Parental ratings of behavioral adjustment in two samples of adopted Chinese girls: Age-related versus socio-emotional correlates and predictors

Impact of Biological Children's Adjustment on Their Siblings Who Were Adopted From China

“…Higher scores on the index of developmental delays at adoption were indicative of greater delays. Tan and Marfo (2006) reported that Chinese children's rejecting behavior toward the parents during the initial period of adoption strongly predicted their later CBCL-rated problems. In the current study, the initial period of adoption was operationalized as the first 2 weeks after the child was adopted.…”

“…As orphanage living often fails to meet the needs of many children, delays in socioemotional and physical development are relatively common. Developed from an earlier study on 750 adopted Chinese children (Tan & Marfo, 2006;Tan & Yang, 2005) and in-depth interviews with 11 families, the index items asked the parents to report medical evaluation results in five areas of the child's development: gross motor skills, fine motor skills, social skills, emotional maturity, and cognitive ability. In order to avoid the possibility of parents self-assessing the developmental status of their adopted children, they were first asked to report whether their children had undergone a professional examination.…”

“…An index consisting of six items (i.e., appeared to be afraid of adoptive parents, preferred to be held by others, preferred to be held facing away, refused to be held by adoptive parents, refused to be fed by adoptive parents, avoided parent's affection) was used to measure the adopted children's initial behavioral patterns. Similar to the index of developmental delays, items for this index were generated from an earlier study of 750 children (Tan & Marfo, 2006;Tan & Yang, 2005) as well as from in-depth interviews with 11 adoptive families. Parents were first asked to check if the listed behavior was observed in their child.…”

Another way of thinking about ADHD: the predictive role of early attachment deprivation in adolescents’ level of symptoms

“…They also help document the role of individual, family and cultural risk factors in adoptees' behavioral adaptation. Lower levels of behavioral adjustment have been found to be predicted by age of adoption [53] and other risk factors, such as current age, single parenthood and culture of origin [1,17,75]. More specifically, ADHD seems to increase with the age of adoption, suggesting that exposure to early attachment deprivation provokes self-regulatory deficits, thus increasing children's vulnerability to ADHD symptoms [20,37,54].…”

Preadoption adversity, MAOA, and behavioral adjustment in internationally adopted Chinese girls

“…scars, sores, lice, untreated medical condition) generated from in-depth preliminary interviews with adoptive families and from an earlier study on 750 children adopted from China (Tan and Marfo, 2006). Parents were asked to check all signs/ symptoms that they observed when the child was first adopted.…”