This outcome
study, conducted during the 1960s, followed up on 100 adoptions
arranged by four New York agencies decades earlier, between 1931
and 1940. The study is interesting not only because it surveyed
very long-term outcomes, but because thinking about adoption had
changed so much in the intervening period. For example, the researchers
were preoccupied with factors such as infertility
and the unique struggles that adopters faced in feeling entitled
to their children. This understandably incorporated the emphasis
on difference that was featured in recent works of adoption theory,
like Shared Fate,
and in therapeutic perspectives on adoption that reached their peak
after midcentury. Yet when the adoptions studied here were initially
arranged, during the 1930s, infertility and its
psychological consequences had been minor considerations, if they
had been considerations at all.
Jaffee and Fanshel nevertheless set out to explore and measure
adults’ “ability to undertake parental role obligations
without neurotic conflict.” They hypothesized that attitudes
toward child-rearing were a sensitive barometer of parental psychology
and would be strongly correlated with outcomes. Stricter parents
(who resorted to spanking, for instance, and rarely left their children
alone) were less able to handle separation. This illustrated that
they had not overcome the handicaps of adoptive parenthood. On the
other hand, parents who took more risks and allowed their children
more freedom (by hiring more babysitters, for instance) had vanquished
“the psychological insult” of infertility.
They had achieved authentic parenthood.
Contrary to their hypothesis, the data that Fanshel and Jaffee
gathered suggested that the degree of strictness had little to do
with adoption outcomes. Money rather than psychology determined
the extent of substitute care. The study utilized extensive tape-recorded
interviews that were then coded and manipulated electronically.
The researchers also examined original case records and devised
an instrument that interviewers used to evaluate parents’
overall feelings about adoption and infertility.
The study focused on school performance, quality of past and present
child-parent relationships, health, vocational history, heterosexual
adjustment, and parental satisfaction. Outcomes were summarized,
an Overall Adjustment Score was calculated, and the 100 adoptees
were divided into three groups: “low-problem,” “middle-range,”
and “high-problem.”
The researchers assumed that difference in adoption made all the
difference, so it astonished them that most of the parents they
interviewed (73 percent) insisted that the problems they had encountered
had nothing to do with adoption. Even parents of “high-problem”
children were unlikely to blame adoption itself for whatever had
gone wrong.
There were other surprises too. Age at placement, which had declined
steadily during the previous four decades because of studies like
How Foster Children Turn Out
and adopters’ demand for babies, did not influence outcomes
as the researchers expected. In fact, “high-problem”
children in the sample had been placed younger than “low-problem”
children.
Jaffee and Fanshel were also perplexed to discover that telling
did not emerge as a significant variable (Marshall Schechter’s
“ Observations on Adopted Children”
predicted that it would.) While the vast majority of parents had
told the children about their adoptive status, they varied widely
in when they told, how they told, and how often (if ever) they returned
to the topic. Few parents had given children full and honest information
about illegitimacy, for
example, and many deliberately withheld embarrassing details. Seven
tables that presented statistical correlations related to telling
revealed that none of this mattered. Only one thing appeared to
influence outcomes. Adoptees who expressed more curiosity about
their natal backgrounds were more highly clustered in the “high-problem”
group. This finding confirmed a view that was widespread at the
time. Indifference to genealogy was a sign of success. Adoptees
who gave little or no thought to the facts of their birth had turned
out well.
How They Fared in Adoption demonstrated a paradox in
the evolution of outcome studies over time. As researchers utilized
more sophisticated design and statistical methodology to control
for variance, they also became more reluctant to make causal claims
and less confident that knowledge would translate into progress.
Studies that set out to banish uncertainty from family-formation
were more and more likely to conclude that little could be known
for sure.
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