Is Adoption Equally Beneficial to Different Aspects of Youth’s Behavioral Health? Findings From Comparing Adopted Chinese Youth With Non-Adopted American and Chinese Youth

Abstract

To test whether adoption differentially benefited adopted youth’s behavioral health, 243 female American youth who were adopted from China were compared with 234 non-adopted American peers, and 955 non-adopted Chinese peers living in China on four composite scales: School Problems, Internalizing Problems, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Personal Adjustment. The adopted youth were from high socioeconomic status (SES) families, while the two comparison groups were from average SES families. Self-report data were collected with the third edition of the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC-3). Effect sizes showed that the adopted youth outperformed their non-adopted American and Chinese peers. Latent mean comparison using Mplus 8 showed that, controlling for age difference, the adopted youth’s advantages over the comparison groups in some subscales dissipated. These findings were explained with possible compensating effects afforded by growing up in high SES adoptive environment, as well as on children’s differential susceptibility to the benefit of intervention.