Adoption Facts

(This is a photo of me and my husband's hands on our birthmom's belly.)

Children of Married Parents
Children who live with married parents tend to have higher grades, are more likely to attend college, and experience lower rates of unemployment.

On average, children of married parents experience better physical and mental health, have lower rates of substance abuse, experience less child abuse, and are less likely to commit suicide or engage in criminal behavior.

“What has been shown over and over again to contribute most to the emotional development of the child is a close, warm, sustained, and continuous relationship with both parents.”

Children of Single Parents
Children raised by a single mother are six times more likely to live in poverty, twice as likely to drop out of high school, and two to three times more likely to have serious emotional and behavioral problems than children who grow up with both parents.

During middle childhood, children raised by single parents have high rates of chronic health and psychiatric disorders.

On average, teens from single-parent homes are more attached to their peer groups and less attached to their parents’ opinions.

As teenagers and young adults, “being raised in a single-mother family is associated with elevated risks of teenage childbearing, . . . incarceration and with being neither employed nor in school.”

Children of unmarried women are likely to need to assume adult roles prematurely.

“Single mothers . . . report less perceived social support, fewer contacts with friends and family, and lower levels of social involvement than married mothers.”

Benefits of Adoption
“On an index of self-esteem, adopted adolescents compare favorably to” those who were not adopted.

Children who were adopted as infants have better health, see mental health professionals less often, have fewer behavioral problems, and do better in school than children born outside of marriage and raised by the unmarried mother.

This information was from ItsAboutLove.org