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Health and medicine

Study: Adoptees from foreign lands adjust surprisingly well

CHICAGO - A new study disputes the notion that children adopted from other countries tend to be damaged emotionally because of hardships they endured.

The analysis of more than 50 years of international data found these youngsters are only slightly more likely than nonadopted children to have behavioral problems such as aggressiveness and anxiety. They even 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 U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.

In the study, adopted children in general had more behavior problems than nonadopted youngsters, regardless of where the adoption took place.

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, researchers said.

Researchers found most international adoptees do well and are largely able to catch up with their nonadopted counterparts.

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

The analysis involved studies on adoption between 1950 and 2005, involving more than 30,000 adoptees and more than 100,000 nonadopted children.

Behavior problems were relatively uncommon among all children studied, but internationally adopted children had a 20 percent higher chance of being disruptive than nonadopted children, and a 10 percent higher chance of being anxious or withdrawn. They also were twice as likely as nonadopted children to receive mental health services.

[Last modified May 25, 2005, 00:41:07]