https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8284-3276
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ABSTRACT
The current study examined the attachment development of 92 internationally adopted Chinese girls, focusing on the influence of type of pre-adoption care (institutional versus foster care) and sensitive adoptive parenting. Although the children were more often insecurely attached than non-adopted children 2 and 6 months after adoption (Times 1 and 2, N = 92), they had similar levels of secure base script knowledge (SBS knowledge) as a non-adopted comparison group at age 10 (Time 3, N = 87). Furthermore, concurrently observed sensitive parenting was positively associated with SBS knowledge. Finally, a significant interaction between type of pre-adoption care and early-childhood sensitive parenting indicated that the post-institutionalized children showed a stronger increase in security than the post-foster children when parents were more sensitive.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the girls and their parents for their generous participation to this study. Moreover, we would like to thank the students who helped in coding the Attachment Script Assessment. Femmie Juffer is supported by the Chair on Adoption Studies and Marinus H. Van IJzendoorn is supported by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Spinoza award).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
SUPPLEMENTAL DATA
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. We repeated these analyses using all 639 children from the taxometric study of T. E. A. Waters et al. (Citation2019) as a comparison group. This did not change the results. More information can be obtained from the corresponding author.