So despite the fact that I spent quite a while thinking about adopting vs. having biological children a few years ago and came out in favour of having biological children for now based on similar concerns you (and Dale) raise about more adverse outcomes in adopted children, I find your conclusion to strongly dissuade from adopting very surprising.
You thinking that adopting might likely be a life-destroying mistake does not seem to line up with the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. Maybe you meant this specifically for adopting teenagers? It was not clear from your comment.
In many ways, I prefer more awareness about difficulties in adopting over the naive ‘why don’t you just adopt?!’ do-gooders who want to have children often hear. So I am grateful that this topic is brought up, I would just prefer a more clear pointing out of trade-offs, as well as more emotional sensitivity on the topic.
When I looked into this, I looked more at qualitative accounts (and also tried to answer a slightly different question—does demand from potential parents for low-risk adopted children outstrip how many such children there are?) and less at quantitative data. While this seems like a clear oversight in retrospect, apparently this led me to a more negative impression than is warranted now looking at the data you linked. If you had told me that 1,5% of biological children have substantial drug abuse problems as defined in the paper and asked me to guess the percentage for adopted children, I would have guessed way more than 3,5%. I was also surprised by the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. So if anything, you are leaving me with a more positive impression of adoption, and are motivating me to look into the topic again.
Thus I am surprised you are so confident in your position you would be willing to spend so much time on dissuading people to adopt. (You are welcome to try to dissuade me that this is even worth my time looking into it!) To me, the outcomes do not seem to be ‘very predictably bad’.
While on average adopted children have worse outcomes than biological children, this really does not need to be true for each individual making this choice. It is also not the only factor which matters. To name some examples which can tilt the decision: infertility, same-sex couples, previous difficult pregnancies or birth trauma, family history of genetic diseases like Huntington’s, more garden-variety heritable risk factors for issues like ADHD, autism and depression, how high risk the potential adoptive children actually are, e.g. based on their age and previous history, etc.
I am unsure how to think about satisfaction data. My general model is that lots of satisfaction data is biased upwards and I can’t really imagine a negative result from that survey, so I really don’t know how much to update on it. I would currently just ignore it, unless someone had a really clever study design where they have some kind of other intervention that is similarly costly and had similar social expectations, but we know is bad for people, that we could use as a control.
And yes, I think concerns like infertility, same-sex couples, and many other things like that can make adoption the best choice for people who really want to have children. But I do think the costs would still be there, you might just not have an alternative.
I also think one can reduce the costs here by a lot by trying to find one of the best kids to adopt, or doing weirder things like trying to find a surrogate mother, which will probably have much less adverse selection effects (though I haven’t thought through this case very much). My concern is much more about the naive way most people seem to handle adoptions, and I think there are ways to reduce the risk to a level where the tradeoffs become much less harsh.
So despite the fact that I spent quite a while thinking about adopting vs. having biological children a few years ago and came out in favour of having biological children for now based on similar concerns you (and Dale) raise about more adverse outcomes in adopted children, I find your conclusion to strongly dissuade from adopting very surprising.
You thinking that adopting might likely be a life-destroying mistake does not seem to line up with the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. Maybe you meant this specifically for adopting teenagers? It was not clear from your comment.
In many ways, I prefer more awareness about difficulties in adopting over the naive ‘why don’t you just adopt?!’ do-gooders who want to have children often hear. So I am grateful that this topic is brought up, I would just prefer a more clear pointing out of trade-offs, as well as more emotional sensitivity on the topic.
When I looked into this, I looked more at qualitative accounts (and also tried to answer a slightly different question—does demand from potential parents for low-risk adopted children outstrip how many such children there are?) and less at quantitative data. While this seems like a clear oversight in retrospect, apparently this led me to a more negative impression than is warranted now looking at the data you linked. If you had told me that 1,5% of biological children have substantial drug abuse problems as defined in the paper and asked me to guess the percentage for adopted children, I would have guessed way more than 3,5%. I was also surprised by the adoption satisfaction data Aaron linked. So if anything, you are leaving me with a more positive impression of adoption, and are motivating me to look into the topic again.
Thus I am surprised you are so confident in your position you would be willing to spend so much time on dissuading people to adopt. (You are welcome to try to dissuade me that this is even worth my time looking into it!) To me, the outcomes do not seem to be ‘very predictably bad’.
While on average adopted children have worse outcomes than biological children, this really does not need to be true for each individual making this choice. It is also not the only factor which matters. To name some examples which can tilt the decision: infertility, same-sex couples, previous difficult pregnancies or birth trauma, family history of genetic diseases like Huntington’s, more garden-variety heritable risk factors for issues like ADHD, autism and depression, how high risk the potential adoptive children actually are, e.g. based on their age and previous history, etc.
I am unsure how to think about satisfaction data. My general model is that lots of satisfaction data is biased upwards and I can’t really imagine a negative result from that survey, so I really don’t know how much to update on it. I would currently just ignore it, unless someone had a really clever study design where they have some kind of other intervention that is similarly costly and had similar social expectations, but we know is bad for people, that we could use as a control.
And yes, I think concerns like infertility, same-sex couples, and many other things like that can make adoption the best choice for people who really want to have children. But I do think the costs would still be there, you might just not have an alternative.
I also think one can reduce the costs here by a lot by trying to find one of the best kids to adopt, or doing weirder things like trying to find a surrogate mother, which will probably have much less adverse selection effects (though I haven’t thought through this case very much). My concern is much more about the naive way most people seem to handle adoptions, and I think there are ways to reduce the risk to a level where the tradeoffs become much less harsh.