ST. LOUIS – Despite feeling more emotional distress and disconnection from their families, adolescents who are adopted don't appear to engage in more high-risk behaviors or have worse adult outcomes than nonadopted adolescents, Dr. Cheryl Kodjo reported in a poster at the annual meeting of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.
“The results seem to contradict what many of us believe based on anecdotal observations,” said Dr. Kodjo of the University of Rochester (N.Y.). “I think, however, that they do point up the need for more research into this area.”
Dr. Kodjo's secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) compared data on the risk behaviors of 18,250 nonadopted and 656 adopted adolescents, obtained in 1994–1995, to their sociobehavioral outcomes as young adults in 2001–2002.
The three-wave Add Health study was launched as a national school-based survey of adolescent behavior. In the first wave, an in-school survey of adolescents from grades 7–12 was carried out in 140 schools during the spring of 1994.
This survey was followed up in 1995 with an in-home interview of each study youth and a principal caregiver.
In the second wave, the adolescents were interviewed again in the home a year later, in 1996.
The third wave of the study occurred during 2001–2002, when the participants were 18–24 years old. By this time, all respondents had left high school for further education, work, or other options. Approximately 10,000 adolescents participated in all three waves.
Dr. Kodjo examined the link between wave 1 risk factors (trying to lose weight; alcohol, marijuana, or other drug use; sexual activity; violence; and suicide attempts) and wave 3 outcomes (diagnosed eating disorder, drug/alcohol treatment, sexually transmitted disease, emergency room injury treatment, and treatment for mental illness), for both the adopted and nonadopted subjects.
She found no significant differences between the two groups in either the frequency of engaging in risk behaviors or the frequency of experiencing an adverse outcome in young adulthood.
Good parenting might be one reason Dr. Kodjo saw no increase in risk behaviors among the adopted adolescents. “Maybe we're just not giving adoptive parents enough credit,” she said in an interview. “It could be that the jobs they are doing in setting limits and enforcing rules effectively keep risk behavior down.”
She noted, however, that the survey did show that adopted adolescents reported more emotional distress and family disconnectedness than their nonadopted counterparts.