Adolescence Can Sting Adopted Kids

One thing, however, that surely does not cause problems is being raised by adoptive parents, Pertman emphasized. "Almost always what we're really talking about is what happened before the adoption."

One implication of that point is that the new study -- which drew upon adoptees in Minnesota who were interviewed as adolescents in the past five to 10 years, most of whom were adopted from Korea -- may have limited applicability to children adopted more recently or from different countries.

"Everyone wants to make generalizations," said Laurie C. Miller of the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, "but it is hard to extrapolate." Indeed, she said, international adoptees often have their own varieties of psychological baggage linked to the circumstances of adoption in their home countries.

Korean adoptees, for example, were in many cases fathered by American service members. "That's a whole different sociopolitical background than the Chinese girls who are put up for adoption just because they are daughters," Miller said. That, in turn, is different "than in other countries where there is extreme poverty and perhaps a very loving family but where the poverty is so extreme that they cannot afford having another mouth to feed."

The new study also says nothing about whether the kinds of behavioral issues documented in adolescent adoptees will persist beyond adolescence.

"This is just a snapshot of one stage of life," McGue said. "The problems may go away, or they may amplify. We really don't know."

McGue plans to follow the subjects of the study for several years to help answer that question.

One message that would be wrong to take home from studies of adolescent adoptees is that counseling is evidence of failure, experts said.

"I would argue that if you're not giving these kids some mental health support, then you're continuing the abuse and neglect that led them to be in foster care in the first place," Pertman said.

Indeed, said Pavao of Family Connections, adoptees and their rearing parents need not wait until problems arise to justify an occasional heart-to-heart with a counselor or other professional.

"Sometimes you just need to have a little check-in to see what's going on in your family," Pavao said. "Think of it as the 50,000-mile checkup."

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