Study Disputes Adoption Myths

Children Adopted From Foreign Countries Adjust (Surprisingly) Well

(AP)  They are often born in poverty and civil strife, abandoned, put in an orphanage, and then suddenly uprooted and sent to live an ocean away with strangers from another culture.

And yet, children adopted from abroad seem to adjust remarkably well, according to a new study that challenges the widely held notion that these youngsters are badly damaged emotionally and prone to disruptive behavior.

The analysis of more than 50 years of international data found that these youngsters are only slightly more likely than non-adopted children to have behavioral problems such as aggressiveness and anxiety. And they actually seem to have fewer problems than children adopted within their own countries.

"Our findings may help them fight the stereotype that is often associated with international adoption," said researchers Femmie Juffer and Marinus H. van IJzendoorn of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

They pooled results from 137 studies on adoptions by parents living in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.

In the study, adopted children in general had more behavior problems than non-adopted youngsters, regardless of where the adoption took place — a result that is not surprising, since both groups often suffer deprivation and come from broken families.

But with backgrounds that often include abandonment, orphanages and civil strife, foreign adoptees are sometimes thought of as difficult, disruptive children — an image that the study does not support, the researchers said.

The results are generally reassuring for international adoption — an increasing phenomenon involving more than 40,000 children a year moving among more than 100 countries — the researchers said.

"Before adoption, most international adoptees experience insufficient medical care, malnutrition, maternal separation, and neglect and abuse in orphanages," the researchers said. But to their surprise, they found that these children do well and are largely able to catch up with their non-adopted counterparts.

The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.