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Published findings

"Different Placement Practices for Different Families? Children’s Adjustment in LGH Adoptive Families"

Costa PA, Tasker F and Leal IP (2021) Different Placement Practices for Different Families? Children’s Adjustment in LGH Adoptive Families. Front. Psychol. 12:649853. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649853

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of children placed with lesbian, gay, and heterosexual adopters, and to examine children’s problem behaviors and positive psychosocial adjustment across the three family types.

Background: There is evidence that children with hard-to-place profiles may be more likely to be matched with lesbian and gay parents. In addition, children adopted from care face greater developmental difficulties than children raised by their birth families, although adoptive parents may buffer the negative effects of early adversity on their children’s psychosocial adjustment.

Method: A final sample of 149 adoptive families from across the United Kingdom was recruited: 71 heterosexual parented, 39 lesbian parented, and 39 gay parented.

Results: The results showed that gay and lesbian parents were more likely than heterosexual parents to be matched with hard-to-place children, partially because they were more open to being matched with children with hard-to-place profiles. However, no differences among the three family types on children’s psychosocial adjustment were found, when controlling for children’s early adversity.

 

Conclusion: Adopted children displayed similar levels of problem behaviors and positive adjustment in lesbian, gay, and heterosexual parented families. Early adversity and having a physical problem/disability accounted for much of the variance in problem behaviors whereas parenting did not. In contrast, it was suggested that parenting processes, namely, parental closeness, may help to explain children’s positive adjustment.

The full publication can be access here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649853/full

preliminary findings

Child development in adoptive families in the UK: Preliminary results from the Empowering Adoptive Families study

Pedro Alexandre Costa, Fiona Tasker & Isabel Leal

(May 11, 2017)

 

This research study is about child and adolescent well-being in adoptive families to examine how adoption, children's pre-adoptive experiences and childrearing practices can best promote child and adolescent well-being. We want to find out what works to promote well-being in different types of families.

We have so far collected a sample of 190 families with adopted children aged 5-18, who have all filled in our online questionnaire which is still open for parents to complete. Although we are still recruiting parents, we have prepared these preliminary results for initial conference presentations,  we want to share these results with you.

The majority of families taking part in our survey were headed by heterosexual couples, while just over a quarter of the families were headed by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents. We asked parents to tell us about their child’s (or children’s) development using standard psychological measures, and also asked parents about their experiences of adopting and their child’s pre-adoptive history We found that children’s behaviours were within the normal range for their age groups and we found no evidence of differences in children’s behaviour in heterosexual parented or LGBT parented families.

Because these are just preliminary results, we would like to invite more parents to participate in this study, so we can collect a diverse array of experiences and of family arrangements and look at experiences of different groups in greater detail.

 

In particular, we would like to invite gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender parents, parents who adopted as a single parent, parents who have adopted internationally and parents with older or teenage children to take part.

If you have not taken part in this study yet, we would really welcome your help and views. Please click this link to the online questionnaire: bit.ly/1OJmDSv

 

Note: These are preliminary results that might change when we have more adoptive families taking part in the survey and we look more closely at the findings. Many thanks from the Research Team to all those families who've already taken part in the survey and helped us with this important research project.

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