I don’t know anything about the backgrounds of the children adopted by these celebrities, but my guess is that it’s unlikely that they would have been raised in the horrible conditions experienced by the children in post-Ceaucescu Romania. A few years ago, researchers began to examine the impact of adoption on kids from Romanian and other Eastern European orphanages. Keep in mind that these adoptees were removed from extremely difficult conditions of abuse and neglect. A new study published in the July issue of the International Journal of Behavioral Development looked at the functioning of some of these children.

Laurie Miller and her colleagues from Tufts Medical Center in Boston recruited families who had adopted children from Eastern European countries or the former Soviet Union; recruitment occurred through the International Adoption Clinic at Tufts. The children had been with their families for at least 5 years and ranged in age from 8 to 10 years. Most of the families were dual-parent homes, with an average parental age of about 41 years. In about a third of the families, the adopted child was the only child in the home, and half of the families had other, unrelated adopted children at home as well. Most of the children were adopted between the ages of 1 and 3.(...)
Read the rest of Third-World Adoption: Are there risk factors for Madonna’s and Angelina’s kids? (507 words)

© Dr. Brian MacDonald C. Psych. for Family Anatomy, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adoption, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Madonna, orphanage
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