Portuguese adopted adolescents' perception of attachment relationships to parents

Abstract

The establishment of emotional bonds is one of the most important tasks of the adoptive family. Most research about attachment in adoption focuses on young adopted children, as opposed to adoptees in other stages of development. The present study aims at assessing the adopted adolescents' self‐perception of attachment relationships with their adoptive parents, by pairing them with a group of institutionalized adolescents and another one of adolescents in the community. One hundred sixty‐five adolescents (55 adopted, 55 in residential care, and 55 living with their birth family), aged 12 to 19, participated in this study. Data were collected using the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment to assess attachment relationships with parents on three dimensions: trust, communication, and alienation. The results showed that adoptees perceived their relationship with their parents in a similar way to peers in the community and presented higher results when compared to institutionalized adolescents in trust and communication and lower scores in alienation. The results highlighted the relevance of family context experiences and suggested that adoption can offer the possibility of building a secure attachment relationship, which is not the case in the context of collective care, as happens within institutionalized care.

Attachment to Parents and Aggressiveness in Adopted Adolescents: A Multi‐Sample Comparison Study

“…Our results are in line with other studies, which have also not found differences in attachment security to parents between community adopted and nonadopted adolescents (Barroso et al., ; McGinn, ; McSherry et al., ), but apparently in contradiction with others that show more insecure attachment organizations in adopted teens (e.g., Escobar & Santelices, ). This might be explained by the usual changes in the attachment system during adolescence, in combination with the different features captured by alternative assessment approaches to attachment.…”

“…However, studies are not homogenous at establishing the age cutoff that makes the difference: 12 months (e.g., van den Dries et al., ), 18 months (e.g., Merz & McCall, ), or 24 months (e.g., Escobar et al., ). Moreover, although not every study confirms that early adoption is associated with better attachment (e.g., Barroso et al., ) and behavioral outcomes (e.g., Escobar et al., ) in adolescence, our results did not find that to be the case. One possible explanation for the worse outcomes for the adopted teens during the first year in our study might be associated with the fact that a high percentage (33.3%) of this subgroup of adolescents came from a domestic adoption, whereas only 8.3% of late adopted teens were nationally adopted; there is evidence that domestic adoptees have worse outcomes than international adoptees (Juffer & van IJzendoorn, ).…”

“…According to that theory, we expected that the improvement in attachment security would become greater the longer the adoptee lived in the adoptive family. However, as in other research (Barroso et al., ; van den Dries et al., ), we did not find any significant association between time in the adoptive family and attachment security to parents. Given that most of the adopted teens of our study (96.1%) had already spent a long time with their adoptive families (from 5 years to more than 10 years), it is possible that such an extended amount of time might have been sufficient to counteract the early adversities linked to the preplacement period.…”

“…A newer study by Barroso, Barbosa‐Ducharne, and Coelho () used the IPPA to examine attachment relationships with parents in a somewhat bigger sample of only adolescents (12–19 years old): in adopted ( n = 55), community ( n = 55), and institutionalized ( n = 55) paired youth. They did not find any attachment‐security differences between adopted and nonadopted community teens, but adopted adolescents showed better scores than institutionalized teens.…”

Attachment across the lifespan: insights from adoptive families

“…In contrast, there is limited evidence that early maltreatment or institutionalization have long-term effects on adoptive individuals' attachment security within the adoptive parent-child relationship. Parents report few differences in the attachment behaviors of children adopted after experiencing adversity and non-adopted children [21][22][23][24][25], and adopted children and adolescents do not report feeling less security in their relationships with their parents than non-adopted children [26][27][28].…”