Heterogeneity in Socio-Emotional Functioning of School-Aged Adopted Children

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Social, Emotional, Personality

Abstract

Scientific evidence showing the negative impact of early adversity on adoptees’ socio-emotional development is abundant conveying the risk of considering adoptees a homogeneous group. The present study aimed at exploring heterogeneity among school-aged domestically adopted children regarding their social skills, emotion regulation/lability and reflective functioning. Further, variables related to the child’s pre-adoption experiences (neglect and time spent in institutional care), temperament (negative reactivity and task persistence), coping strategies (distraction strategies), feelings related to adoption (negative feelings toward the child’s school experience of being adopted and positive feelings toward the child’s own adoptive parents), psychological adjustment and peer acceptance were analyzed in relation to the different patterns of adoptees’ socio-emotional functioning.
Eighty-six adoptees (52 boys), aged 8-10, their adoptive mothers and classmates participated in this study. These children were adopted from the Portuguese Welfare System at the age of 3.24, on average, and spent 23.06 months in institutional care. Data were collected at in-home visits, interviewing both adoptive mothers and adoptees, and at school (n = 76), using a sociometric questionnaire in each participant adoptee’s classroom. Adoptees’ social skills, emotion regulation/lability, temperament and psychological adjustment were assessed using the mother as the informant for the SSIS-RS (Gresham & Elliott, 2008), ERC (Shields & Cicchetti, 1997), SATI (McClowry, 1995) and SDQ (Goodman, 1997), respectively. Adoptive mothers also reported on pre-adoption history of their children. Adoptees’ reflective functioning and discursive coherence, feelings toward adoption and coping strategies were assessed using the FFI (Steele & Steele, 2005), the Child’s Interview on Adoption (Barbosa-Ducharne & Soares, 2012) and the CCSC-R1 (Program for Prevention Research, 1991), respectively. Adoptees’ peer acceptance was assessed using a sociometric questionnaire (Soares & Barbosa-Ducharne, 2012) involving all the classmates of each participant adopted child (n = 1615 classmates).
A cluster analysis identified two groups of adoptees, which were significantly different according to their socio-emotional functioning. Cluster 1 (n = 44) included children with significantly higher scores on social skills, reflective functioning, discursive coherence and emotion regulation than those of Cluster 2 (n = 42). The two groups of adopted children were also significantly different regarding other study variables. Children belonging to Cluster 2 spent more time in institutional care and had a higher probability of having suffered neglect in their birth family, presented significantly higher levels of negative reactivity and lower task persistence ones and used more often distraction strategies, which are less adaptive coping strategies. They reported significantly more negative feelings toward the child’s school experience of being adopted and less positive feelings toward the child’s own adoptive parents, showed lower psychological adjustment and were less socially accepted by their peers.
The present study brings a major contribution to a deeper understanding of socio-emotional functioning of children with early adversity and for whom adoption has provided the opportunity to establish lifetime/permanent relationships with adoptive parents. The study findings highlighted that the heterogeneity among adoptees pertains both to past characteristics and present functioning, stressing the need to further explore differences among adoptive families associated to different patterns of adoptees’ socio-emotional functioning.

Authors

• Joana Lara Soares, University of Porto
  Presenting Author

• Maria Acciaiuoli Bar Ducharne, University of Porto, Portugal
  Non-Presenting Author