An expansive new study released last week offers important and compelling insight from the perspectives and experiences of adults who were adopted as children through foster care, private adoption or international adoption.
The study by the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) draws from the responses of more than 1,200 adoptees to questions on a wide variety of topics – from adoptee relationships with their adoptive and biological families, to race and identity, to current life satisfaction, opinions about adoption, and much more.
The outcomes reveal adoptees to be highly diverse in perspective and yet broadly healthy and satisfied with their lives, relationships and accomplishments.
These findings contrast sharply with many of the narratives that fill social media and other public forums where the loudest voices tend to dominate.
Survey findings show adoptees are healthy, satisfied with their lives
Some of the notable findings of this new study include:
- Overall, adoptees report high satisfaction in their experience of adoption.
- Adoptees also reported high levels of life satisfaction overall, including feelings about their education, vocation and relationships/marriage.
- Adoptees tend to achieve dramatically higher levels of education compared with what we know about their unadopted peers coming from similar situations. Remarkably, adoptees not only surpassed the education level of their biological parents but also the education level of their (frequently very well-educated) adopted parents, often by considerable margins.
- Children whose adoptive parents were of a different race than them did not report lower satisfaction with their adoption than those with one or both adopted parents of the same race. In fact, they reported substantially higher satisfaction.
- Adoptees were moderately more likely to say that adoption works in the best interest of adoptive parents, relative to biological parents or adopted children, but overall, adoptees reported by large margins (of 2:1 or higher) that adoption works in the best interest of all three of these groups at the same time.
- While many noted areas where their experiences of being parented or general experiences as an adoptee fell short of the ideal, they overwhelmingly affirmed the value of adoption for everyone involved.
Data compares to previous meta-studies on adoptees
In total, these results echo the findings of prior meta-studies on adoptees.
These have found that – although adoptees face a number of challenges at rates higher than the general population – adoptees not only dramatically outpace peers from similar situations who were not adopted but also do quite well in the long run compared to the general population in every domain, from cognitive growth to physical healing and health to self-esteem. Best of all, their lives are a source of good to their adoptive families, spouses, children, workplaces and communities.
For further reading, find the full study here: Profiles in Adoption: Adult Adoptee Experiences.
Rachel Medefind is the Director of the CAFO Institute for Family-Centered Healing and Health. For more information and resources, join the mailing list.