I think raising one’s own kids is often significantly more rewarding than raising adopted kids, just because one’s own kids will share so much more of one’s cognitive traits, personality traits, quirks, etc, that you can empathize better with them.
I’m extremelyskeptical of this claim. Many parents I know with multiple biological children report that they have immensely different personalities, and it seems intuitively obvious that any statistical correlations of such traits between child and parent that are driven by genes will be overwhelmed by statistical noise in a family with an n of, say, 3 or fewer children. As someone with two biological children, IMHO almost all of the rewarding aspects of being a parent come from the experience of watching them grow up on a daily basis and directly contributing to that growth, not from picking out physical or other characteristics that happen to remind me of myself.
One confounding factor here is that the children that you might potentially adopt are pretty different from the children you might have biologically. Most adoptees have gone through some form of trauma, they are rarely newborns, they often had worse prenatal environments, their biological parents probably wouldn’t enjoy the forum, etc.
I think if somehow one of my children had been swapped at birth with a child from similar parents it probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on what raising them would be like, but that’s not really what we’re talking about?
(I do also think it’s cute the various more specific ways our kids resemble us, but I agree this is not a major contribution to the experience of parenting.)
I think this is slightly overstating things—I’m not sure of the numbers as the statistics I’ve found online seem inconsistant, but it looks like the majority of private adoptions, and >10% of all adoptions, are newborns.
I’m extremely skeptical of this claim. Many parents I know with multiple biological children report that they have immensely different personalities, and it seems intuitively obvious that any statistical correlations of such traits between child and parent that are driven by genes will be overwhelmed by statistical noise in a family with an n of, say, 3 or fewer children. As someone with two biological children, IMHO almost all of the rewarding aspects of being a parent come from the experience of watching them grow up on a daily basis and directly contributing to that growth, not from picking out physical or other characteristics that happen to remind me of myself.
One confounding factor here is that the children that you might potentially adopt are pretty different from the children you might have biologically. Most adoptees have gone through some form of trauma, they are rarely newborns, they often had worse prenatal environments, their biological parents probably wouldn’t enjoy the forum, etc.
I think if somehow one of my children had been swapped at birth with a child from similar parents it probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on what raising them would be like, but that’s not really what we’re talking about?
(I do also think it’s cute the various more specific ways our kids resemble us, but I agree this is not a major contribution to the experience of parenting.)
I think this is slightly overstating things—I’m not sure of the numbers as the statistics I’ve found online seem inconsistant, but it looks like the majority of private adoptions, and >10% of all adoptions, are newborns.