Over 4,000 international adoptions take place in Spain every year. A study published in Spanish Journal of Psychology indicates these children suffer from more emotional and behavioral problems than non-adopted kids.
Researchers at the University of Barcelona studied 52 adopted children from different countries – China, Nepal, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, Columbia, Guatemala, Haiti, Peru and Ethiopia – aged 6 to 11, and a control group of 44 non-adopted children.
Research revealed that there were relatively no differences in the adaptation processes of both adopted and non-adopted children. This seems to be due to resilience variables – both individual and familial – which counteract the effects of negative experiences and help with favorable development.
Among adopted children, time spent in an institution was a variable that had negative impact on the onset of externalizing and internalizing problems.
Children coming from Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine in this case) displayed more attention problems, poorer adaptive abilities and poorer interpersonal relations than the rest of the kids.
According to the age at placement, attention problems appear in children adopted after the age of 3.
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