Post‐adoption contact, adoption communicative openness, and satisfaction with contact as predictors of externalizing behavior in adolescence and emerging adulthood

Understanding the origins and predictors of antisocial behavior is important because of the negative consequences of physical aggressiveness, bullying, gang violence, and other forms of externalizing behavior to perpetrators, victims, and broader society. There has been much debate about whether a higher rate of externalizing behavior is found among adopted adolescents than their nonadopted agemates (cf. Feigelman, 2001; Haugaard, 1999; Juffer & van IJzendoorn, 2005; Keyes, Sharma, Elkins, Iacono, & McGue, 2008; Wierzbicki, 1993). A fairly consistent, but low magnitude difference in externalizing behavior has been found across several studies; however, the reasons for this difference are poorly understood. Differences in rates of externalizing between adoptees and nonadoptees may be due to heterogeneity within the population of adopted adolescents (Grotevant, van Dulmen, Dunbar, Nelson-Christinedaughter, Christensen, Fan, & Miller, 2006) that results in a small number of extreme cases that affect the sample characteristics (Brand & Brinich, 1999). Some adopted children had healthy beginnings, were born to women who had adequate prenatal care, and were placed in their adoptive homes soon after birth. Others began life in circumstances that increased their risk for externalizing behavior, including removal from their birth families because of abuse, neglect, chemical dependency, or major mental disorders that made it impossible for their parents to meet their developmental needs; some of these children lived in these conditions for a number of years before being placed for adoption. Although some variation in externalizing appears to be explained by such prenatal or preplacement factors (e.g., Grotevant, et al., 2006), some scholars have speculated about possible contributions made by postplacement factors such as connections between the child and his or her birth relatives (Kraft, Palombo, Mitchell, Woods, Schmidt, & Tucker, 1985). In recent years, domestic adoptions of infants in North America have increasingly involved contact between the child’s families of adoption and birth (Grotevant & McRoy, 1998). Several hypotheses about connections between contact and psychological outcomes have been advanced. The first involves the type and degree of contact being experienced by the child and his or her birth relatives. When contact was becoming more prevalent in the 1980s, some practitioners suggested that children would become confused about who their real parents were, causing problems with self-esteem and identity that might lead to psychological adjustment problems (Kraft, Palombo, Mitchell, Woods, Schmidt, & Tucker, 1985). The second hypothesis focuses on the openness with which adoption and contact are discussed within the adoptive family, or adoption communicative openness. Brodzinsky (2005, 2006) suggested that even when contact is impossible, adoptive parents’ openness in communicating with their child about their adoption would make significant contributions to child and adolescent well-being. A third hypothesis focuses on adoptive family members’ interpretations of their contact situation and their satisfaction with it rather than on the actual levels of contact or communication, emphasizing how adoptees make meaning of their contact, and how this interpretive process affects well-being and adjustment. According to this hypothesis, good psychological adjustment of the adoptee occurs when adoptive family members are satisfied with the contact they have, regardless of the particulars of their situation. Four recent studies have provided partial or contradictory evidence concerning links between various aspects of contact and adjustment. Von Korff, Grotevant, & McRoy (2006) compared two highly contrasting contact groups: one in which there had been no contact or information shared from infancy into mid-adolescence, and the other in which there had been ongoing and frequent direct contact with face-to-face meetings between adopted children and their birth mothers from childhood into adolescence. Adoptive parents’ reports on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL: Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) indicated no significant associations between contact and adolescent externalizing behavior. Neil (2009) examined correlations among contact, adoption communicative openness, and externalizing behavior in a sample of 62 UK children ages 5 - 13 (M = 8.5 yrs). Adoption communicative openness (ACO) was assessed from ratings of interviews conducted with adoptive mothers; contact was a dichotomous variable indicating whether the child had direct face-to-face contact with a birth relative or not. Externalizing behavior was assessed using adoptive mothers’ reports on the CBCL. No relation was found between externalizing and either contact or ACO; however, contact and ACO were positively related. Brodzinsky (2006) examined correlations among contact, adoption communicative openness, CBCL total problems, and self-esteem in a sample of 73 US children ages 8 - 13 (M = 11.1 years). Unlike Neil’s study, the measure of ACO was the child’s report of how open they felt the family atmosphere was in terms of discussing adoption with their parents. Contact was assessed by parent report of activities engaged with the child’s birth relatives. Child-reported ACO was negatively correlated with CBCL total problem behaviors and positively correlated with child self-esteem. Contact was positively correlated with self-esteem and negatively (but not significantly) correlated with problem behavior. As in Neil’s study, contact and ACO were positively correlated. Finally, in an Israeli sample of 28 year old adoptees (Levy-Shiff, 2001), “openness to adoption,” was defined as “the extent to which the adoptees feel open to enquiry and discussion of adoption-related issues with their adoptive parents” (p. 100). In this study, “openness to adoption” was positively associated with self-concept and negatively associated with psychopathology, consistent with Brodzinsky. Taken together, this set of findings suggests that neither contact nor adoption communicative openness (measured from the parental perspective) is strongly related to children’s externalizing outcomes. Brodzinsky’s finding that adoption communicative openness measured from the child’s perspective is related to adjustment may be due to the nature of the questions on the measure. Many of the items indicate the respondent’s satisfaction or comfort with communication with parents (e.g., “I am very satisfied about how my parents and I talk together concerning my feelings about being adopted” and “I feel very uncomfortable discussing my birth parents with my adoptive parents”.) This suggests that the adoptee’s satisfaction with contact merits further investigation. In an earlier study with a small sample of adoptive kinship networks that either ceased or increased contact between childhood and adolescence, we found that parents’ satisfaction with contact was associated with their feelings of control over the contact (Dunbar et al 2006). It is possible that adolescents’ externalizing behavior, which involves rule-breaking and aggressive behavior of various sorts, may be triggered when adolescents feel they do not have control over how their adoptions are being handled. Perhaps their adoptive parents are blocking them from obtaining desired information, or are encouraging more frequent contact than they would like to have. Or there may be discrepancies between the type of birth family contact they want and that appears to be possible. For example, dissatisfaction with contact typically occurred when adoptive family members wanted more contact than they had, but were unable to bring it about (Grotevant, et al., 2007). The present study was designed to clarify these contradictory findings by including measures of contact, adoption communicative openness, and satisfaction with contact. It extends prior work in several ways: externalizing behavior was assessed using latent variables with youth and both adoptive parents’ reports as indicators; the analyses controlled for childhood externalizing, age and gender; and included ratings of satisfaction with contact from adoptive parents and their adolescents. We hypothesized that externalizing behavior is moderately stable from childhood to adolescence to emerging adulthood. Further, we expected that neither contact nor adoption communicative openness predicts changes in externalizing behavior from childhood to emerging adulthood, but satisfaction with contact is negatively associated with changes in externalizing behavior from childhood to emerging adulthood.