From Pragmatic to Sentimental Adoption: The Evolution of Child Adoption in
the United States over the 20th Century
Chiaki Moriguchi
Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University
chiaki@ier.hit-u.ac.jp
Abstract
Adopting a child, as an alternative to bearing a child, is a widely accepted means offorming a family in the U.S. today. According to the 2000 Census, adopted children comprise
2% of all U.S. children under age 18. In fact, the U.S. was the first country to enact themodern adoption law in the 19th century that protected the best interest of the child andprovided adoptive parents with exclusive parental rights upon court approval. According to
the historical literature, however, even in the U.S., child adoption remained “few and mostlyinformal” among white families in the early 20th century (Carpe 2000), where adoptive
parents were taking children in mostly for their labor values as farm laborers or housekeepers.
With a gradual decline of the economic value of children and a growing perception that
nurture matters more than nature, a greater number of childless couples began to adopt
unrelated infants to rear the child as “their very own” (Berebitsky 2000). By the 1940s thenumber of families seeking to adopt far exceeded the number of adoptable children. In otherwords, the historical literature suggests that child adoption in the U.S. have evolved from“pragmatic adoption” to “sentimental adoption” in the course of the 20th century. As
preceding studies remain largely qualitative, however, we know relatively little about thenature and extent of adoption practices in the historical U.S.
The objective of this study is to quantitatively document the changing nature of childadoption and evaluate its implications for the welfare of adopted children. Using the public
use samples of U.S. Federal Census microdata (IPUMS) in 1880-1930, which contains morethan 10,000 white adopted children residing in married two-parent households, I firstinvestigate parental motivations for adoption. Using a multinominal logit analysis in which
parents select child attributes when adopting, I find that farming households were more likely

to adopt children for pragmatic reasons, while households with higher socio-economic status
were more likely to practice sentimental adoption.
Next, I investigate whether or not parental motivations for adoption affect educational
investments in adopted children. To do so, using IPUMS 1880-1930 and 2000 data, I compare
educational outcomes of biological and adopted children. I find that, in 1880-1930, adopted
children had significantly lower educational outcomes (i.e., lower literacy rate, lower school
attendance, and higher labor force participation) than biological children after controlling forhousehold characteristics. Moreover, the educational disadvantages were considerably
greater for adopted children in farming households in 1880-1930. When compared withbiological children in the same household, the educational disadvantage of adopted children
persisted in the earlier decades, indicating that parental discrimination might have been an
important reason for their disadvantages. By 2000, the educational disadvantage of adopted
children have been greatly reduced or even reversed in some measures. My findings are
consistent with the great transformation of adoption practices in the U.S. from pragmatic tosentimental adoption with important implications for the welfare of adopted children.