The Family Stories Project has benefited from the participation of 80 families, all of whom have shared their own family stories with us. The parents in these families have given us very rich and candid accounts of their philosophies regarding early adoption communication and the early conversations their family has had. Over the past several years we have been working to carefully code, review, and analyze the information these families have shared, and we have begun to present these findings at national and international conferences. We are also currently in the process of writing up these presentations for publication in a variety of journals, including those targeting adoption professionals and researchers, as well as those aimed towards audiences interested in child development and family processes more generally. It is our hope that the results of this research will help inform the practice of a wide range of professionals, in turn helping to provide a more substantial evidence base for the feedback and guidance provided to adoptive families. Through our efforts to share what we are learning, we hope that future generations of adoptive families will benefit from the generosity and openness of the families who shared their experiences with us.

Research that emphasizes normative processes in adoptive families is important. Many families are created through adoption, with over 2.1 million adopted children in the United States alone. Although a number of studies have indicated that the majority of adopted children are well adjusted, most of the adoption research to date has focused on risks and problem outcomes. Much less is known regarding normative adoptive family experiences. While adoptive families face unique challenges, they also provide an exciting opportunity to understand family processes and child development more generally. The Family Stories Project has been exploring a variety of processes related to adoptive family experiences, emotion communication, early adoption dialogues, and child and parent factors that influence the ways that early adoption communication unfolds.

Following are brief summaries, or abstracts, of some of the presentations we have made or will make at professional conferences. Once these presentations have been accepted for publication we will make copies of the articles available for download from this website.

Fathers, Mothers and Marriages: What Shapes Adoption Conversations in Adoptive Families with Young Children?

Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, 2005.

Objective: To identify factors that influence parental involvement in adoption dialogues with their young children.

Method: Participants were 66 internationally adoptive, heterosexual couples with a target child between the ages of 4-7. Each couple was jointly interviewed about their experiences in addressing the topic of adoption with their young children and their philosophies and strategies relevant to such discussions. In addition, each parent completed questionnaires assessing their marital satisfaction as well as their beliefs about how adoption influences family experience. The couples' interview was coded for specific content about how adoption had come up as a topic in the family and the roles that parents played in addressing it, thus providing information regarding each parent's level of involvement in adoption dialogues.

Results: Findings confirmed previous observations that mothers tend to be more actively involved in talking about adoption than fathers and that mothers take the lead in the adoption dialogue. Mothers who were highly involved in addressing adoption had husbands who were also more involved in adoption conversations with their children.

Correlates of adoption involvement varied by parent gender. Mothers were more involved with younger children, while fathers were more involved with children who had stronger verbal skills. Emphasis on the difference between biological vs. adoptive parenting was related to maternal, but not paternal, involvement. Finally, each parents' perception of the quality of the marital relationship played an important role in predicting their involvement in early adoption dialogues; parents who reported more positive marital relationships were more actively involved in adoption conversations.

Conclusions: Findings suggest an intricate interplay, influenced by gender roles, between the marital and co-parental dynamics that shape the process by which adoptive parents engage in communication with their children about what makes them a family.

Family processes that promote emotional competence and a sense of belonging in young internationally adopted children

Presented at the International Conference on Adoption Research, July 2006

The Family Stories Project examined how parents and young children begin the process of communicating about adoption, factors that influence the unfolding of these dialogues, and links between these early conversations and children's emotional security. Participants were 67 mothers and fathers and their 4- to 7-year-old internationally adopted children. Parents were interviewed jointly to assess their experiences and philosophies regarding communicating with young children about adoption; interviews were scored on multiple dimensions to assess parents' emotional availability (e.g., openness to dialogue, tolerance of children's negative emotion, and acknowledgement of their own feelings of ambivalence or loss). Target children were interviewed using an attachment-based story-stem task to assess the security of their self and family representations. Whole family units (including siblings) were observed interacting while jointly constructing a story of how their family began. Results indicated that parents' emotional availability was related to their provision of confident support during adoption dialogues. Furthermore, parents' emotional availability and provision of confident support were positively related to children's adoption integration and relationship security. Results also suggested a special role played by fathers, in that their provision of emotional support during the interaction task was more consistently related to the security of children's representations than was maternal behavior. When fathers were more involved in the adoption dialogue families had more positive affective exchanges during interaction. These results highlight the importance of emotionally open and supportive family interactions for adopted children's emotional well-being, as well as the unique qualities contributed by both mothers and fathers.

Child Emotion Regulation, Parenting, and Child Behavior Problems in Families with Internationally Adopted Children

Presented at the International Conference on Adoption Research, July 2006

The present study investigated the associations between parenting, child emotion regulation, and child behavioral problems in a sample of internationally adoptive families with young children. Participants were 67 families with adopted children between the ages of 4 to 7, all placed with their family prior to one year of age. Both mothers and fathers reported on their children's emotion regulation and behavior problems using standard parent-report measures. In addition, families were observed interacting during a task that requested the family unit to 'draw a picture together that tells the story of how your family began.' Parenting sensitivity was coded from observations of interaction during this drawing task. As expected, results revealed associations between poor child emotion regulation and child behavior problems. Both mothers' and fathers' reports revealed that poor emotion regulation was associated with higher levels of child externalizing behavior. There were few direct associations between the quality of parenting and child behavior outcomes. Rather, results indicated that child emotion regulation moderated the association between parenting and child outcomes; children with poor emotion regulation skills were most vulnerable to less sensitive parenting. Findings indicate that adopted children's behavioral outcomes may best be understood as reflecting complex interactions between child and adoptive family characteristics. Parenting an emotionally labile child poses unique challenges for parents; parents of children with poor emotion regulation skills may benefit from targeted preventative intervention as their children are also most vulnerable to the consequences of lapses in parenting sensitivity.

Qualitative papers in progress:

The richness of our data allow us to take an in-depth look at the varied experiences of adoptive families. Rather than just summarizing overall trends, we can explore how certain family processes unfold and how different families approach them in unique ways.

Current projects include the development of qualitative papers that examine:

• Parents' feelings and thoughts about early communication with their children about adoption;
• The experiences of adoptive families headed by same-sex co-parents;
• The experiences of adoptive fathers;
• How families address the images of birthparents as they talk with their young children about adoption.