Changing Family, Changing Education

Adoption Context, Parental Investment, and Children’s Educational Outcomes

“…In fact, whereas less than 25% of domestically adopted children are placed in transracial contexts, 84% of international adoptions are classified as transracial. In these ways at least, internationally adoptive families are the least similar to the traditional, normative “family ideal”—a middle-class, monoracial family with two biological parents married to each other (Biblarz & Raftery, 1999; Farr & Patterson, 2009; Hamilton et al, 2007; Hamilton et al, 2011).…”

“…Thus, we would consider finding that parental investment strategies differ by adoption context to support and refine their basic compensation argument. Given the adoption market’s internal stratification, internationally adoptive families in fact may have both the greatest incentives and greatest opportunities to employ dual compensatory strategies (Hamilton et al, 2011; Vandivere et al, 2009).…”

“…Though recent studies call for multivariate analyses to examine whether school-related outcomes differ systematically between adoptive and other children (see Hamilton, Werum, Steelman, & Powell, 2011), to our knowledge, few such studies exist. Extant research on educational outcomes for adoptive children rarely includes comparisons with nonadopted children (e.g., Vandivere & McKlindon, 2010), or it tends to focus on those with clinical problems or a history of institutionalization, which risks overestimating negative outcomes (Beckett et al, 2006; Bimmel et al, 2003; van Ijzendoorn et al, 2005).…”

One parent, two parents, one sex, two sexes: Public attitudes toward single and same‐sex parents

“…Critics of single and same‐sex parents often assume there is an “ideal” family arrangement composed of children and their married biological mother and father. Many Americans consider this family type to be the “the gold standard” and use this family form as a yardstick to evaluate the outcomes of children from other family types (Coontz, 2016; Hamilton et al, 2011; Smith, 1993). While advocates of these “traditional” families advance a “two versus one” argument for children's well‐being, the meaning of this argument differs.…”

“…This gap in attitudinal research is puzzling given concerns among certain constituencies regarding the putative harms of single‐parent and same‐sex parent households. Critics of single‐parent families contend that relying on just one parent contributes to a host of problems for their children, such as lower educational attainment, delinquency, teenage pregnancies, poverty, and welfare dependency (Blankenhorn, 1995; Pearlstein, 2011; Popenoe, 2009; for competing discussions of single‐parent households in the U.S., see Amato et al, 2015; Brooks, 2002; Downey & Powell, 1993; Hamilton et al, 2011; Larossa, 2009; Usdansky, 2009). In contrast, critics of same‐sex parent homes often root their opposition in the claim that children's well‐being is maximized when they live with their mother and father.…”