I'm sorry but I'm not buying this study: The study, published in the new issue of the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems. "One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them," Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study's three co-authors, said in a telephone interview Monday. "Adoptive parents face a culture where, to many other people, adoption is not real parenthood," Powell said. "What they're trying to do is compensate. ... They recognize the barriers they face, and it sets the stage for them to be better parents."
Now, I have no intention of disparaging those who adopt children and I believe that they could love their children as if they were their own but there is no way that an adoptive parent would be better at parenting than those who conceived and bore their own child. I could see if they were as good as but I absolutely reject the notion that I'm somehow deficient in the mom department just because I carried these kids for nine months and then was in labor with one for 16 hours (with 2 hours of pushing) and the other for 3 hours (induced labor and no drugs, so it was 3 hours of intense pain). This somehow makes me less of a mom?
I think that I'm an excellent mom and would stack my mothering skills against anyone but you don't have to take my word for it, let's go to the kids and see what they think of my mothering skills. I forced asked them to write a testimony of my skill as a mom and here is what they wrote:
Sarah: My mom is the best. She is always there for me and does what's best for me. I love her lots.
Samantha: Mommy is the best mom in the world she is very funny, smart, loving and is a good mom. Even though she doesn't let me do some stuff [I won't let her have gum] she still loves me and i love her very much. She is a good Christian and loves the Lord. She spoils me and i feel bad sometimes when i don't appreciate her. I love her more than anyone except Jesus.
This junk research and I'm not buying it and neither is ABC News:
In other words, they aren't better parents.Today's new bundle of joy is a study on adoptive parents published in the American Sociological Review. The Associated Press report on this study looks darn newsy: "Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents."
What might have been made clearer is that this is so because adoptive families — of which there were 161 in the sample — have higher incomes and more education. When the data are controlled for income and education, there is no significant difference between married mom-and-dad adoptive parents and mom-and-dad biological parents. Both do equally better than other family types.
The report's basic finding is that compared with being raised by a biological mother and father, being raised by an adoptive mom and dad "does not unequivocally constitute a disadvantage" in the allocation of resources to young children.
That is not the same as saying it's an advantage over being raised by two biological parents. In fact, the study says that "We find that the two-adoptive-parent family structure is remarkably similar to the two-biological-parent family structure," and that both are better than alternatives.
