
The Adoption Paradox - jimsojim
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-adoption-paradox/409495/?single_page=true
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vessenes
This article is silly.

Adoptive children are not compared to their 'classmates' who stay
institutionalized, instead other children who won a genetic lottery, both
literally and financially.

I'm an adoptive parent and have bio-children. The challenges my adoptive son
has to overcome are enormous -- language, nurture, early-stage nutrition,
family integration..But I bet he's doing far better on most developmental
scales than his compatriots at the orphanage we adopted him from, a place that
was so limited in experiences his four year old friends didn't know words like
'cone' or 'arrow'.

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hugh4
Why do lower-class children adopted into higher-class families behave more
like lower-class children than higher-class children?

This seems to only a "paradox" if you believe in some kind of all-nurture no-
nature blank-slate theory of human nature.

~~~
cjensen
When you look for stuff which correlates with the outcome of a child growing
up, almost nothing correlates _except_ parenting quality. For example, single
parenting and divorced parents correlate with lower outcomes [1]. Parental
class or wealth do not correlate except in regards to how people of different
classes or wealth situations raise children differently, or have more
discretionary time available to spend on their children.

This paradox flies in the face of the conventional interpretation of the data.
This really calls for follow-up studies which look more carefully for causes
-- for example, as vessenes points out, children who are available for
adoption may have, on average, challenges that differ from the norm.

[1] I am not judging. Instead, consider that a single programmer will
generally, but not always, be less effective than a pair of programmers.

~~~
vessenes
If you posit that institutionalization is not good for children, something
that I think is probably uncontroversial (but come on HN, give me your best
shot), you have a bunch of interesting externalities from the adoption system,
especially the international adoption system.

In particular, kids in most Geneva convention countries need to 'time out' of
their domestic processes, so they are institutionalized longer, sometimes
years longer than a local adoption would have been. They are also very often
'damaged goods' depending on the country of origin -- babies with
unproblematic histories get adopted quickly some places.

For whatever reason, upper-middle-class adoptive families seem to me to trend
international (and we did that in our case); the gap there might be
exaggerated even further over a lower income family doing a local adoption.
The article and / or studies cited could be living with these sorts of
correlative issues unless very carefully considered and designed around;
nothing in the article made me think that level of detailed consideration had
been accomplished by the author, though.

------
carsongross
Yes, the world must be deeply confusing to people who aren't aware of
genetics.

