NYHOMESTUDY BLOG

Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children
compared with biological parents, according to the results of a national
study that challenges the more conventional view — emphasized in legal and
scholarly debates — that children are better off with their biological
parents.

The study, by sociologists at Indiana University Bloomington and the
University of Connecticut, found that two-parent adoptive parents not only
spend more money on their children, but they invest more time, such as
reading to them, talking with their children about their problems or eating
meals together.

“Society often tells people that adoption isn’t normal,” said IUB Professor
Brian Powell, who focuses on the sociology of the family. “When people make
the decision that they want to have children and then use unusual means to
have them, they compensate for the barriers.”

The findings of the study, funded in part by the National Science
Foundation, were published in the February issue of the American
Sociological Review. Coauthors include Laura Hamilton, a doctoral student in
IUB’s Department of Sociology; and Simon Cheng, an assistant professor at
UConn. The study is available at:

In the United States, 2 percent to 4 percent of households include adopted
children, and researchers expect this number to grow. Instead of looking at
two-parent adoptive parent households, most research that has examined
parental expenditure on children has compared biological parents with
stepparent households, single parents or clinical populations that are not
nationally representative.

This omission is notable, Powell said, because many of the assumptions used
in contemporary legal and scholarly discussions — some of which translate
into legal rulings and public policy — about the importance of biological
parents to the well-being of children rely on these older studies. The
authors wrote that “recent court cases regarding same-sex marriage cite this
body of research as evidence of the superiority of biological parenthood
and, in turn, as a compelling rationale for the current legal definitions of
marriage.”

The article specifically cites two court cases in Washington and New York
states that rely on this rationale: Andersen v. King County, which upheld a
state law banning same-sex marriage; and Seymour v. Holcomb, where a
same-sex marriage ban also was upheld.

In academia, the new findings contradict claims by evolutionary
psychologists that parents are born to dote on their biological children
more than their adoptive children.

“It really calls into question that people’s motivations are really about
just passing on their own genes,” Powell said.

For this study, the researchers examined data from the Early Childhood
Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten-First Grade Waves, which involves a
nationally representative sample of U.S. families. Because of the strong
impact parental resources can have on children during their early years of
schooling, the researchers examined data involving around 13,000 households
that included first-graders.

Two-parent adoptive parents, in general, were older and wealthier than
biological parents, single parents and stepparents. When financial resources
were taken into consideration, the investments by two-parent adoptive
parents appeared more similar to two-parent biological parents but still
showed an advantage.

The research was supported by the NSF, Spencer Foundation and the American
Educational Research Association.

The American Sociological Review is the flagship journal of the 101-year-old
American Sociological Association.

“Adoptive parents, adaptive parents: Evaluating the importance of biological
ties for parental investment,” American Sociological Review, vol. 72 (Feb.:
95-116).