Being Adopted When your Siblings are Not--a Study on Parent-Child Closeness

photo © 2010 Nina Matthews | more info (via: Wylio)

Thank you all for your responses to the recent guest blog about being adopted when the siblings you are raised with are not.  Your input about being that adoptee was helpful.  What I found particularly interesting was the experiences of the biologically-raised siblings with an adopted brother or sister.  One thing that stuck out to me was the adoptee being "chosen" and how that might make the other siblings feel.  Decades back, it was recommended that parents read "The Chosen Child" to their adopted children and the "chosen" notion has thus become a part of adoption, though, I believe it is not as prevalent now as it was then.  We know how "chosen" makes adoptees feel.  I know some adoptees who feel special and embrace it.  A lot of the adoptees I know feel alienated by it or held to an impossible standard.  Some (I'm one of them) do not feel or identify with being "chosen," at all (loved?  Yes.  Chosen?  I never felt it made sense for me).  But what if you are the one who isn't told you were "chosen" because you were biologically-raised.  I never thought about this perspective.  So, thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Ironically enough, I found a study related to the topic the guest blogger wrote about shortly after the entry posted.

The study is from 2009.  The purpose was to rate the closeness of adoptees to their adoptive families.  Here is the abstract to give you more of an idea of what the study was about:

"Adults who had been children in families of the Texas Adoption Project rated how emotionally close they had been to their parents. Ratings were obtained via a mail questionnaire from 324 adopted and 149 biological children, and from parents and siblings. On the whole, relationships were judged to have been close rather than distant; parents judged them to have been closer than their children did; biological children were closer to their parents than adopted children; and children closer to their mothers than to their fathers. Self-ratings of childhood closeness were modest predictors of life outcomes such as maturity of personality, educational achievement, and absence of externalizing problems. Father–child similarity in personality was correlated (weakly) with judged closeness, but mother–child similarity was not."

The literature review discussed previous studies about factors impacting parent-child closeness.  Studies that found that biology as well as resemblance played a role in closeness were among those reviewed.


The adoptees interviewed were all in their 30's and 40's at the time of the study and adopted as infants.  The study sought to rate the retrospective perception of the adoptees, parents, and biologically-raised siblings about parent-child closeness as well as compare the ratings to the current life situation of the adoptee to see if parent-child closeness correlated with higher levels of success in adulthood (marriage, personality, education level etc.).  The researchers were also interested in discovering if resemblance had anything to do with parent-child closeness.


300 families were sought out for the interview.  324 adoptees, 149 biological descendants of adoptive parents, 266 parents, and 133 siblings (of adoptees, I presume) responded.


Respondents rated closeness on a scale of 1 to 10.  They also filled out sociodemographic/socioeconomic information (e.g. education level).  Personality information was recorded by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

• As a whole relationships were rated as being close.
• Parents saw themselves as being closer to their children than their children saw themselves as being close to their parents.
• Parents judged their adopted children as being less emotionally close to them than their biological children.  
• There was a correlation for the adopted individuals in closeness with parents with successes in adulthood.  There was no such correlation for the biologically-raised in closeness with parents, except for closeness with one's mother correlating to education level.
• Mother's relationships to their children were shown to be closer than father's.
• Similarities between parents and children were found to predict emotional closeness.

For those wondering, I believe the "Texas Adoption Project" was a previous study conducted in 1974-1975 that shared the same participants as this study.  I do not have any information on what the previous study was about.


Biologically-raised or adopted, from the study it doesn't seem uncommon for any son or daughter to feel that they were less close to their parents than perhaps they would have liked to have been for whatever reason.  But the reasons they perceive themselves as being less close may be different.  That's why, for me, it's so important to listen to the reasons adoptees said they felt less close (which, unfortunately, this study did not get into).  I also wish the study went more into why the parents said they felt less close to their adopted children.  


I didn't do a very in-depth analysis of this article, just reported some of the info and findings.  My brain is still tired from my lack of sleep and just having finished final week at school (the semester is over, yay!).  This study is significant for the same reason the previous post was important to the guest blogger.  When you are adopted and do not now very many adoptees, you have no way of knowing if what you think and feel is common among adoptees or not.  While everyone's feelings about their own experience of being adopted are valid, it does inexplicably make an adoptee feel better to know they are not alone in what they felt or perceived.  Besides the fact that I like reading research, this is why I share research here.  I think people are less likely to label adoptees as flawed and histrionic, insensitively tell them to "get over it," or persist in telling the adoptee that they are wrong for whatever reason, if research shows that what an adoptee is saying is something that is also significant for other adoptees.


Reference:
Loehlin, J. C., Horn, J. M., & Ernst, J. L. (2010). Parent–child closeness studied in adoptive families.Personality & Individual Differences, 48(2), 149-154. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.09.012