Wittenborn was following up another group at Yale Universityās Child Development Clinic. Both Brenner and Wittenborn were particularly interested in psychological tests in predicting later development. Working with a team of child psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers Wittenborn studied a group of adopted children aged 5 and 6 and another group aged 8 to 9 years, who had been given Gesell developmental tests in infancy and were tested again during the study. The later IQ was found to be related to the education and ambitions of the adoptive parents and to some extent to the occupational level of the birth parents, but Wittenborn concluded that āmuch of the effort commonly devoted to an exact evaluation of infants considered for adoption could more profitably be devoted to a study of the applicants who desire to be adoptive parentsā. Brenner, too, was disillusioned with the predictive value of infant tests and found the qualities of the adoptive parents much more important.
The 1960s saw several more follow-up undertakings, as well as some clinical studies and considerable interest in adoption theory and practice. In Florida Helen Witmer and her colleagues (1963) carried out a study which described how families who had adopted children privately in the State of Florida appeared to be functioning ten years later. Witmer found the families functioning satisfactorily in 70 per cent of the cases, with girls making a better adjustment than boys. Compared with a group of natural children the adopted children, both boys and girls, appeared to be at a slight disadvantage in personal and social functioning but not in intelligence or school achievement.
A little later, Bryn Mawr College and the Childrenās Aid...
