adoption essay conclusion

Essay on Adoption

Students are often asked to write an essay on Adoption in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Adoption

Understanding adoption.

Adoption is when a person or a couple becomes the legal parent of a child who is not their biological child. This process gives the child all the rights and privileges of a biological child. It’s an act of love and kindness, offering a child a secure home and family.

Types of Adoption

There are different types of adoption. The first is domestic adoption, where a child is adopted within the same country. The second is international adoption, where a child from another country is adopted. The third type is foster care adoption, where a foster child is adopted.

Benefits of Adoption

Adoption benefits everyone involved. The child gets a loving family and a secure home. The adoptive parents get the joy of raising a child. Society also benefits as every child that is adopted is one less child without a home.

Adoption Process

The adoption process can be long and difficult. It involves a lot of paperwork and legal work. The adoptive parents need to prove they can provide a safe and loving home for the child. Once everything is approved, the child becomes a legal part of the family.

Adoption Challenges

250 words essay on adoption, what is adoption.

Adoption is a process where a person takes the responsibility of a child whose biological parents cannot care for them. The person who adopts becomes the child’s legal parent and gives them all the love, care, and support they need.

Why People Choose Adoption

People choose to adopt for many reasons. Some people cannot have their own children. Others want to provide a home for a child in need. Some people adopt to expand their families. Each person has their unique reason for adopting a child.

There are different types of adoption. In ‘open adoption’, the child may still have contact with their biological parents. ‘Closed adoption’ means no contact with biological parents. ‘Foster to adopt’ is when a child is placed in a temporary home before being adopted.

Adoption benefits everyone involved. The child gets a loving home. The adoptive parents get to share their life with a child. It also helps society by making sure every child has a family.

Challenges of Adoption

Adoption can also be challenging. It can take a long time and involve many legal steps. Adopted children may also have emotional issues due to their past experiences.

500 Words Essay on Adoption

Adoption is a process where a person takes the responsibility of parenting a child from the child’s biological parents. This process creates a permanent change in status and transfers all rights and responsibilities from the biological parents to the adoptive parents.

Reasons for Adoption

Many reasons lead people to adopt. Some people cannot have their own children due to medical issues. Others adopt to provide a stable family life to children in need. There are also people who adopt to bring more children into their families and to give their biological children siblings.

The Adoption Process

Once approved, the adoptive parents are matched with a child. This can take a long time, depending on many factors. After the match, there is a period where the child and parents get to know each other. If all goes well, the court finalizes the adoption.

There are different types of adoption. Domestic adoption is when a child is adopted within the same country. International adoption involves adopting a child from a different country. In open adoption, the biological parents can stay in contact with the child and adoptive parents. In closed adoption, the records are sealed, and the biological parents have no contact with the child.

Despite its benefits, adoption can also present challenges. Adopted children may struggle with feelings of loss or questions about their identity. Adoptive parents may face difficulties in bonding with the child or addressing the child’s emotional needs. It’s important for adoptive families to seek support and guidance to navigate these challenges.

Adoption is a special journey that brings families together. It’s a process that requires patience, understanding, and love. While it can present challenges, the rewards of providing a child with a loving home are immeasurable. Adoption is a testament to the fact that family is not just about blood relations, but also about love, respect, and care.

In conclusion, adoption is a beautiful process that can bring immense happiness to both the child and the adoptive parents. It is a life-changing decision that should be made with great care and consideration. The joy of giving a child a loving home and a bright future is truly priceless.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Think you can get into a top-10 school? Take our chance-me calculator... if you dare. 🔥

Last updated June 15, 2023

Every piece we write is researched and vetted by a former admissions officer. Read about our mission to pull back the admissions curtain.

Blog > Essay Advice , Personal Statement > 3 Ways to Approach College Essays About Adoption

3 Ways to Approach College Essays About Adoption

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University Admissions

Key Takeaway

If you’re adopted, you might be wondering whether you can write your college essay about your experiences as an adoptee.

The answer is simple: absolutely! College essays about adoption aren’t overly common. And because the topic tends to be such a personal one, you don’t have to worry too much about being cliche or general. Reflecting meaningfully on your own experiences is enough.

In this post, we’ll go over three strategies for writing your college essay about adoption, and we’ll talk about two mistakes to avoid.

The first way to approach your college essay about adoption is to focus on the theme of identity. In general, topics related to identity tend to lead to outstanding college essays because they’re inherently personal and vulnerable—two foundational traits of a personal statement . Adoption essays are no different.

When writing about adoption and identity, applicants tend to focus on their identity prior to and after being adopted. For some, a personal statement might detail the journey of reconciling their identity at birth with their identity in their adopted family. For others, it might center on an identity they’ve held all along.

Whatever your story is, you can be authentic in how you present your journey with your identity.

Biology or Psychology

You could also take a more academic approach to your personal statement by exploring your adoption through a biological or psychological framework. This approach may work especially well if you want to go into either field.

Exploring your adoption through a biological or psychological lens might look like an investigation into your own experience of nature versus nurture. Where do you see similarities between you and your adoptive family? Do you have any traits you think are genetic?

With this approach, you can show a keen academic interest in a subject while also exploring your own background and identity.

If you were adopted into a family whose culture differs from that of your birth family, then you might choose to write about your identity through the lens of culture.

The majority of applicants who take this approach write about their journey reconnecting with their birth culture. Others write about what it was like to adapt to a new culture when they were adopted. And others yet discuss the feeling of being in between cultures.

No matter what your own experience has been, you can write a strong essay by reflecting on how your cultures have shaped who you are today.

Two Mistakes to Avoid

While you don’t have to think too much about avoiding cliches, there are two common mistakes to be on the lookout for as you’re writing and revising your personal statement.

Focusing too much on negative or difficult emotions

Adoption can be a challenging subject to write about under any circumstances. In a college essay, it can be especially difficult because the stakes are high and you’re writing for an audience of faceless admissions officers.

While you may have heard that you need a “sob story” to get into college, the truth is that college essays are most successful when they don’t dwell on the negative. That’s not to say that you can’t write about anything difficult that you’ve faced. But you want your admissions officers to have positive emotions when they think back on your file, so your essay should ultimately resolve with some kind of light, hope, or positivity.

Telling a story that is about your adoption, not you

As we’ve already covered, adoption is a solid topic for a college essay. But you don’t want your college essay to be only about your adoption. It should, in the end, be about you .

Whatever you reveal to your admissions officers through your adoption story should serve two purposes: 1) to give insight into who you are, and 2) to reveal something about your core strengths. (If you want to know more about either of those purposes, hop on over to our guide to college essays .)

So don’t simply detail your adoption or focus only on the aspects that have been positive or negative for you. Write about them only for the purpose of telling admissions officers something about yourself.

The bottom line

If you feel so inclined, go ahead and write your college essay about being adopted. You might approach the topic through the lens of identity, biology, culture, or something uniquely your own. Whatever approach you take, make sure to keep the focus on you, not your adoption, and to conclude your essay on a positive note.

Looking for inspiration? Check out our college essay examples . We have a bunch—and they’re all graded and annotated by former admissions officers.

Liked that? Try this next.

How A Selective Admissions Office Reads 50k Applications In A Season

How to Write a College Essay (Exercises + Examples)

How to Write Supplemental Essays that Will Impress Admissions Officers

21 College Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

"the only actually useful chance calculator i’ve seen—plus a crash course on the application review process.".

Irena Smith, Former Stanford Admissions Officer

We built the best admissions chancer in the world . How is it the best? It draws from our experience in top-10 admissions offices to show you how selective admissions actually works.

College Essay: Identity in Adoption

“Where are you from?” is a  common icebreaker that I’ve struggled with my entire life. I was born in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, and was adopted and raised in Blaine, Minnesota. For some people this question is easier to answer than others. However, I am from two places and find difficulty in choosing a side. It wasn’t until ninth grade that I stopped thinking I had to choose between the United States and Guatemala.  

Growing up  I  attempted to fit in with my classmates; I began rejecting learning Spanish, and started to stereotype the language and the people. In fourth grade my family sent me to  a cultural immersion camp, La Semana, so I could learn more about my culture and language. Despite going to the camp and being surrounded by people who wanted to learn about their culture, I continued to renounce my heritage and tried to assimilate with what I assumed Americans were supposed to be. 

My perception of what an American girl was included activities like cheerleading, dancing and jumping rope. Since I never participated in those activities, it made me feel like I was an outsider to my classmates. I believed there was something wrong with me and thought I wasn’t “American” enough. At school, I had trouble fitting in with most of my friends because I didn’t look like them. On the other hand, there were times when I felt like I didn’t belong among other Hispanic people, especially when I was with the group of kids at my church. They unintentionally made me feel embarrassed because I could  not speak Spanish fluently and wasn’t able to comprehend people speaking it. 

In school there were a few times when my friends would start speaking about their cultures and I wasn’t able to contribute since I was confused about my own cultural identity. One of my friends from Bulgaria made me feel jealous because she had the ability to learn her native language and dances. She even went on yearly visits to Bulgaria. 

I haven’t returned to Guatemala since my adoption. However, looking back, going to La Semana and finding community with other adopted people makes me want to learn more about “home.” It also makes me wonder about things like my birth mother, birth family, or even what happened to my foster parent. Despite not wanting to immerse myself in Guatemalan tradition at the beginning, something started to bloom in me and spark my desire to let myself accept my heritage.                   

It is something I continue to struggle with. Recently, I have begun applying myself in Spanish class. Growing up, it was embarrassing to look Hispanic and not speak the language. The embarrassment from not speaking Spanish created more shame about my culture.  A moment that was defining for me was when I looked around and saw how many people also had multicultural backgrounds. I still have a long way to go but I am beginning to see that I can be Guatemalan-American and don’t have to choose one culture to live with.

I know I want to go into a social science field in college, specifically anthropology. My own experience with accepting my background and traditions would help me with analyzing past human culture and help me have an easier time with acceptance of their cultures. College will help me understand how I fit in the world while learning more about different cultures. It would help me form an idea on what I want to do with my future as I am exposed to new topics and ideas. College would be a rewarding experience since my birth mother gave me up so I could have opportunities she never had, including college.

© 2024 ThreeSixty Journalism • Login

ThreeSixty Journalism,

a nonprofit program of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, uses the principles of strong writing and reporting to help diverse Minnesota youth tell the stories of their lives and communities.

Fiona, age three, with her adoptive grandparents. All images supplied by and © the author

The adoption paradox

Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child.

by Fiona Sampson   + BIO

A child of four or five sits colouring at a low table. Memory can be tricky: the image is dim and rather unstable. But I know that the child is me, and that she’s been caught showing off by her grandmother, who is looking after her. (Where are the parents? I don’t know.)

‘I’m going to show my mummy and daddy,’ says the little girl, about her picture.

‘They’re not your mummy and daddy,’ says the old woman on the sofa, witchily. ‘You have a real mummy and daddy somewhere else.’

The child I remember doesn’t show her face; she keeps on colouring. But words have magic powers. Real… somewhere else. This single sentence sucks the reality out of everything around her: the red carpet, the blue Formica tabletop, the buttoned upholstery of the sofa on which her grandmother sits watching her.

The author, aged two and a half

You could call it a life sentence , for this is the moment in which I learn that I am adopted.

I will repress this memory for decades, and for all the usual reasons. Like every child, I want to be happy. Still, what makes adoption so through-the-mirror, so literally unheimlich, so ‘un-homing’, has nothing to do with unhappy families or childhood abuse. Indeed, I suspect the reason that comparatively few stories of adoptee experience make it to the mainstream is that this is not classic misery memoir territory. Instead, at its heart are existential questions of identity, about the foundations of the self.

C hildren who are adopted must ask themselves ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What does it mean to be me?’: generally when they’re still too young to manage this kind of world-shifting thought experiment. And they can never put the experiment aside. This shifty, shifting interplay of alternative narratives is who they are.

Perhaps inevitably, my grandmother’s revelation is followed by a scene in the bathroom – maybe that evening, maybe days later – when my child self, having listened to my mother tell some apparently irrelevant story about how babies grow in tummies, insists in tears: ‘But I am still really your little girl, aren’t I?’ Searching around, as I will for years to come, for some kind of inalienability. This I do remember: the bathroom mirror, the cold light.

But of course, there is no inalienability anywhere in the adoption triangle. Adoption is precisely predicated upon alienability. Within it, everything – name, home, belonging, life chances – can be negotiated. Which means everything can also be negotiated away. Adoption goes deeper even than those inalienable – intrinsic – rights that we hold to be part of, and help us to define, the human individual: self-determination, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and so on. Adoption says that not even the individual’s identity is intrinsic. Not even, to put it another way, their individuality itself.

‘Normal’ family life – kids growing up in birth families of whatever form – is scarily circumstantial

For the child, this total alienability means there’s nothing intrinsic to herself that guarantees her connection to anyone. What has been chosen can be unchosen. The existential lack of givenness with which adoptees live is why, for us, adoptive ‘parents’ who return ‘their’ kids to the system when the going gets tough are more than stories about abuse, they have a kind of abysmal horror. We don’t just read them with sympathy, they ‘take us apart’.

Still, some biological parents do abandon their kids, or are forced to hand them over to authorities of various kinds, or prevented by destitution or illness from being able to raise them. Some die. Their babies get kidnapped by regimes, ‘charities’, people smugglers. Viewed this way, ‘normal’ family life – kids growing up in birth families of whatever form: step-, half-, single-parent, gay, IVF, grandparental – is scarily circumstantial. Plus, even within bio families, no one reposes entirely within the bosom of inalienability. Divorces lead to custody battles; adult siblings drift apart; parents offer addict offspring tough love.

But we don’t really want to think about this. It’s already difficult enough working out who you are, paying the bills, and just generally hustling a living. Having something to count on through thick and thin – a touchstone of something absolute, perhaps, even within the most secular of lives – is as attractive as ever. The political rhetoric of ‘hardworking families’ – invoked by all major political parties around the world – reaches across the ideological spectrum. Though it’s the Right, of course, that crosses its fingers hardest against those it sees as lacking the social status of a nuclear family, with habitual targets including single mothers and the LGBTQ+ community.

A doptees lack that social status too. Which leads me to ask again why, that summer afternoon in our house on a suburban street in south-west England, my grandmother chose to poke at the story of my adoption. From family diaries I’ve inherited, I know how much she had been against the idea in the first place. Still, in those days before IVF, there was no other ‘solution’ to childlessness. Every week of my childhood we prayed in church for ‘the barren woman’, and as I got older and understood what this meant, I became embarrassed for my mum. But perhaps my grandmother, if not consciously, blamed my father instead. I began to notice how neither of my adoptive parents got on well with their in-laws. My father’s side thought my mother nervy and pretentious, while my mother’s family found my father, son of a country vicar, too down to earth. ‘The rectory kitchen had an earth floor ,’ my mother hissed once in explanation.

The author, age five, in the garden of her grandfather’s house

Where was I in this? Since I was problematic, I think each side identified me with the ‘other’. Until puberty, I was a daddy’s girl; certainly, at four or five, I was already bookish like him. Family memory has my (dyslexic) mother tearing a newspaper out of my hands when I’m two years old.

Perhaps my grandmother thought of the pair of us as a kind of trouble her daughter had got into. Or perhaps she was indulging in magical thinking. The lurking alienability of the closest human bonds is frightening, after all. And adoption, being founded upon this risk, reminds society about it at the same time as denying it, through pretending that its own remedial process is a problem-busting happy ending.

In truth, it can only ever be a happi er ending. Of course, every kid who escapes institutional care to grow up in a loving adoptive family has a happier ending – and middle, and almost-beginning – than would otherwise be the case. And even though it’s undoubtedly harder to love someone else’s biological child than your own – why else would stepmothers have such a wicked reputation in folk wisdom? – there are innumerable such families, such kids. But to say this is as good as family bonds that never fractured in the first place is to confuse the contingent with an absolute good. Like claiming that fantastic orthopaedic surgery after a major accident is as good as never having had the accident in the first place.

The social pressure to be grateful prevents the sheer effort of being an adoptee from being talked about

The new adoptive family, forming like a scar, is built on loss and breakage. It has to try and heal each corner of its triad: biological parents who have lost (or chosen to lose) their kids, adoptive parents who are often dealing with infertility and the loss of the dream of ‘kids of their own’, and an adoptee who will grow up without the restful privilege of a family that is ‘their own’.

Over the years, I’ve come to think that my grandmother was also poking me. My childish psyche, tentacled like a sea anemone, would shut if she hurt it enough. It did shut. And she was compelled to make it do so because I was a stranger in the family. The cuckoo in the nest , a phrase I got to know well. Both a stranger: and so anomalously strange that I would eventually pass more and better exams than any of her four biological grandchildren.

An official photo sent by the (then) prospective adopters back to the agency within three days of the child’s arrival. Note the shaved head

Still, I had to strive to do so and, as that striving suggests, in my experience living in adoption means living with anxiety. I believe the social pressure on us to be grateful prevents the sheer effort of being an adoptee from being talked about. There’s a lot of negative expectation, talk of bad blood , around what’s going to emerge from the default cuteness of being a child. Not that I was a cute kid. My adoptive mother’s strategy was to keep me always slightly undernourished and overstretched, continually slightly unwell, in order to underline her charity in taking on a child whose background could be assumed to be, at best, what she called ‘common’.

But many adoptees I’ve known are, or were, cute. They strove as hard to sparkle as I did to be good: obedient and hardworking, I was desperate to please. Every attempt to be loveable is an attempt to be seductive. I have a theory, based only on personal experience of what happened to several of my contemporaries, that adopted kids are extra vulnerable to grooming. Cases that made the national news, scandals known only to classmates: perhaps I was lucky to be kept plain and awkward. I can’t forget the ones who dropped out, who killed themselves.

So much innocent striving. It came from being a source of anxiety in our adoptive families. Would the taint show in some way? Would we be naughty, or dishonest, or – particularly for girls when I was growing up – promiscuous? The reverse too: what unexpected talents, skills, strengths might emerge from our profound unknown-ness as an unrelated child? As I grew through childhood, for example, I took to books like a duck to water. But I was also inevitably clumsier than the adults I lived with. This natural developmental stage became parsed as an attribute – poor coordination – into which I accordingly grew: children are very amenable. I suspect adoptive children take on particular family roles even more than other kids: the good one, the bad one, the brainy stupid sporty pretty blond dark funny one… The result in my case was to make all of us in that house feel I was like an unexploded bomb. The cut glass on the sideboard, the best china stacked within it, seemed to shudder as I passed, and I shuddered too. I was afraid that, even without touching, I would somehow knock or chip or crack something.

B eing an adoptee is performative. Some words for this are: being good enough, assimilating, fighting for acceptance, not being but being- as . For me it meant, among other things, never being allowed to go out of the house with teenaged friends. Adoption is arduous for everyone, even when it works. So I find the social media trend for videos of adopters and adoptees meeting for the first time incomprehensible. It’s not just that it’s voyeuristic: it’s that those posting and viewing them seem unable to see what’s there in plain sight.

Today, many domestic adoptions, in the UK at least, are open. The child they’re built around knows where she came from. The adoptive family may even stay in touch with her birth family during her childhood. But when I was a baby, most adoptions were not only retroactively ‘closed’ but conducted ‘blind’, with no choosing each other. Indeed, no meeting at all prior to the child being handed over for life. This was understood not to matter because the child was seen as completely interchangeable – apart, perhaps, from its sex. The baby as tabula rasa for the adopters to ‘make their own’. Will this idea return, as more accidental babies come up for adoption following the striking down of Roe v Wade in the United States, and a more general shift in the Global North away from prioritising women’s rights?

Whatever happens next, international adoption – where allowed – continues to be ‘blind’. And at the end of all the fees and paperwork, two or three unrelated people, small and big, meet each other. Videos that parade this meeting are usually labelled #happymoment: which I imagine is in the nature of a Users’ Guide, because they quite plainly are not. They make everything that’s difficult about adoption visible, starting with the control exercised by the adoption agency. A stunned, often weeping child is led, like the bride in a forced marriage, into the presence of strangers with whom the child must spend the rest of her life. The adoptive parents’ emotions are visible too: this is the apotheosis of years of longing. (If they’re disappointed, they certainly can’t show it now.) This small person must now sustain their big longing. The new parents generally offer some small cheap toy to draw her forward into the ambush of an embrace . (Don’t take treats from strangers, kids!) And the tackiness of these greeting gifts seems to sum up the contingency of adoption, its underlying Oh, this will do ethos.

It was less than a week before Christmas. If I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution

I wasn’t adopted as an ambulatory child, thank goodness, but after a few months of being passed between foster mothers. Nevertheless, I know quite a lot about my own #happymoment. (I almost prefer the crudeness of the alternative, #gotchaday – also, of course, used for pets and rescue animals – with its implied compulsion.) From my biological mother, whom I traced years ago, I know how an agency worker took me from her, carried me through a nearby door – and that my adoptive parents were right on the other side. She heard my adoptive mother laugh – a laugh I know intimately of course. I know too that in the long taxi journey across London to the agency in Fitzrovia, my bio mother apologised to me and had a little cry.

I know the bleached London brick of those windy Fitzrovia terraces.

I know from my adoptive dad’s diary that we nearly didn’t turn up. We arrived for the handover 50 minutes late, leaving my new parents just 10 minutes to interact with me at the agency before they took me away. Checks, balances?

I don’t know how much I was priced at, but I do know that my grandmother told my mother they could have paid more and got a younger baby. I know from my case file that it was less than a week before Christmas and that, if I wasn’t placed before the holiday, I was to be put into an institution. My file also tells me I was hard to place because I was a girl. And also because someone has noted on the file that my biological mother is plain and I resemble her.

I know from my adoptive mother that, less than an hour later, I was throwing up on her on the train, and so my dad asked people in the compartment to stop smoking. Since she was widowed, she’s kept returning to this story. It’s as if, like her own mother, she associates me with my father. In the same vein, it’s she who recently brought back my memory of the primal scene with her mother. I had remembered the terror of ‘But I am still really your little girl, aren’t I?’ but forgotten its cause. The search for reassurance was a screen memory; behind it was the abyss of disconnection.

T here are a hundred ways to tell a child she’s adopted: adoption is not culture specific. There have always been orphans and foundlings, and people wishing to take them into their families. Sources as varied as the 6th- to 5th-century BCE story of Moses, or the accounts of apprentice-adoptions of gifted child artists in Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century Lives of the Artists , tell us this. Yet adoption is laden with cultural meanings, and not, usually, by adoptees themselves. How strange it is, for example, that even with our era’s embrace of essential identities – through identity politics, in gender transitioning – adoption remains an exception, held to define an individual regardless of their own experience and understanding of themselves.

Even the happiest of families cannot completely resolve the difficulty that adoption is necessarily about de-essentialisation, a destabilising of identity, which almost compels some kind of remedial stabilisation. Adoptee views and experiences of this central ‘knot’ vary hugely. For some, their adoptive identity and the life they lead with it is ‘real’ and the rest almost fabular. For others, nature trumps nurture. Still others feel that a range of inherited and learnt characteristics coexist within them. But whatever their personal take on identity, their legal standing will not flex with it. An adoptee may wish to acknowledge their birth identity, but legal processes such as citizenship accept only documentation, not DNA testing, as evidence of identity. Or they may wish to deny that part of their identity altogether, and fix themselves more fully in their adoptive family. Just as gender transitioning is understood to cancel out someone’s first-given identity, so the neither-nor of adoptive identity can feel like a lie that needs cancelling out. Yet this too is unachievable. There is no legal form that can further undo the residue of biological embodiment at the heart of the adoption experience. And no adoptee can transition to biological belonging: familial relatedness would require a total genetic rewrite.

Consciousness of adoption is surely the original impostor syndrome

However happy an adoption, birth identity remains. It is Thomas Hardy’s ‘Heredity’, ‘the family face’ that will ‘live on, /Projecting trait and trace/ … And leaping from place to place’ in the poem the British writer published in 1917. Or else it’s a question in medical histories. Or it’s something that rises to the surface, an old scar now, at such moments of family pressure as marriage or inheritance.

Whatever an adoptee’s beliefs, in other words, a duality, a kind of astigmatism of the self, remains part of their experience. Perhaps it helps to see this a little aslant. In the canonical French novelist George Sand’s memoir Histoire de ma Vie (1855), she addresses having been (mis-)informed that she was ‘really’ an earlier, older child than herself, who had been born to her parents before they married and was therefore omitted from the records:

It’s no more than two or three years that I’ve known positively who I am. I was indeed born [as registered]; I am truly – myself – in a word, which doesn’t stop pleasing me, for there’s something troubling about doubting one’s name, one’s age and one’s country … I could have died without knowing whether I had lived – in person – or in someone else’s place. [Author’s translation]

‘In someone else’s place’: consciousness of adoption is surely the original impostor syndrome. To which someone who hasn’t experienced it might respond: ‘But never mind what you’re called : core identity is being the one who experiences and does what you do.’ Well then: but what if this duality, this slippage between two stories about yourself, forms part of that experience? Your identity must then contain that plurality. Like the dragon eating its tail on a Romanesque capital, identity as awareness gives ceaselessly onto awareness of identity.

Adoption is a kind of forcing ground of these forms of identity experiment. I suspect that the more widely it is recognised as such, the more adoptees will find the cultural space to be respected simply as ordinary people who have lived through particular early circumstances. Circumstances that don’t trouble most people, but that throw up problems and fears – about who we are, how we love and where we are safe – in which we all share.

Nature and landscape

Laughing shores

Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination

Giordano Lipari

Virtues and vices

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful. Psychiatry must embrace new meaning-making frameworks

Justin Garson

Neuroscience

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures

Clayton Page Aldern

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

Sex and sexuality

Sexual sensation

What makes touch on some parts of the body erotic but not others? Cutting-edge biologists are arriving at new answers

David J Linden

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Adoption — Adoption: A Pathway to Family and Belonging

Adoption: a Pathway to Family and Belonging

• Categories: Adoption International Adoption

About this sample

Words: 575 |

Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 575 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, the benefits of adoption, challenges in the adoption process, societal attitudes towards adoption.

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

• Expert in: Life

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 833 words

2 pages / 834 words

4 pages / 1661 words

3 pages / 1353 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Adoption

The concept of adoption holds profound significance as it provides a pathway to stable and loving homes for children in need. This essay explores the multifaceted benefits of adoption, not only for the children being adopted but [...]

Same-sex adoption is a highly debated and controversial topic that has been gaining attention in recent years. With the increasing acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriage in many countries, the issue of same-sex couples [...]

The question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children has been a contentious and emotionally charged issue for many years. Advocates argue that love and stability are the most important factors in [...]

Good morning/afternoon/evening, everyone. Today, I stand before you to deliver a persuasive speech on the importance of adopting animals. Animals play a crucial role in our lives, and it is our responsibility to ensure their [...]

Should children of color have to spend the most vulnerable years of their life in foster care or orphanages simply because a family of their race is unavailable? What if a family of a different race could adopt these children? [...]

Immigration in the USA between 1941 and 1980 went through immense change. Following the years of 1917, 1921 and 1924 the open door that immigrants saw as a beacon of light to their newfound freedom was shut to many; the [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Life

Essay Samples on Adoption

The curious case of natalia grace: the ongoing debate.

In 2009, Kristine and Michael Barnett adopted a 6-year-old girl from Ukraine named Natalia Grace. She had dwarfism and was initially thought to be around 8 years old when adopted. However, soon after the adoption, the Barnetts began to suspect that Natalia was older than...

What is Better: Buying Pets or Adoption

The decision to bring a pet into one's life is a significant and rewarding choice. However, when considering the acquisition of a furry companion, the question arises: what is better buying pets or adoption? This essay explores the pros and cons of both options, delving...

Pet Adoption: the Vital Importance of Research Before Making a Choice

Research before adopting a pet is sometimes something that is overlooked. This small step is an easy way to minimize future problems that could arise. Making sure the pet is safe, comfortable, and happy should be an owner’s primary concern. Failure to do research can...

My Adoption Story: What's Life Like as an Adopted Child

My adoption story is the topic that I have chosen to base my essay as well as to reveal what is adoption in general. Taking the time to reflect on the life I’ve had so far makes me wonder how other individuals have experienced the...

• About Myself
• Personal Experience

Reflection on International Adoption as Possible Solution for Orphans

International adoption, a process where children from one country are adopted by families residing in another, has long been a subject of global attention and controversy. While the concept of offering a loving home to a child in need transcends borders, the practice of international...

• Child Protection

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

• 100% unique papers
• 3 hrs deadline option

An Analysis Of The Language's Role In Defining Deming’s Identity

Abstract The Leavers, a novel by American writer Lisa Ko tells the story of a Chinese boy who at the age of five was left by his mother and then adopted by an American couple. The issue of identity and its duality seems to be...

• Individual Identity
• Language Diversity

Impacts of Adoption and Factors to Consider During Adoption

Adoption is fairly common, talked about topic in today’s society. With an estimate of over 437,000 children in the United States who were in foster care during the year of 2016. It has long been a solution for children and infants who find themselves without...

The Benefits and Immediate Need for Adoption

Imagine this scenario: You are in a bar with some best friends. Everybody is drinking, laughing, and enjoying themselves. After several rounds of drinks, you tell your friends you will drive home, and they don’t stop you. You grab your keys, shakely attempt to put...

• Family Values

The Question of Normal and Acceptance in Adoption

There are 20,000 adoptions from Russia yearly and over 1.6 million from the world a year, coming from an adoptive child myself from Russia, I Believe strongly in adoption and believe that it is hard to adopt children in this day and age. It is...

Pet Adoption Awareness as Enchancment of Human Wellbeing

Maple, an eleven-year-old dog who has never had a person to love her, sits in a cage each day waiting to be adopted. Each day Maple fears of being euthanized. Maple has many health problems due to her tragic past as a puppy mill mom....

Birth Mother's Choice of Child Adoption vs. Abortion

This overall question gives many people hope of what can be, while others consider it a nightmare. Both are a choice that affects the child and the mother. Child adoption is better than abortion because it is safer, less stressful, and sometimes easier on the...

Adoption of Innovation in Agriculture in Cameroon

In Cameroon, agriculture is vital in achieving the sustainable development goals of alleviating poverty and improving food security by ensuring zero hunger. Agriculture in Cameroon contributes 22.16% to gross domestic product and employs about 45% of the active population (Institute Nationale de Statistique 2016). In...

• Food Security

Ethnic Adoption: Lack of Privilege and Wellbeing Analysis

Living in a country in the western part of Africa, for over 12 years, has had its impact on my personality and the way I view the world. In Nigeria, 50% of the citizens live in poverty (Yomi Kazeem), and at least a third of...

• African American

Best topics on Adoption

1. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: the Ongoing Debate

2. What is Better: Buying Pets or Adoption

3. Pet Adoption: the Vital Importance of Research Before Making a Choice

4. My Adoption Story: What’s Life Like as an Adopted Child

5. Reflection on International Adoption as Possible Solution for Orphans

6. An Analysis Of The Language’s Role In Defining Deming’s Identity

7. Impacts of Adoption and Factors to Consider During Adoption

8. The Benefits and Immediate Need for Adoption

9. The Question of Normal and Acceptance in Adoption

10. Pet Adoption Awareness as Enchancment of Human Wellbeing

11. Birth Mother’s Choice of Child Adoption vs. Abortion

12. Adoption of Innovation in Agriculture in Cameroon

13. Ethnic Adoption: Lack of Privilege and Wellbeing Analysis

• Personality
• Career Goals

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Adoption - Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting role for another and, in doing so, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents. Essays could explore the different types of adoption, the legal and social processes involved, the psychological and emotional impacts on all parties involved, and the societal attitudes towards adoption. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Adoption you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Abortion and Adoption

Abortion is not as simple as walking into a medical office and having the procedure performed. Although Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the United States in 1973 women often have to deal with judgment from others including not only protestors but significant others and family members, choosing between abortion and adoption, emotional stress possibly from the reason they are needing an abortion, physical complications, as well as state governments trying to take away their right to have an […]

How to Encourage Mass Cryptocurrency Adoption?

While more and more businesses accept cryptocurrency every day, there are still barriers to mass adoption of decentralized digital currency. Some of the very same things that carry the technology's greatest strengths also stand as a barrier to wider adoption. However, there are things we can all do in the short term to encourage participation, and there are also things the industry must do moving forward for long-term success. We're going to take a look at both. What can we […]

Let’s Talk about my Abortion Article

Why is something that requires two people, almost always considered the woman's problem? Every answer to this question is different, more aggressive in some cases, but it narrows down to basic human rights. Now you may be asking "What the hell is she talking about?" and I can assure you, we will get to that. I'd like for you to first put yourself in a situation: You're given a puppy, yet you're allergic to dogs and absolutely do not have […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Adoption and Birth Certificate

“Adoption is the act of establishing a person as parent who is not in fact or in law his child” according to the Encyclopedia of Britannica. The first legal adoption in the United States was allowed in the year 1851 (Williams 14). In the the 1900’s society had looked down apon those who had a child out of wedlock, so closed adoption records were a way to protect the privacy of all involved but by the 1970’s people began to […]

Adoption in the United States

Adoption in the United States is not uncommon at all. But if you are looking to adopt, why limit your options to the U.S. When there's a whole world of children out there in desperate need of caretakers. If you choose to adopt you should adopt internationally. You should adopt internationally because you help a child by taking them away from a pace with possible minimal healthcare, you will get the child faster because in the U.S. there's always difficulty […]

Abortion: Post Psychological Effects

The termination of pregnancy also known as abortion, is a procedure where a pregnancy has to come to an end. It is mostly decided when a women no longer wants the baby or cannot have it for a certain reason. The individual should not feel lonely because there are millions of other women that get the same procedure. Although nobody ever talks about the aftermath of it and what a women goes through. Abortion is a heated topic in todays […]

What is Adoption?

Imagine being a child and wondering why your parents look different than you. He or she begins to ask questions like why they have brown eyes and there are blue. The child might ponder on why their brothers and sisters have certain qualities that they themselves doesn’t have. The parents might be skeptical to explain to the child why they are so different. Do you know what the real meaning of adoption is? Adoption is a process where by a […]

Even Though Adoption

All around the world there are families who want to open their home to a child in need. Some of these children have been mistreated and abused. Others were given up by their parents at birth. No matter the circumstances, however, these children deserve a loving family. Standing in the way of the children and their new family is one long processadoption. Even though there are both negative and positive factors involved in adopting, a new and better life for […]

Debunking the Stigma Aroung Children in the Foster System

Adoption is a viable option for parents who are not able to raise their children themselves. It also gives many young couples the opportunity to have and raise a child that they might not otherwise be able to have. Many adoption cases are success stories, and America’s adoption system has much to recommend it; however, America’s adoption and foster system is also rife with controversies and problems; new solutions to those problems need to be explored. The topic of this […]

Adoption Benefits for Adoptive Parents

Adoption; when hear the word adoption, what comes to mind when you hear it. Some people think adoption is a good thing; others see it as bad. The way I see adoption, I see it as giving a child a better future. To better understand what adoption truly means, this essay will help paint a clearer picture and create a different viewpoint on how you see adoption. Adoption is defined as the action or fact of legally taking another's child […]

The Effects of Transracial Adoption

The controversy surrounding transracial adoption certainly suggests that as a society, Americans are deeply ambivalent about racial distinctions in the family household. Specifically, transracial adoption has been defined as “the joining of racially different parents with children together in adoptive families” (Smith, Juarez, & Jacobson, 2011). This issue continues to cause much debate between those who view transracial adoption as a positive experience for both the children and society as a whole and the opponents who believe that the process […]

To Choose or not to Choose

Abortion can be a very disputed topic among many different groups of people. However the question comes down to , should all women be allowed to choose or should all abortions no matter the circumstances be considered murder? No matter what, it is believed that the baby should always have a fair opportunity at a life of their own however certain circumstances come down to abortion being the best option not only for the mother but the baby as well. […]

Functionalism Theory in Adoption and Types of Adoption

Sociological imagination is the nature of mind that enables one to comprehend "history and life story and the relations between the two-inside society". It enables one to change starting with one point of view then onto the next considering an exhaustive perspective on the "socio-social framework". Adoption is the social, enthusiastic, and legitimate procedure in which youngsters who won't be raised by their introduction to the world guardians turn out to be full and perpetual lawful individuals from another family while […]

The Dark Side of Adoption: Mental Health in Adoptees

To an outsider, the idea of adoption may seem as a very fruitful endeavor – the birth family gets spared of the financial and time-consuming burden that can come with having another child while the said adoptee gets placed into a more stable environment, with a family who can provide for them in ways the birth family cannot. While on paper this ideology might ring with a perfect tune, to those who have lived as adoptees know the tone to […]

Guatemala: International Adoption and Child Protection Policies

The selection of the country in the Global South that will be the focus of this research paper is Guatemala. Guatemala is a country that has been independent since 1821 (Dolor, L, 2008). Over the past few centuries, this country has endured many hardships. In 2008, A major policy was implemented throughout the country that impacted many. This Policy is on Guatemala’s International Adoptions and the laws of child protection throughout the country (Dolor, L, 2008). The implementation of this […]

The Precaution Adoption Process Model

If someone was faced with a health problem, how prepared would they be to resolve it? Would they have the knowledge to act in times of a crisis? The Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) was developed to explain how a person makes decisions to take action and how he or she relates that decision into action (Sandman, Weinstein, & Blalock, 2001); it can be utilized to help people take part in health protective behaviors and move through its seven stages: […]

Pecularities of Foster Care System

Foster Care is a system in which a minor is being put into a group home, or private home of a state-certified caregiver, referred to as a "foster parent" or with a family member approved by the state. Instead of being safely returned with their families or moved quickly into adoptive homes many will be forced to remain or bounce around different foster homes or institutions for years. Frequent moves in and out of the homes of strangers can be […]

International Adoptions

Adoption from foreign countries, also known as international adoption, is continually growing in drastic demand. The process is one that is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated, but the final product is worth the while because the child is taken in by a family who will care for them. The process is most commonly regarded as being worth the resources and effort for both family and child. The other side believes that international adoptions open the door for the endangerment of the […]

Thinking about the Importance of Adoption

“Adoption Statistics” page found on the adoption network center website stated, “Around 140,000 children are adopted by American families each year”. Adoption is becoming more widely accepted as a mode of creating a family, or bring a child in to someone’s life as seen by the statistic above there are numerous children who get to experience this life changing, and life bettering event every year. Adoption is more than just giving a child in need a home. Adopting a child […]

LGBT Adoption Rights

The LGBT community in America has come a long way in recent years. In June of 2015, President Barack Obama announced to the public that The United States Supreme Court struck down all state laws banning same-sex marriage. A similar law was passed that prohibited businesses from discriminating against potential or current employees due to their sexual or romantic orientation. It was a huge step forward for the LGBT community. More americans were able to express their true selves, without […]

About Adoption and Foster Care

Growing up in an orphanage can be extremely detrimental to a child’s well-being. Studies show that children adopted from overseas orphanages revealed developmental delays in 50 to 90 percent at initial evaluation with a significant proportion in multiple areas such as language and motor skills. The longer the individuals spend in an orphanage the greater degree of delay. One study shows that 55 percent of children upon first evaluation exhibited abnormal behaviors, this number dropped to 36 percent just one-year […]

How has History Changed to Make LGBTQ more Accepted

How has history changed to make people with in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender community (LGBT) more accepted. In the past few years people with in the LGNT community have been more accepted than they have ever been. Most people with in the community still must fight for equal rights, but they also have been able to have more equal rights than ever before. People with in the LGBT community have overcome so much. They have overcome bulling, harassment, and […]

Intercountry Adoption (Ica), Adoption of a Child of Another Country

Introduction Natural disasters, war, and many other factors contribute to the number of children left without a family or home. Intercountry adoption (ICA), adoption of a child of another country, began gaining attention during Colonial Times all the way up to WWII as Americans took in homeless children after the war (Brumble and Kampfe 2011). Transracial adoption (TRA) rose after Americans began adopting Korean children after the Korean War ended in 1953 (Brumble and Kampfe 2011). Transracial adoption is the […]

Interracial Adoptions

Interracial adoptions have been all the rage for a while with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron that have publically shown their affinity for adopting outside their race. Adoption is not as simple as many people perceive it as. Interracial adoption is a whole other side of it, although thoughtful and with well intentions, it can breed its own issues. Adopting a child outside of one’s race will leave a cultural barrier between the parent(s) and child (American Adoptions, […]

Foster Children and Adoption

Introduction A review of the literature reveals academic achievement success and failure rates within the foster care population have been studied; as have social behaviors in this particular population. In addition, literature review also reveals a narrow or short research history on the idea of sports impacting foster children’s return to normalcy. This literature review will provide a brief history of youth in foster care, highlight recent milestones in research, briefly summarize research of this population, and point to sports […]

Topic: Child Fostering/Adoption

Purpose: To persuade and inspire people into planning to adopt and/or foster a child as the shortage of foster homes/ parents continue to grow and children placed on care is increasing. Thesis: All children deserve to grow up with love and the right to build a relationship of a family with stability and not be living from house to house within a foster care system. Would you agree that we all have certain phrases that we cannot anxiously wait to hear […]

The Partisanship of Persuasion

Nelson Mandela once stated that, “History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children”(Nepaul). In the U.S., an estimated 107,918 children in foster care are available for adoption and 2 million LGBT are interested in adopting; however, discrimination- driven people are attempting to prohibit this process (“LGBT Adoption Statistics”). Although some people believe that gay-adoption should be prohibited, same-sex couples should have the right to adoption without narrow-minded biases getting in the way. In […]

Adoption is at the Core Center of Islam Essay

Introduction The word ‘orphan’ is mentioned 23 times in the Quran, in 12 different surahs in 12 distinct ways. The most famous orphan known in the Islamic culture, is the prophet himself, peace be upon him. His father died before his birth and he lost both his mother and his grandfather by the time he was only eight years old. Leaving his uncle, Abu Talib, to take care of him, protect him and raised him until his own death. As […]

Adoption in America

Adoption, the legal action of taking another person’s child and bringing them up as one's own. Commonly adoption has touched a lot of individuals lives, including myself and my families. According to adoption network website, 135,000 children are adopted in the United States each year. Each child that is adopted goes through a lengthy legal process whether they are being adopted out of foster care, directly from the birth parents, or through their legal guardian. The process of adoption is […]

Assignment 2: the Effects of Transracial Adoption

One of the things that I am most passionate about in this world is adoption; I have felt called to adopt from the time I was a little girl in elementary school, have visited orphanages, and have had many friends who have adopted or are in the process of adopting. I feel as strongly about race and racial equity, which stems from my work as a high school teacher in a diverse school. When merging both of those subjects, a […]

Additional Example Essays

• Documentary Film "Three Identical Strangers" Analysis
• What are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)?
• "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes
• What Happens to Jem and Scout's Mother and How Do They Fell About Her Absence?
• Letter From Birmingham Jail Rhetorical Analysis
• Shakespeare's Hamlet Character Analysis
• The Mental Health Stigma
• Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
• Substance Abuse and Mental Illnesses
• How do Video Games affect the Mental Health of Young Adults
• A Reflection on Mental Health Awareness and Overcoming Stigma
• Homeless Veterans

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Dissertation

Research Paper

• Testimonials

Research Papers

Dissertations

Term Papers

Adoption Essay

An adoption essay is a kind writing, which contains the information about child adoption. The writer should discuss the matter from two perspectives. Both the children’s and parents’ interests must be presented in the paper. Moreover, it is necessary to mention that there are several types of adoption. They are: agency adoption, independent adoption, and intercountry adoption. The most important thing to do before getting down to work is choosing the topic for the paper. Read the sources you have found and try to connect your own ideas with ones of the author’s. It is possible to discuss one of the following questions in the paper: 1) What is adoption? 2) Do such types of adoption as agency, independent, and intercountry differ? 3) How to find a child for adoption?. 4) Are the children of all ages available for adoption? 5) Is it possible for a single person to take care of such a child?

Quick Navigation through the Adoption Essay Page

Adoption essay basics.

• How Can We Help

An Adoption Research Paper

An adoption thesis statement, an abortion essay, a foster care essay, adoption quotes, a trans-racial adoption essay, a good adoption essay, download free sample of an adoption essay.

An Adoption Essay Sample (Click the Image to Enlarge)

Adoption is a legal process of adopting a child. The parent adopting, called adopter, assumes all the parenting rights of the biological parents after adoption is finalized. The adopted child becomes a family member and gets all the rights that go with it, like inheritance, for example. While adoption is common everywhere, it is highly regulated in the western world. And there are many issues surrounding adoption: legal, social and psychological. Writing a well-crafted adoption essay means that the writer is informed about the aspects concerning the topic under analysis.

Adoption has existed for many centuries. When slavery was common, children used to be adopted to be slaves. The extension of the family and ensuring the continuity of the generation also were the reasons for adoption. Recently, the focus is on the welfare of a child. And obviously there have been tendency of childless parents adopting a child. On the welfare side, children abandoned by parents, orphaned or not well provided are adopted by those, who can take care of them. There have been debates about LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) adoption. In that case, welfare of the adoptee is given the main consideration.

How Can We Help?

You can hand over the writing of an adoption essay to ProfEssays.com . We will charge you very fairly for the services. All the papers are automatically checked for plagiarism before the delivery. Moreover, we have unlimited free revisions policy. This ensures that all the necessary changes will be made if you are not satisfied with the writing before or after the final paper is delivered to you. Our company ensures full confidentiality to any of your personal information. Also we have 24/7 customer support to take care of any of your queries. So buy essays with the help of ProfEssays.com and forget about all your worries and sleepless nights.

ProfEssays.com is committed to meet all the usual expectations of students and their professors. We can write any paper from personal essays for college admission to any kind of essays for your academic need. We hire only professional writers , whose native language is English. Besides, their experience in their field is matchless in the industry. They are very well acquainted with all the aspects of adoption and can provide your paper with strong arguments.

An adoption research paper must be structured properly. If you want to organize your paper correctly, you should prepare a pithy outline for it. Firstly, identify the problem you are going to deal with. Secondly, choose the level of detail that you are going to use. Do not forget that it is possible to write several phrases about an issue or use one or two words to explain the same point.

An adoption thesis statement is often recommended to write the last. It is so because its purpose is to become a guide to the paper. It is better to make it provocative to catch the readers’ attention. Try brainstorming to get the ideas for your thesis . Some professionals suggest finding excellent thesis statements and taking them as an example. It will be great if your thesis contains contradiction or some new idea.

An abortion essay is also a frequently written paper. It is necessary to state that any abortion essay should emphasize the consequences of abortion. It must influence the readers’ point of view upon this issue. Women who get rid of their own babies do not think that they kill living beings. The baby’s heart starts beating in the fifth week of pregnancy; that is why abortion is a murder of a creature which even did not start to live.

A foster care essay should present both positive and negative influence of foster care upon a child. On the one hand, it is the only way out both for childless people and a homeless child. But on the other hand, there are several problems that may occur. It can be emotional instability, unexpected conflicts, bad behavior, rebellion against the guardian’s control, etc. The writer may focus whether on these problems and give his own recommendations.

Adoption quotes are very useful for writing the paper on the matter under consideration. The quotes may be applied either as means for inspiration or as a topic to discuss. Thus, if you cannot choose an interesting topic for your adoption paper , you may google and select an interesting quote to become the basis for the writing. You may use this one: “ It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons .”

A trans-racial adoption essay should explain what trans-racial adoption is. In fact, it is giving home and family to children that have different race and cultural background from the parents, who are going to adopt them. All children are equal and need parental love and care. The writer may focus on the procedure and requirements for adopting such a child. It is also necessary to view the opposing thoughts concerning the topic.

Consider the following points for a good adoption essay .

• The title is obviously the most important thing to decide. It decides, if the readers want to read the paper up to the end. So, choose the title that you think will get the reader involved. Plus, make sure that you have enough knowledge for discussing the problem.
• Introduction gives the reader the basic data about adoption and the aspect of adoption you are dealing with. For example, if you are writing about the adoption of orphaned children, you can give the general overview of the problem along with statistics.
• Thesis statement is your declaration about the topic. Here you tell the readers in one sentence what your paper deals with. It gives you a clear focus on the issue and lets the readers know what they can expect from the paper.
• Body is obviously the main part of the essay as it is where you explain your take and then you put forward your opinions, arguments and facts. Ensure that you deal with all the aspects, pros and cons, and the issues surrounding the topic.
• Conclusion is a closing part of your adoption essay. Here you should summarize your points and give a final impression to the readers of what you are dealing in the essay. This is your chance to create a lasting impression in the readers’ mind.
• Format is also very important. The popular formats are APA style , MLA style , Turabian style, etc.

Thus, dealing with the debatable idea like adoption is not an easy task. The controversies surrounding adoption need you to be aware of many facets and issues of adoption. What if the biological parents want their child back? What about the social reception of the child? Will the adopters give the children enough love and emotional support for their mental development? Adoption is a beginning of new lasting relationship, but will that be sustained over period of time? These are some of the questions surrounding adoption. And you should answer some of them in your adoption essay . You ought to see the matter from the side of adoptee, adopters and the biological parents. Besides, you must not ignore the rules and regulation governing adoption.

Note: ProfEssays.com is an outstanding custom writing company. We have over 500 expert writers with PhD and Masters level educations who are all ready to fulfill your writing needs, regardless of the academic level or research topic. Just imagine, you place the order before you go to sleep and in the morning an excellent, 100% unique essay ! or term paper, written in strict accordance with your instructions by a professional writer is already in your email box! We understand the pressure students are under to achieve high academic goals and we are ready help you because we love writing. By choosing us as your partner, you can achieve more academically and gain valuable time for your other interests. Place your order now !”

Looking for an exceptional company to do some custom writing for you? Look no further than ProfEssays.com! You simply place an order with the writing instructions you have been given, and before you know it, your essay or term paper, completely finished and unique, will be completed and sent back to you. At ProfEssays.com, we have over 500 highly educated, professional writers standing by waiting to help you with any writing needs you may have! We understand students have plenty on their plates, which is why we love to help them out. Let us do the work for you, so you have time to do what you want to do!

• Customers' Testimonials
• Custom Book Report
• Help with Case Studies
• Personal Essays
• Custom Movie Review
• Narrative Essays
• Argumentative Essays
• Homework Help
• Essay Format
• Essay Outline
• Essay Topics
• Essay Questions
• How to Write a Research Paper
• Research Paper Format
• Research Paper Introduction
• Research Paper Outline
• Research Paper Abstract
• Research Paper Topics

Client Lounge

Deadline approaching.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Adoptive parenting and attachment: association of the internal working models between adoptive mothers and their late-adopted children during adolescence.

• 1 Department of Educational Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy
• 2 Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
• 3 Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
• 4 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy
• 5 Department of Humanities, Literature, Cultural Heritage, University of Foggia, Foggia, Italy

Introduction: Recent literature has shown that the good outcome of adoption would mostly depend on the quality of adoptive parenting, which is strongly associated with the security of parental internal working models (IWMs) of attachment. Specifically, attachment states-of-mind of adoptive mothers classified as free and autonomous and without lack of resolution of loss or trauma could represent a good protective factor for adopted children, previously maltreated and neglected. While most research on adoptive families focused on pre-school and school-aged children, the aim of this study was to assess the concordance of IWMs of attachment in adoptive dyads during adolescence.

Method: Our pilot-study involved 76 participants: 30 adoptive mothers (mean age = 51.5 ± 4.3), and their 46 late-adopted adolescents (mean age = 13.9 ± 1.6), who were all aged 4–9 years old at time of adoption (mean age = 6.3 ± 1.5). Attachment representations of adopted adolescents were assessed by the Friend and Family Interview (FFI), while adoptive mothers’ state-of-mind with respect to attachment was classified by the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Adolescents’ verbal intelligence was controlled for.

Results: Late-adopted adolescents were classified as follows: 67% secure, 26% dismissing, and 7% preoccupied in the FFI, while their adoptive mothers’ AAI classifications were 70% free-autonomous, 7% dismissing, and 23% unresolved. We found a significant concordance of 70% (32 dyads) between the secure–insecure FFI and AAI classifications. Specifically adoptive mothers with high coherence of transcript and low unresolved loss tend to have late-adopted children with high secure attachment, even if the adolescents’ verbal intelligence made a significant contribution to this prediction.

Discussion: Our results provides an empirical contribution to the literature concerning the concordance of attachment in adoptive dyads, highlighting the beneficial impact of highly coherent states-of-mind of adoptive mothers on the attachment representations of their late-adopted adolescent children.

Introduction

Attachment theory stressed the importance of early parent–child relationships for normative development of socio-emotional functioning across the life span ( Thompson, 1999 ). These relationships play a significant role on the development of a child’s internal working models (IWMs) of the self, others, and relationships influencing the child’s attachment security ( Bowlby, 1969 ), and they guide the construction and the expectations of future social interactions. IWMs of caregivers are expected to affect parenting and caregiving transactions that mothers enact both consciously and unconsciously in their interactions with the child ( Bretherton and Munholland, 2008 ; Dazzi and Zavattini, 2011 ; Velotti et al., 2011 ). Literature also established that parents’ IWMs, manifested in discussions about childhood experiences during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George et al., unpublished), predicted the quality of the infant-parent attachment relationship as observed in Ainsworth’s Strange Situation procedure (SSP; Ainsworth et al., 1978 ; van IJzendoorn, 1995 ; Steele et al., 1996 ; Tini et al., 2003 ; Verhage et al., 2015 ).

Overall, literature suggested parents’ IWMs that form the basis of parenting behaviors (sensitivity, attunement, monitoring, etc.) may influence the child’s IWMs from early childhood to adolescence ( Karavasilis et al., 2003 ; Gamble and Roberts, 2005 ; Bosmans et al., 2006 ; Gallarin and Alonso-Arbiol, 2012 ). However, only a few studies assessed the concordance of attachment representations between parent–children dyads (mostly “mother–son”) in this stage of life ( Rosenstein and Horowitz, 1996 ; Zimmerman et al., 1997 ; Allen et al., 2003 ; Scharf et al., 2012 ), providing evidence of a weak to moderate intergenerational effect. Further, the measurement of attachment in adolescence presents some weaknesses. Literature showed that, when assessing IWMs, the AAI ( Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn, 2009 ) and the Attachment Interview for Childhood and Adolescence (AICA; Ammaniti et al., unpublished) were used, but without taking into account the specificity of this stage. Moreover, conscious attachment styles may be captured by questionnaires, such as the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA; Armsden and Greenberg, 1987 ; Pace et al., 2011 ), which measures attachment security and its factors (trust, communication, and alienation) in adolescence, but presents obvious limitations characterizing self-reports. Finally, in recent years, the Friends and Family Interview (FFI; Steele and Steele, 2005 ) were developed to assess attachment representations in late childhood and adolescence, including important relationships beyond the child–parent relationships and provided encouraging results ( Kriss et al., 2012 ; Pace, 2014 ; Steele et al., unpublished).

Growing literature has recently examined attachment among adoptive families in the years following adoption. Adoption in Italy is a very common phenomenon. In the period between 2000 and 2013, 42,048 children were legally authorized to enter the country for adoption. Children were adopted by 33,820 couples with an average of 1.24 children per couple ( Italian Commission for International Adoptions, 2013 ). Internationally adopted children’s mean age at arrival was 5.5 years with four children out of 10 (42.1%) between 1 and 4 years old and 43.8% of adopted children between 5 and 9 years old; 8.8% were 10 years or older, while only 5.4% of adopted children were younger than 1 year old.

As reported in a 2009 meta-analysis ( van den Dries et al., 2009 ), children who were adopted before 12 months of age were as securely attached as their non-adopted peers, whereas children adopted after their first birthday were less securely attached than non-adopted children ( d = 0.80, CI = 0.49–1.12). Moreover, adopted children showed more disorganized attachment compared to their non-adopted peers ( d = 0.36, CI = 0.04–0.68), but they were less often disorganized compared to institutionalized children. Thus, early adoption is a considerable and effective intervention in the domain of attachment relationships ( Lionetti, 2014 ).

However, as mentioned above, in the Italian adoption practice, almost 95% of internationally adopted children were placed after 1 year of life, and, thus, they should be considered as late-adopted children ( Howe, 1998 ). Late adoption represents an exceptional intervention aimed at influencing and reprocessing representations of children who often suffered traumas, abuse, and neglect in their early infancy or childhood ( Rutter and O’Connor, 2004 ; Juffer and van IJzendoorn, 2005 ; van IJzendoorn and Juffer, 2006 ; Dozier and Rutter, 2008 ). Furthermore, no differences were found in the attachment patterns between international and domestic adopted children probably because similar early negative experiences were suffered by the adopted children, independently from the type of adoption ( van den Dries et al., 2009 ). On the one hand, late-adoption represents a window for the investigation of the impact of children’s negative pre-adoption experiences on the development of insecure-disorganized IWMs of attachment ( Steele et al., 2007 ; Pace et al., 2015b ). On the other hand, late adoption embodies the opportunity for children’s schemas to be revised and reprocessed based on the “new” relationships with adoptive caregivers ( Steele et al., 2003 , 2008 ; Juffer and van IJzendoorn, 2005 ). Some studies highlighted that previously maltreated and neglected children placed after 4 years of age and assessed both through a behavioral procedure and narrative tasks ( Pace and Zavattini, 2011 ; Pace et al., 2012 ) showed increasing attachment security over 2 years after adoption. Additional findings showed that late adopted children improve markedly in the positive representations of the self, the caregiver, and in the relationship with others and also in the narrative’s coherence ( Hodges et al., 2003 ; Kaniuk et al., 2004 ). As suggested from these empirical findings, further positive revision may be possible, even in older adopted children, and, therefore, exploring which parental characteristics could foster their “earned” security deserves attention ( Pace et al., 2012 ). In the Attachment Representations and Adoption Outcome study ( Steele et al., 2003 , 2007 ) mothers’ insecurity of attachment (either dismissing or preoccupied) as assessed by the AAI 3 months after adoption was correlated with children’s (4–8 years old) negative narratives and disorganized or bizarre themes proposed in an attachment story completion. In addition, children with unresolved adoptive mothers failed to establish secure attachment and positive representations of self and others ( Steele et al., 2003 ). Both parents’ attachment insecurity was strongly associated with high levels of disorganization or insecurity in the adoptees and confirmed even 2 years later. When neither parents’ AAI was secure at the time of placement, 2 years later 86% of adopted children scored high for disorganization ( Steele et al., 2008 ). Veríssimo and Salvaterra (2006) , assessing a sample of Portuguese children adopted between 3 weeks and 47 months of age, found that the scores reflecting the presence and quality of maternal secure representations predicted the level of attachment security of adopted children, as measured by Secure Base Scripts (SBS; Waters and Waters, 2006 ) and assessed by the Attachment Behavior Q-Set (AQS; Waters, 1995 ) (Spearman rho = 0.38, p < 0.01) with no correlations either with child’s age at time of adoption or the child’s age at time of assessment. Barone and Lionetti (2012) , assessing parents’ attachment state-of-mind using the AAI and children’s (3–5 years old) attachment patterns, administered a doll story completion task 12–18 months after placement and found 80% concordance with respect to two attachment classifications in mother–child dyads and 60% concordance with respect to three-way attachment classification. Concerning father–child dyads, no significant associations were found. Pace and Zavattini (2011) and Pace et al. (2012) found that late-adopted children (4–7 years old) who presented significant enhancing attachment security were predominantly placed with secure adoptive mothers ( p < 0.05). However, the concordance between the adoptive mothers’ attachment representations and their adopted children’s narratives on the two-way system (secure vs. insecure) was not significant (56%).

All these studies focus on the few years after late-adopted children’s placement, usually during middle childhood, while only a few studies examine what happens during later stages, such as late-childhood and adolescence. These studies show a percentage of secure attachment of adolescent adoptees that range between 32% ( Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ) and 63% ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ), using the AAI or AICA and from 32% ( Escobar and Santelices, 2013 ) to 51% ( Groza et al., 2012 ) and 60% ( Barcons et al., 2012 ), using the FFI. Most of these studies found no unresolved or disorganized (U/D) classifications either by the AAI or the FFI (only 2% in Barcons et al., 2012 ), meaning that adoptees were able to develop an organized attachment strategy, despite their early negative experiences. This data is worthwhile given that the disorganized attachment could be considered a strong predictor of short- and long-term psychopathological problems ( van IJzendoorn et al., 1999 ; West et al., 2001 ). Except for Escobar and Santelices (2013) , no study found a significant association between the age of adoption and attachment patterns, meaning that older age at adoption did not automatically imply high attachment insecurity.

Given that parenting seems to continue to influence children’s attachment representations, even during adolescence ( Hoeve et al., 2011 ), attachment researchers have recently questioned the role of adoptive parents in influencing attachment in adopted adolescents. A longitudinal adoption study ( Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ), assessed through the AAI, revealed that mothers of secure adolescents showed significantly more sensitive support during conflicts than did mothers of insecure adolescents. The authors concluded that both early and later maternal sensitive support were important for continuity of secure attachment for the first 14 years of life of early adopted adolescents. Another study ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ) assessing attachment in adopted adolescents and their adoptive parents, using the AAI and the AICA (Ammaniti et al., unpublished), did not find any significant concordance between mother–child and father–child two-way attachment systems. However, they suggested that the majority of parents who were secure with respect to attachment had children who were also secure, while those who were insecure had adopted children who were equally distributed in the two-way attachment classifications (secure vs. insecure). Limitations of this study, however, should be addressed due to both the wide variability of the sample characteristics and the lack of control for background variables.

Given the growing importance of assessing attachment bonds between adoptive parents and their children, especially in adolescence where there is a shortage of literature, in the current correlational study we investigated attachment concordance between late-adopted adolescents and their adoptive mothers. We expected correspondence between mothers’ AAI attachment representations and children’s FFI attachment representations (AAI and FFI categories and state-of-mind scales), mostly at the level of secure vs. insecure partition, as we controlled for demographic variables, adolescents’ verbal cognitive status, that can foster secure attachment patterns ( West et al., 2013 ), and maternal psychopathological symptoms.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

The adoptive families were recruited through two authorized international adoption agencies [e.g., Centro Italiano di Aiuti all’Infanzia-CIAI (Italian Center for Supporting Childhood) and Associazione Teresa Scalfati (Teresa Scalfati’s Association)], an association supporting adoptive families [Genitori si Diventa (Becoming Parents)] and the social-health service specialized on adoption working in Rome. All the participants lived in the following cities of the Center of Italy: Rome, L’Aquila, and Teramo.

The eligible criteria for this study were the following: age range of late-adopted adolescents between 11 and 16 years old, age of adoption after 4 years of age, length of placement equal to 4 years at least (considered a sufficient length of time for stabilizing adoptive child–parent relationships, van den Dries et al., 2009 ), absence of children’s special needs, absence of maternal clinical diseases, parents with medium-to-high education level, married couples still living together, and families living in urban contexts.

This study included 76 participants: 46 late-adopted adolescents (23 female) and their 30 adoptive mothers. Of the adolescents, 14 were “only” children, while 32 were siblings both involved in the study. 21 mother–child dyads had already participated in a longitudinal study ( Pace and Zavattini, 2011 ; Pace et al., 2012 ). The pre-adoption histories of the adoptees were characterized by severe adversities, such as serious neglect, physical maltreatment, sexual abuse, and widely variable periods of institutionalization.

Variables and Measures

Late-adopted adolescents, adolescents’ attachment representations.

Attachment representations of adolescents were assessed using the Italian version of the FFI ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ), authorized by the author Howard Steele. The FFI is a semi-structured interview informed by, yet distinct from, the AAI ( Main et al., 2008 ). Interviews are video-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The FFI’s coding system comprises eight scales, each including subscales as follows: (1) Coherence , based on Grice’s well-known maxims of good conversation—truth, economy, relation, and manner, and overall coherence; (2) Reflective Functioning —developmental perspective, theory of mind, diversity of feelings; (3) Evidence of Secure Base —father, mother, and other significant figure; (4) Evidence of Self–Esteem —social competence, school competence, and self-regard; (5) Peer Relations —frequency of contact and quality of best friendship; (6) Sibling Relations —warmth, hostility and rivalry; (7) Anxieties and Defense —idealization, role reversal, anger, derogation, adaptive response; and (8) Differentiation of Parental Representations .

The interview also includes the following global attachment classifications (Steele et al., unpublished): (1) secure classification indicates that the person’s narrative reflects flexibility, ease, and ability to turn to others for support when in distress; (2) insecure-dismissing classification describes people who use derogation or idealization as a defense and show restriction when they have to acknowledge or express distressing feelings; (3) insecure-preoccupied classification describes adolescents rated highly in anger or passivity; and finally, (4) insecure-disorganized classification describes people showing some lapses in monitoring or reasoning as well as contradictory or incompatible strategies in the attachment narratives.

The scales are scored on a 7-point scale from 1 to 4 (1 = no evidence; 2 = mild evidence; 3 = moderate evidence; 4 = marked evidence), including mid-points.

In the FFI coding system, the interviews have both a final classification (the above-mentioned secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized categories) like in the AAI and a scoring (1–4) for each classification, which is unlike the AAI. This double coding system captures attachment representations both at categorical and dimensional levels.

For this study, two blinded raters (both trained by Howard Steele and reliable coders for the FFI) coded 14 of the 46 interviews (30.4%). Inter-rater agreement was 100% ( k = 1, p < 0.001) on the four-way classification system (secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized). Spearman’s rho correlations for the five coherence scales ranged from 0.66 for the relation scale ( p < 0.05) to 0.86 for the manner one ( p < 0.01). The other FFIs were coded only by one trained coder. To our knowledge, this is the first study assessing attachment representations of late-adopted adolescents with the FFI in Italy.

Adolescents’ Cognitive Status

Given the contrasting findings on the links between attachment representations and cognitive level of participants at developmental stages ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ; Stievenart et al., 2011 ; Beijersbergen et al., 2012 ; West et al., 2013 ), we assessed the verbal intelligence of late-adopted adolescents.

Participants’ verbal IQ was measured by the vocabulary subtest from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (verbal WISC-III, Wechsler, 1991 ; Italian validation, Orsini and Picone, 2006 ) for participants aged between 6 and 16 years and 11 months. The verbal WISC III consists of the following subtests: information, similarities, arithmetic reasoning, vocabulary, comprehension (CV), memory figures. The child’s verbal IQ is obtained from the sum of the weighted points of the first five verbal subtests, while the factor score of verbal CV is obtained based on the weighted score received in the last subtest.

Adoptive Mothers

Maternal attachment states of mind.

The states of mind with respect to attachment of adoptive mothers were assessed through the AAI (George et al., unpublished; Main et al., unpublished), a well-known and semi-structured interview with 20 questions lasting approximately 1 h. The AAIs are audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The transcripts were used to assess possible past experiences with attachment figures in infancy (Loving, Rejection, Neglecting, Role Reversal, and Pressure to Achieve) and current states of mind (Idealization, Lack of Memory, Anger, Derogation, Passivity, Transcript Coherence, Mental Coherence, Metacognitive Monitoring, Fear of Loss, Unresolved Loss, Unresolved Trauma) on 25 1-to-9 scales.

The coding system classifies attachment states of mind into one of three principal categories: (1) free-autonomous and secure (F/A), where individuals freely describe their attachment experiences with balance and coherence; (2) insecure-dismissing (Ds), where they are unable to give evidence for the positive evaluations of their parents showing idealization or normalization strategies; (3) insecure-preoccupied (P), where they use angry or vague language when talking about their attachment relationships. One of two transversal categories can also be added: insecure-unresolved/disorganized loss or trauma (U), where transcripts presented lapses in monitoring of reasoning or discourse or reports of extreme behavioral reactions during discussion of these specific topics, or cannot classify (CC), where completely contradictory attachment patterns (e.g., dismissing/entangled) emerged.

Psychometric studies in many countries have shown that attachment classifications provided by the AAI are steady across periods of up to 15 months and are independent of the interviewer. The AAI categories were not correlated with the interviewees’ cognitive level, social desirability, memory, or general discourse style ( Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJzendoorn, 1993 ; Crowell et al., 1996 ).

For our study, all the AAIs were coded by a reliable coder. For inter-rater reliability, 10 interviews (30%) were also classified by another expert evaluator. Both coders were trained by Deborah Jacobvitz and Nino Dazzi and they were provided with AAI’s reliability and unaware of the other data collected. Inter-rater agreement was 88% ( k = 0.77, p < 0.01) for four-way classifications (free-autonomous, dismissing, entangled, or unresolved). Spearman’s rho correlation of 0.72 was found for the coherence of transcript’s scale ( p < 0.05), 0.74 for coherence of mind ( p < 0.05), and 0.97 for unresolved loss ( p < 0.01).

Socio-demographic and Adoption Data

Ad-hoc questions were developed for this research and they were answered by adoptive mothers to collect personal data (age of birth, education level, year of marriage, etc.) and information concerning the details of adoption (children’s age at arrival, country of origin, length of adoption, pre-adoption information, etc.). A part of this sheet was designed to investigate the children pre-adoption histories, especially the motivations for which they were placed for adoption (e.g., parental abandonment, death, drug abuse, etc.) and the events leading to change of guardianship, such as neglect, physical and sexual abuse, institutionalization, and multiple placements. In the last part we asked about physical condition, mental retardation, and psychiatric diagnoses of the children.

Maternal psychopathology

Before adoption, parents seeking to adopt were assessed to examine their psychopathological risk, but at the time of this study’s assessment, some years had passed since this pre-adoption selection. Therefore we checked the psychopathology level of adoptive mothers to ensure they were free from mental disorder symptoms and no psychological problems had emerged after adoption.

Mental health problems of mothers were measured using the Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1994 ), a 90-item standardized instrument designed to measure current symptom severity grouped in 10 main symptom dimensions (somatization, obsession-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, psychoticism, and other symptoms, such as problems with sleep) and an index of psychopathology (Global Severity Index, GSI). This measure provides a reliable estimate of the likelihood of being diagnosed with a mental health disorder ( T score above 63 on the GSI for any two symptom dimensions).

The data were collected during a session lasting approximately 2 h at the university’s laboratory. Mothers and children were assessed separately: the FFI and the WISC-III were administered to the adolescents, while the AAI, the socio-demographic questionnaire, adoption sheet, and the SCL-90 were used with their adoptive mothers. Participation in this research was voluntary. Before the session, written informed consent was obtained from all families. The research protocol had been previously approved by the University Ethical Committee.

Data Analysis

Results were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS, Version 21.0). We decided to use primarily non-parametric tests, which are appropriate for variables of this type because they do not require that the sample is drawn from a normally distributed population ( Siegel and Castellan, 1988 ). The significance level for all analyses was set at p < 0.05.

First, we presented descriptive statistics of all of the study variables and then we investigated whether FFI and AAI classifications were associated with background and control variables. Next, we tested the study’s hypotheses with respect to the association of attachment between mothers and late-adopted adolescents. Specifically:

(1)  We examined the concordance between adoptive mothers’ AAI categories and late-adopted adolescents’ FFI categories on the two-way system (secure–insecure) and, when possible, three-way (secure, dismissing, and preoccupied) and four-way systems (secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized). Using multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then tested whether FFI attachment category of late-adopted adolescents could be predicted by taking into account mothers’ AAI categories.

(2)  We examined the correlation between late-adopted adolescents’ FFI scales and adoptive mothers’ AAI state-of-mind scales (especially coherence scales considered to be the best predictors of free-autonomous classifications). Using linear regression analyses, we then tested whether FFI scales of late-adopted adolescents could be predicted by taking into account mothers’ AAI state-of-mind scales.

Descriptive Variables

Table 1 presents descriptive results concerning background variables and attachment classification for both adolescents and mothers.

TABLE 1. Child and mothers demographic and adoption characteristics.

Late Adopted Adolescents

The statistical analyses with adolescents’ FFI categories were conducted using a secure vs. insecure partition with preoccupied adolescents included in the insecure group together with dismissing ones. Adolescents’ FFI classifications were not associated with gender ( p = 0.35), continent of origin ( p = 0.10), age at arrival ( p = 0.50), length of adoption ( p = 0.60), age at assessment ( p = 0.27), educational level ( p = 0.26), or presence or absence of siblings ( p = 0.69). However, secure adolescents ( M = 104.39, SD = 23.62) showed a significantly higher level of verbal IQ ( T = 3.49, df = 44, p < 0.01) than insecure ones ( M = 79.67, SD = 20.05). Hence, we decided to include verbal IQ as a covariate in the regression model.

The statistical analyses using maternal AAI categories were conducted using a free-autonomous vs. non-free-autonomous partition with dismissing mothers included in the non-free-autonomous group together with unresolved ones. Mothers’ AAI classifications were not associated with age ( p = 0.87), years of education ( p = 0.28), length of marriage ( p = 0.16), or level of psychopathological symptoms ( p = 0.13).

Attachment IWMs in Adolescent-Mothers Dyads

Classifications.

Table 2 presents the distributions of the attachment classifications of adoptive mothers’ AAI and late-adopted adolescents’ FFI.

TABLE 2. The concordance between adolescents’ FFI and maternal AAI classifications 1 .

We found a significant of 70% (32 dyads) on the two-way AAI and FFI systems (rphi = 0.31, p = 0.04) and a concordance of 61% (28 dyads) on the four-way system approaching significance (χ 2 = 8.29; df = 4, p = 0.08). To further examine the possibility of interaction, we conducted multinomial logistic regression analyses predicting adolescents’ secure–insecure FFI categories from mothers’ AAI free-autonomous vs. not-free-autonomous, adding verbal IQ as a covariate. The multinomial logistic regression model indicated that free-autonomous adoptive mothers showed a tendency to have secure late-adopted children (β = 1.42, p = 0.08), although adolescents’ high verbal IQ appeared to be a better predictor of their secure classification (β = 0.05, p = 0.01).

Table 3 shows the correlations between the FFI and the AAI state-of-mind scales.

TABLE 3. Spearman’s correlations between the AAI and the FFI scales.

The FFI scales were highly correlated with verbal IQ scorings ( r between 0.35 and 0.63, p < 0.01), while no correlations were found between maternal AAI scale of states of mind and adolescents’ verbal IQ scorings ( r between -0.17 and 0.29, p = ns). Based on these correlations, we ran two linear regression analyses (Table 4 ). The first entered the secure pattern as the dependent measure and the second entered the disorganized pattern as the dependent variable. For both regressions, we inserted coherence of transcript, coherence of mind, and idealizing father as independent variables; for the first two, we added unresolved loss in the independent blocks. Verbal IQ was added as a covariate.

TABLE 4. Regression model predicting adolescents’ secure and disorganized FFI scales from maternal AAI states-of-mind scales.

The regression summary indicated that high coherence of transcript and low unresolved loss of adoptive mothers could predict high secure attachment of their late-adopted children, even if the adolescents’ verbal intelligence made a significant contribution to their prediction. Moreover, high cognitive status of adoptees made a significant contribution to the prediction of low scores on their disorganized patterns of attachment.

Our sample of late-adopted adolescents was classified through the FFI with 67.4% as secure, 26.1% as dismissing, 6.5% as preoccupied, and none disorganized, showing attachment representation distribution overlap with those both from the Italian AAI meta-analysis of non-clinical adolescent samples ( Cassibba et al., 2013 , 62% free-autonomous, 24% dismissing, 10% preoccupied, and 4% unresolved), and adoption studies using the AICA ( Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ) and the FFI ( Barcons et al., 2012 ; Stievenart et al., 2012 ). These data confirms that adoption can be seen as a positive intervention also for late-adopted children who were considered a high risk group due to their adverse pre-adoption experiences.

Concerning the distribution of AAI classifications of adoptive mothers, we found a high percentage of free-autonomous classifications (70%), similar to those in the Italian AAI meta-analysis of non-clinical mothers ( Cassibba et al., 2013 , 62% free-autonomous, 24% dismissing, 10% preoccupied, and 4% unresolved-disorganized), post-adoption studies including parents assessment ( Steele et al., 2008 , 2010 ; Barone and Lionetti, 2012 ; Pace et al., 2012 ), and studies on couples seeking to adopt ( Cavanna et al., 2011 ; Calvo et al., 2015 ; Pace et al., 2015a ).

We found a significant concordance between the attachment states of mind of adoptive mothers using the AAI and the attachment representations of late-adopted adolescents using the FFI (70% for two-way and 61% for four-way attachment classification). This result confirmed findings from most of the studies on adoptions, although some research did not find significant associations (Table 5 ).

TABLE 5. Studies assessing attachment concordance between adopted children and their mothers.

We would suggest that maternal attachment states of mind, characterized by highly coherent narratives of their own attachment relationships, could be very beneficial for their children via several pathways. First, attachment security of mothers in the AAI is usually associated with both physical and emotional availability, responsiveness, acceptance, and cooperativeness ( Allen et al., 2003 ; Riva Crugnola et al., 2009 ; Scherf et al., 2013 ). We would suggest that these maternal behaviors may teach children to feel confident in considering their own and others’ feelings, and to build their own security and self–esteem. Second, free-autonomous adoptive mothers may be more capable of managing and tolerating their children’s separation process during adolescence without experiencing adolescents’ autonomy and exploration behaviors as an attack on the mother–child relationship. Third, free and autonomous adoptive mothers, who are able to coherently integrate their own past attachment history, may be especially good at helping their children to process their early negative and traumatizing experiences and integrate them coherently into their personal biography ( Pace et al., 2012 ). Palacios and Brodzinsky (2010) pointed out that the construction of personal identity becomes even more significant for adopted teenagers, since, during adolescence, connecting the past, the present, and the future in a single and coherent story becomes central and requires the processing and integration of their own story both in adopted children and their parents. On the other hand, adoptive mothers with insecure attachment states of mind, in our study classified as dismissing or unresolved, mostly had insecure children. These data indicated that mothers with low coherence and high unresolved loss would fail to transmit to their late-adopted children the emotional security required for self-confidence and relationally competence ( Scharf et al., 2012 ), and they could be less capable of reducing the impact of their negative past experiences. However, surprisingly three secure adopted adolescents, despite their free-autonomous secondary classification, had unresolved adoptive mothers. From a clinical perspective, it is interesting to mention two points to explain this counter-intuitive data: on one hand, these adoptive mothers were among the few involved in psychotherapeutic treatment in their young adulthood; on the other hand, the three secure adolescents were among the few in our sample who were placed in foster care after the abandonment from biological parents, without experiencing any institutionalization. We would suggest that these protective factors could reduce the impact of the unresolved states of mind of the adoptive mothers on the attachment representation of their adopted children.

Finally, attachment security is overrepresented in late-adopted adolescents with high verbal cognitive scores. This result, in line with findings on early adopted children ( van Londen et al., 2007 ), seems intriguing at different levels. First, our data may indicate a problem with the discriminant validity of the FFI: the more advanced the child’s verbal abilities are, the better she or he is able to describe and talk about attachment relationships, leading to an overrepresentation of attachment security ( Atkinson et al., 1999 ). However, this interpretation does not seem to be confirmed by a study with non-clinical samples ( Steele and Steele, 2005 ). Moreover, controlling for verbal IQ, the relationship between AAI and FFI remained significant and this favored the content and the discriminant validity of the FFI. A second hypothesis could be that, unlike the adult sample, where attachment representations and verbal intelligence were completely distinct domains ( Crowell et al., 1996 ), among adopted adolescents, attachment may be related to cognitive development, as revealed among non-clinical children ( O’Connor and McCartney, 2007 ; Kerns, 2008 ; West et al., 2013 ). Lastly, we would suggest that late-adopted adolescent showing high verbal IQ may represent another factor that can help them build their secure attachment representation together with maternal attachment security (adopted children with high verbal IQ may be able to easily learn new habits in adoptive families, etc.). Further studies are needed to investigate whether the correlation between attachment classifications by the FFI and verbal intelligence also holds in normative samples.

Limitations and Future Developments

This study had several limitations. First, the restrictive eligibility criteria (absence of children with special needs in the sample, low maternal psychopathology, medium-to-high maternal education level, married couples living together) to take part in the study are a limitation for the generalizability of results and they could explain the low rate of insecure attachment in our sample, which was comparable to the rate of the non-adoptive adolescent population. Second, our sample size was quite small and it was not homogeneous (adolescents’ age, age at adoption, children’ country of origin, etc.). Third, fathers’ assessments were lacking in our study. Fourth, the correlational nature of the research design did not allow causal inferences. Lastly, the voluntary participation of adoptive families might have self-selected more sensitive families. Further research is needed to replicate our findings with larger and more uniform samples, using longitudinal research design, and including fathers’ assessment.

First our results highlighted a concordance of attachment representations among adoptive mother–child dyads during adolescence, endorsing results of some previous studies (e.g., Barone and Lionetti, 2012 ) on late-adopted children during childhood, and indicating that a relationship with a secure mother may represent a very beneficial experience for the late-adopted adolescents, despite their hard past-experiences. Second, we found a correlation between adolescents’ attachment security and verbal IQ that deserves to be investigated in further studies to assess whether it also holds in normative samples.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Ainsworth, M. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Google Scholar

Allen, J. P., McElhaney, K. B., Land, D. J., Kuperminc, G. P., Moore, C. M., O’Beirne-Kelley, H., et al. (2003). A secure base in adolescence: markers of attachment security in the mother-adolescent relationship. Child Dev. 74, 292–307. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.t01-1-00536

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Armsden, G. C., and Greenberg, M. T. (1987). The inventory of parent and peer attachment: individual differences and their relationship to psychological well-being in adolescence. J. Youth Adolesc. 16, 427–454. doi: 10.1007/BF02202939

Atkinson, L., Chisholm, V. C., Scott, B., Goldberg, S., Vaughn, B. E., Blackwell, J., et al. (1999). “Maternal sensitivity, child functional level, and attachment in Down Syndrome,” in Atypical Attachment in Infancy and Early Childhood among Children at Developmental Risk. Society for Research in Child Development Monograph , Vol. 238, eds J. I. Vondra and D. Barnett (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 45–66. doi: 10.1111/1540-5834.00033

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (1993). A psychometric study of the adult attachment interview: reliability and discriminant validity. Dev. Psychol. 29, 870–880. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.29.5.870

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2009). The first 10,000 adult attachment interviews: distributions of adult attachment representations in clinical and non-clinical groups. Attach. Hum. Dev. 11, 223–263. doi: 10.1080/14616730902814762

Barcons, N., Abrines, N., Brun, C., Sartini, C., Fumadó, V., and Marre, D. (2012). Social relationships in children from intercountry adoption. Child. Youth Serv. Rev. 34, 955–961. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2012.01.028

Barone, L., and Lionetti, F. (2012). Attachment and emotional understanding: a study on late adopted pre schoolers and their parents. Child Care Health Dev. 38, 690–696. doi: 10.1111/j.13652214.2011.01296.x

Beijersbergen, M. D., Juffer, F., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2012). Remaining or becoming secure: parental sensitive support predicts attachment continuity from infancy to adolescence in a longitudinal adoption study. Dev. Psychol. 48, 1277–1282. doi: 10.1037/a0027442

Bosmans, G., Braet, C., van Leeuwen, K., and Beyers, W. (2006). Do parenting behaviors predict externalizing behavior in adolescence, or is attachment the neglected 3rd factor? J. Youth Adolesc. 35, 354–364. doi: 10.1007/s10964-005-9026-1

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. Attachment and Loss: Loss , Vol. 1. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Bretherton, I., and Munholland, K. A. (2008). “Internal working models in attachment relationships: elaborating a central construct in attachment theory,” in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications , 2nd Edn, eds J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 102–127.

Calvo, V., Palmieri, A., Codamo, A., Scampoli, M. R., and Bianco, F. (2015). Perceptions of parental bonding, adult attachment, and marital adjustment in prospective adoptive parents. An empirical study in the pre-adoptive period. Sex. Relationsh. Ther. 1–14. doi: 10.1080/14681994.2014.1001355

Cassibba, R., Sette, G., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2013). Attachment the Italian way. Eur. Psychol. 18, 47–58. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040/a000128

Cavanna, D., Migliorini, L., and Napoli, C. (2011). Attachment and adjustment of pre-adoptive parents. Int. J. Child Fam. Welf. 14, 148–160.

Crowell, J. A., Waters, E., Treboux, D., O’Connor, E., Colon Downs, C., Feider, O., et al. (1996). Discriminant validity of the adult attachment interview. Child Dev. 67, 2584–2599. doi: 10.2307/1131642

Dazzi, N., and Zavattini, G. C. (2011). Attachment paradigm and the clinical practice. G. Ital. Psicol. 38, 729–756. doi: 10.1421/36100

Derogatis, L. R. (1994). The Symptom Checklist 90-R: Administration, Scoring and Procedures Manual , 3rd Edn. Minneapolis, MN: National Computing Systems.

Dozier, M., and Rutter, M. (2008). “Challenges to the development of attachment relationships faced by young children in foster and adoptive care,” in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Applications , 2nd Edn, eds J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 698–717.

Dozier, M., Stovall, K. C., Albus, K. E., and Bates, B. (2001). Attachment for infants in foster care: the role of caregiver state of mind. Child Dev. 72, 1467–1477. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00360

Escobar, M. J., and Santelices, M. P. (2013). Attachment in adopted adolescents. National adoption in Chile. Child. Youth Serv. Rev. 35, 488–492. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2012.12.011

Gallarin, M., and Alonso-Arbiol, I. (2012). Parenting practices, parental attachment and aggressiveness in adolescence: a predictive model. J. Adolesc. 35, 1601–1610. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2012.07.002

Gamble, S. A., and Roberts, J. E. (2005). Adolescents’ perceptions of primary caregivers and cognitive style: the roles of attachment security and gender. Cogn. Ther. Res. 29, 123–141. doi: 10.1007/s10608-005-3160-7

Groza, V., Muntean, A., and Ungureanu, R. (2012). The adoptive family within the Romanian cultural context: an exploratory study. Adopt. Q. 15, 1–17. doi: 10.1080/10926755.2012.661327

Hodges, J., Steele, M., Hillman, S., Henderson, K., and Kaniuk, J. (2003). Changes in attachment representations over the first year of adoptive placement: narratives of maltreated children. Clin. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 8, 351–367. doi: 10.1177/1359104503008003006

Hoeve, M., Dubas, J. S., Gerris, J. R., van der Laan, P. H., and Smeenk, W. (2011). Maternal and paternal parenting styles: unique and combined links to adolescent and early adult delinquency. J. Adolesc. 34, 813–827. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.02.004

Howe, D. (1998). Patterns of Adoption. Nature, Nurture and Psychosocial Development. Oxford: Blackwell Science.

Italian Commission for International Adoptions (2013). Data and Perspectives in the Adoption International. Available at: http://www.commissioneadozioni.it/it/per-una-famiglia-adottiva/rapporto-statistico.aspx

Juffer, F., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2005). Behavior problems and mental health referrals of international adoptees: a meta-analytic approach. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 293, 2501–2515. doi: 10.1001/jama.293.20.2501

Kaniuk, J., Steele, M., and Hodges, J. (2004). Report on a longitudinal research project, exploring the development of attachments between older, hard-to-place children and their adopters over the first two years of placement. Adopt. Foster. 28, 61–67. doi: 10.1177/030857590402800208

Karavasilis, L., Doyle, A. B., and Markiewicz, D. (2003). Associations between parenting style and attachment to mother in middle childhood and adolescence. Int. J. Behav. Dev. 27, 153–164. doi: 10.1080/0165025024400015

Kerns, K. A. (2008). “Attachment in middle childhood,” in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Applications , 2nd Edn, eds J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (New York, NY: Guilford Publications), 366–382.

Kriss, A., Steele, H., and Steele, M. (2012). Measuring attachment and reflective functioning in early adolescence: an introduction to the friends and family interview. Res. Psychother. 15, 87–95. doi: 10.7411/RP.2012.009

Lionetti, F. (2014). What promotes secure attachment in early adoption? The protective roles of infants’ temperament and adoptive parents’ attachment. Attach. Hum. Dev. 16, 573–589. doi: 10.1080/14616734.2014.959028

Main, M., Hesse E., and Goldwyn, R. (2008). “Studying differences in language usage in recounting attachment history: an introduction to the AAI,” in Clinical Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview , eds H. Steele and M. Steele (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 31–68.

O’Connor, E., and McCartney, K. (2007). Attachment and cognitive skills: an investigation of mediating mechanisms. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 28, 458–476. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2007.06.007

Orsini, A., and Picone, L. (2006). Contributo alla Taratura Italiana di Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) [Contribution to the Italian Validation of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children]. Firenze: Giunti OS.

Pace, C. S. (2014). Assessing attachment representations among adoptees during middle childhood and adolescence with the Friend and Family Interview (FFI): clinical and research perspectives. Front. Psychol. 5:1114. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01114

Pace, C. S., San Martini, P., and Zavattini, G. C. (2011). The factor structure of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA): a survey of Italian adolescents. Pers. Individ. Differ. 51, 83–88. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.006

Pace, C. S., Santona, A., Zavattini, G. C., and Di Folco, S. (2015a). Attachment states of mind and couple relationships in couples seeking to adopt. J. Child Fam. Stud. 1–13. doi: 10.1007/s10826-015-0134-6

Pace, C. S., Zavattini, G. C., and Tambelli, R. (2015b). Does Family Drawing assess attachment representations of late-adopted children? A preliminary report. Child Adolesc. Ment. Health 20, 26–33. doi: 10.1111/camh.12042

Pace, C. S., and Zavattini, G. C. (2011). ‘Adoption and attachment theory’ the attachment models of adoptive mothers and the revision of attachment patterns of their late-adopted children. Child Care Health Dev. 37, 82–88. doi: 10.1111/j.13652214.2010.01135.x

Pace, C. S., Zavattini, G. C., and D’Alessio, M. (2012). Continuity and discontinuity of attachment patterns: a short-term longitudinal pilot study using a sample of late-adopted children and their adoptive mothers. Attach. Hum. Dev. 14, 45–61. doi: 10.1080/14616734.2012.636658

Palacios, J., and Brodzinsky, D. (2010). Adoption research: trends, topics, outcomes. Int. J. Behav. Dev. 34, 270–284. doi: 10.1177/0165025410362837

Riva Crugnola, C., Sagliaschi, S., and Rancati, I. (2009). Attachment quality and elaboration of early unfavourable experiences in adopted preteens. Psicol. Clin. Sviluppo 13, 515–542. doi: 10.1449/30785

Rosenstein, D. S., and Horowitz, H. A. (1996). Adolescent attachment and psychopathology. J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 64, 244. doi: 10.1037/0022-006X.64.2.244

Rutter, M., and O’Connor, T. G. (2004). Are there biological programming effects for psychological development? Findings from a study of Romanian adoptees. Dev. Psychol. 40, 81–94. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.40.1.81

Scharf, M., Mayseless, O., and Kivenson-Baron, I. (2012). Intergenerational concordance in Adult Attachment Interviews with mothers, fathers and adolescent sons and subsequent adjustment of sons to military service. Attach. Hum. Dev. 14, 367–390. doi: 10.1080/14616734.2012.691652

Scherf, K. S., Smyth, J. M., and Delgado, M. R. (2013). The amygdala: an agent of change in adolescent neural networks. Horm. Behav. 64, 298–313. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2013.05.011

Siegel, S., and Castellan, N. J. Jr. (1988). Non Parametric Statistics for the Behavioral Science. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Steele, H., and Steele, M. (2005). “The construct of coherence as an indicator of attachment security in middle childhood: the friends and family interview,” in Attachment in Middle Childhood , eds K. A. Kerns and R. A. Richardson (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 137–160.

Steele, H., Steele, M., and Fonagy, P. (1996). Associations among attachment classifications of mothers, fathers, and their infants. Child Dev. 67, 541–555. doi: 10.2307/1131831

Steele, M., Henderson, K., Hodges, J., Kaniuk, J., Hillman, S., and Steele, H. (2007). “In the best interests of the late-placed child: a report from the attachment representations and adoption outcome study,” in Developmental Science and Psychoanalysis: Integration and Innovation , eds L. C. Mayes, P. Fonagy, and M. Target (London: Karnac Books), 159–182.

Steele, M., Hodges, J., Kaniuk, J., Hillman, S., and Henderson, K. (2003). Attachment representations and adoption: associations between maternal states of mind and emotion narratives in previously maltreated children. J. Child Psychother. 29, 187–205. doi: 10.1080/0075417031000138442

Steele, M., Hodges, J., Kaniuk, J., and Steele, H. (2010). Mental representation and change: developing attachment relationships in an adoption context. Psychoanal. Inq. 30, 25–40. doi: 10.1080/07351690903200135

Steele, M., Hodges, J., Kaniuk, J., Steele, H., Hillman, S., and Asquith, K. (2008). “Forecasting outcomes in previously maltreated children. The use of the AAI in a longitudinal adoption study,” in Clinical Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview , eds H. Steele and M. Steele (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 427–451.

Stievenart, M., Casonato, M., Muntean, A., and van de Schoot, R. (2012). The friends and family interview: measurement invariance across Belgium and Romania. Eur. J. Dev. Psychol. 9, 737–743. doi: 10.1080/17405629.2012.689822

Stievenart, M., Roskam, I., Meunier, J. C., and Van de Moortele, G. (2011). The reciprocal relation between children’s attachment representations and their cognitive ability. Int. J. Behav. Dev. 35, 58–66. doi: 10.1177/0165025410370790

Thompson, R. A. (1999). “Early attachment and later development,” in Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications , eds J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 265–286.

Tini, M., Corcoran, D., Rodrigues-Doolabh, L., and Waters, E. (2003). Maternal attachment scripts and infant security. Paper Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development , Tampa, FL.

PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar

van den Dries, L., Juffer, F., van IJzendoorn, M. H., and Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (2009). Fostering security? A meta-analysis of attachment in adopted children. Child. Youth Serv. Rev. 31, 410–421. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2008.09.008

van IJzendoorn, M. (1995). Adult attachment representations, parental responsiveness, and infant attachment: a meta-analysis on the predictive validity of the Adult Attachment Interview. Psychol. Bull. 117, 387–403. doi: 10.1037/0033–2909.117.3.387

van IJzendoorn, M. H., and Juffer, F. (2006). The Emanuel Miller Memorial Lecture 2006: adoption as intervention. Meta-analytic evidence for massive catch-up and plasticity in physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development. J. Child Psychol. Psychiatry 47, 1228–1245. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01675.x

van IJzendoorn, M. H., Schuengel, C., and Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (1999). Disorganized attachment in early childhood: meta-analysis of precursors, concomitants, and sequelae. Dev. Psychopathol. 11, 225–249. doi: 10.1017/S0954579499002035

van Londen, W. M., Juffer, F., and van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). Attachment, cognitive, and motor development in adopted children: short-term outcomes after international adoption. J. Pediatr. Psychol. 32, 1249–1258. doi: 10.1093/jpepsy/jsm062

Velotti, P., Castellano, R., and Zavattini, G. C. (2011). Adjustment of couples following childbirth: the role of generalized and specific states of mind in an italian sample. Eur. Psychol. 16, 1–10. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040/a000022

Verhage, M. L., Schuengel, C., Madigan, S., Fearon, R. M. P., Oosterman, M., Cassibba, R., et al. (2015). “Intergenerational transmission of attachment and mediation by caregiver sensitivity: new meta-analytic findings,” in Paper Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development , Philadelphia, PA.

Veríssimo, M., and Salvaterra, F. (2006). Maternal secure-base scripts and children’s attachment security in an adopted sample. Attach. Hum. Dev. 8, 261–273. doi: 10.1080/14616730600856149

Waters, E. (1995). Appendix a: the attachment q-set (version 3.0 ) . Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 60, 234–246. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5834.1995.tb00214.x

Waters, H. S., and Waters, E. (2006). The attachment working models concept: among other things, we build script-like representations of secure base experiences. Attach. Hum. Dev. 8, 185–197. doi: 10.1080/14616730600856016

Wechsler, D. (1991). The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children , 3rd Edn. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.

West, K. K., Mathews, B. L., and Kerns, K. A. (2013). Mother–child attachment and cognitive performance in middle childhood: an examination of mediating mechanisms. Early Child. Res. Q. 28, 259–270. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2012.07.005

West, M., Adam, K., Spreng, S., and Rose, S. (2001). Attachment disorganization and dissociative symptoms in clinically treated adolescents. Can. J. Psychiatry 46, 627–631.

Zimmerman, P., Fremmer-Bombik, E., Spangler, G., and Grossman, K. E. (1997). “Attachment in adolescence: a longitudinal perspective,” in Development of Interaction and Attachment: Traditional and Non-Traditional Approaches , eds W. Koops, J. B. Hoeksema, and D. C. van den Boom (Amsterdam: North-Holland), 281–291.

Keywords : attachment, adoption, adolescence, internal working models (IWMs), Friend and Family Interview

Citation: Pace CS, Di Folco S, Guerriero V, Santona A and Terrone G (2015) Adoptive parenting and attachment: association of the internal working models between adoptive mothers and their late-adopted children during adolescence. Front. Psychol. 6:1433. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01433

Received: 30 April 2015; Accepted: 08 September 2015; Published: 23 September 2015.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2015 Pace, Di Folco, Guerriero, Santona and Terrone. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Cecilia S. Pace, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Genoa, Corso Podestà 2, 16128 Genoa, Italy, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Environment
• Information Science
• Social Issues
• Argumentative
• Cause and Effect
• Classification
• Compare and Contrast
• Descriptive
• Exemplification
• Informative
• Controversial
• Exploratory
• What Is an Essay
• Length of an Essay
• Generate Ideas
• Types of Essays
• Structuring an Essay
• Outline For Essay
• Essay Introduction
• Thesis Statement
• Body of an Essay
• Writing a Conclusion
• Essay Writing Tips
• Drafting an Essay
• Revision Process
• Fix a Broken Essay
• Format of an Essay
• Essay Examples
• Essay Checklist
• Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Research Paper
• Write My Research Paper
• Write My Essay
• Custom Essay Writing Service
• Admission Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Essay
• Academic Ghostwriting
• Write My Book Report
• Case Study Writing Service
• Dissertation Writing Service
• Coursework Writing Service
• Lab Report Writing Service
• Do My Assignment
• Buy College Papers
• Capstone Project Writing Service
• Buy Research Paper
• Custom Essays for Sale

Can’t find a perfect paper?

• Free Essay Samples

Essays on Adoption

The adoption essay should explain adoption and reflect the correct situation with it. Adoption essays define adoption as a form of the family upbringing of children, deprived of parental care, with the establishment of legal relations between parents and adopted children. The number of children left without parental care is steadily growing every year. Essays on adoption reveal the heartbreaking statistics on adoption – there are about 400,000 kids, currently available for adoption in the US alone. There are several types of adoption: by a relative, through the foster care system, international, through private facilitators. Our adoption essay samples can benefit your essay by providing relevant and comprehensive information regarding adoption – samples of the best adoption essays can be found below.

Recent trends in sustainability in the restaurant industry Recent trends have pushed many businesses to implement sustainable policies and practices. In studying sustainability in the restaurant sector, the main items that are often affected include energy and water, food waste management, and effects of products on different habitats. Some of the...

Electronic Health Record (EHR) consists of a multi-disciplinary approach to preparing new systems, ensuring privacy and complying with security, designing practice workflows, training the care team and managing the process of adoption (Hodgkins, n.d.). A successful EHR implementation helps the practice in adapting to new systems with ease, which will...

Nothing beats a long walk in the morning or evening with the company of a friendly pet dog. Dogs have been man’s companion for several decades now because they share our lives in several ways many animals cannot. Dogs are always friendly and a perfect human companion that is why...

Words: 2842

Same-sex marriage is a greatly controversial issue in many communities where it is yet to be legalized. Despite this surprise of the twenty-first surgery, many nations around the globe continue to legalize same-sex marriages. The LGBT (Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community in many parts of the globe continues to...

Words: 1237

The Impact of Same-Sex Couples on Adoption The has been a significant rise in the number of same-sex couples forming their own families by artificial insemination, adoption, and foster care. It has been approximated that there are at least fourteen million minors in the U.S that are living with at least...

Importance of Belonging and Foster Care There are specific things that every human being is entitled to have in order to live a comfortable and fulfilling life. As such, apart from the basic rights of food, shelter, and clothing, people need to have a sense of belonging which is important for...

Words: 1192

Found a perfect essay sample but want a unique one?

Request writing help from expert writer in you feed!

Legal Agreements and Child Adoption Legal agreements such as adoptions, custody, and parentage are all made to care for children when their parents are unable to do so. The process by which an adult takes the role of a child's legal permanent parent is known as child adoption. Where the prior...

If there is a disagreement regarding a child's adoption rights, one side must be a qualified parent, while the other is a third party. In contrast to the third party, the parent in his claim is claiming a basic constitutional right. The constitution does not grant any basic rights to a...

In her short story Desiree's Baby, Kate Chopin discusses the different shades of love that exist between people. In certain cases, it is conditional which jeopardizes the foundation of families. The most important divider in this story is race. It is set in pre-World War I America in the home...

Words: 1289

LGTB adoptions grant people from the lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual communities the moral right to exercise parental responsibility for children. The controversy surrounding LGTB adoptions has sparked social concern and reform in-laws to allow LGTB parents to adopt children based on their parental wishes. A true story about the...

Adoption is a term that describes the process of adapting to a new meaning, feature, or environment; it can also be interpreted as the transformation of one thing into something else. Adoption, according to Hutcheon (2102), is an alerted version of a text, musical composition, poem, or short story that...

Words: 2732

Campaigns organized in favor of a social purpose are referred to as social movements. They are generally focused on either the adoption or the avoidance of change that affects societal principles and structure. Although the scale of each social activity varies, they are all collective. Public signs emerge from the more...

Related topic to Adoption

You might also like.

Home / Essay Samples / Life / Family / Adoption

Adoption Essay Examples

Foster kids in the real world.

Foster children adapt better to the world than normal children because foster care kids know what it is like to go through hard times and they work harder than normal kids. Sometimes kids need a push to be better and the foster care parents give...

Adoption of English Words in Japanese Public Space

Asian countries are fascinating for us because they are exotic. They are very different from what we see every day. One of such basic differences is the alphabet. For Westerners, it is a sequence of incomprehensible signs. When you go to a place like this,...

Problems in the Us Foster Care System

The foster care system in the United States of America is and has been in trouble for years. The reality of the system is often hidden due to the fact that this is not a commonly known problem. If The Children's Bureau does not address...

Sibling Relationships and the Case for and Against Placing Them Together in Foster Care Or Adoption

This essay aims to look more intensely at sibling relationships and the case for and against placing them together in foster care or adoption. It is clear that although the law namely, the Children and Young Person’s act 2008 along with other social norms, support...

The Problem of Orphanage in Society

A perfect world is unrealistic, everyone has imperfections. As a whole society we need to strive to improve ourselves and each other's actions and way of living. A specific social problem I have read into is the orphanage problem in society. There are millions of...

Adopting Pets is a Better Option than Buying Them

To begin with I searched about some good arguments in which people and breeders explain why buying a pet is a better option. First I found the one that said that a registered breeder will be able to give you official papers for the animal...

An Overview of Climate Change Adoption Programs in India

Bio-diversity is bona fide and right at present occurring as indicated by the IPCC‟s latest assessment report IPCC iv 2007 as shown by the report the effects of common change and their related expenses will fall excessively on making nations devastating to undermine the accomplishment...

The Flaws of Foster Care System in America

Many people question the Foster care system by calling it, modern day slavery and child trafficking. According the the article What You Need to Know About Foster Care and Human Trafficking it states; “According to the National Foster Youth Institute, it’s estimated that 60 percent...

Adoption: Negative & Positive Aspects

There are many young adolescents in modern day society falling pregnant by accident or on purpose. At a young age this could be caused by many different factors. Some of the people affected are unable to care for a baby due to the major commitments...

Current Conditions in Foster Care and Its Effects on Youth

The Foster Care System is an important system we implement in the United States. Children in need of homes and help happen all over the United States and all times. But what really goes on when a child enters Foster Care? Is our system helping...

Trying to find an excellent essay sample but no results?

Don’t waste your time and get a professional writer to help!

You may also like

• Responsibility
• Why i want to be a Nurse
• About Myself
• Twins Essays
• Family Values Essays
• Family History Essays
• Mother Essays
• Traditional Family Roles Essays
• Single Parenting Essays
• Father Essays
• Parenting Styles Essays
• Marriage Essays

About Adoption

Adoption is the action or fact of legally taking another's child and bringing it up as one's own, or the fact of being adopted.

Open adoption (allows to be communicated between adoptive and biological parents) and closed adoption (seals all identifying information and communication).

Infertility, health concerns relating to pregnancy and childbirth, wanting to cement a new family following divorce or death of one parent, religious or philosophical conviction, decision to care for otherwise parent-less children, fear of inheritable diseases.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->