Adoptive Family Relationships and Healthy Adolescent Development: A Risk and Resilience Analysis

Abstract

This study used a risk and resilience perspective and the catch-up model of adoption to analyze data from the National Survey of Adoptive Parents for 701 adopted adolescents. Structural equation models showed that better parent-child relationship quality was significantly associated with reduced odds of skipping school, being suspended, and reporting substance abuse or police trouble, when demographic variables and the pre-placement abuse/neglect factor were controlled. Better parent-child relationships also were associated with better performance in language arts, but not in mathematics. In general, few differences in the pattern of significant relationships were observed for a transracial adoptee subset of adolescents.

KEYWORDS:

• adopted adolescents
• adoptive family relationships
• transracial adoption
• parent-child relationship
• structural equation modeling
• latent variable interactions
• adoption

Acknowledgements and thanks to Jessica Gendernalik for research assistance and to the editors for their comments on an early draft.