Adoption, Foreign-Born Status, and Children's Progress in School

Adoption: A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents

OBJECTIVE

This article examines adoption as a strategy used by parents to fulfill their preference for a specific sex composition among their children in the United States.

BACKGROUND

Evidence from the United States suggests that parents with children of the same sex are more likely to continue childbearing, as parents generally desire at least one girl and one boy. What is unknown, however, is whether parents use adoption to fulfill this same preference.

METHOD

Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (n=1,107,800 children), the authors test the relationships among the sex composition of preceding siblings, child sex, and adoption status.

RESULTS

Children who had same-sex preceding siblings were more likely to be adopted, as opposed to biologically related to their parents, than children who had mixed-sex preceding siblings. Further, adopted children were more likely to be of the missing sex (i.e., adopted girls were more likely than were adopted boys to have only preceding brothers).

CONCLUSION

These findings suggest a need to consider parental sex preferences and child sex in studies on adoption decisions. Further, adoption provides one mechanism parents can use to achieve a balanced sex composition among their children.

Adoption status and disparities in the familial configurations of children

Few studies have examined the familial configurations of adopted children and how these configurations differ from those of non-adoptees. As a result, this study examines the relationship between adoption status and inequalities in the family structure of children. Our results indicate that adopted children are more likely to live in nuclear families compared to non- adopted children. Part of this is driven by the comparatively limited presence of adoptees in single-mother, single-father, and other types of non-nuclear families. Foreign-born adoptees are more likely to live in nuclear families compared to U.S.-born adoptees, but adoptees from racial and ethnic minority groups are less likely to live in such families compared to their white counterparts. These race-ethnic inequalities in family structure are however moderated by foreign-born status. Accordingly, our results indicate that foreign-born black and Hispanic children have the highest odds of residing in nuclear families among the U.S. population of adopted children.