Open adoption is becoming a common element of preparation for and ongoing services in infant and special-needs adoptions. This article discusses the results of a recent survey of 1,268 adoptive parents (1,396 adoptions) in California, in which questions were asked concerning openness and ongoing contact with biological parents. Postplacement contact with biological parents was common in this sa...

The studies reported here aimed to test the proposal that mind-mindedness is a quality of personal relationships by assessing mind-mindedness in caregiver-child dyads in which the relationship has not spanned the child's life or in which the relationship has been judged dysfunctional. Studies 1 and 2 investigated differences in mind-mindedness between adoptive parents (ns = 89, 36) and biologic...

This study contrasted offsprings' attachment patterns and recollections of parent characteristics in two college samples: 147 females from intact biological parents and 157 females of parental divorce. Secure females from intact or non-intact families rated parents positively, while insecure females rated parents as absent, distant, and demanding. In contrast to females from intact families, fe...

BACKGROUND Selecting appropriate controls for studies of genetic variation in case series is important. The two major candidates involve the use of blood donors or a random sample of the population. METHODS We compare and contrast the two different populations of controls for studies of genetic variation using data from parents enrolled in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (...

Warm and responsive parenting is optimal for child development, but this style of parenting may be difficult for some parents to achieve. This study examines how parents’ observed warmth and their reported frequency of parent–child activities were related to children’s classifications as having biological risks or a range of disability indicators. Children were low-income prekindergarteners who...

BACKGROUND Cycle accidents are a common cause of physical injury in children and adolescents. Education is one strategy to reduce cycle-related injuries. In the UK, some children undertake National Cycle Proficiency Scheme [NCPS] training (now known as Bikeability) in their final years of primary school. It aims to promote cycling and safe cycling behaviours but there has been little scientific...

As many as 3% of children in the United States live in kinship care arrangements with caregivers who are relatives but not the biological parents of the child. A growing body of evidence suggests that children who cannot live with their biological parents fare better, overall, when living with extended family than with nonrelated foster parents. Acknowledging this, federal laws and public polic...

Objectives Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) clusters in families, but the familial risk of IBS has not been determined in adoptees. Studying adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents is a strong study design for separating genetic from environmental causes of familial clustering. This nationwide study aimed to separate the biological (genetic) and familial environmental contribution to t...

I examine whether the effect of parents' education on children's educational achievement and attainment varies by family structure and, if so, whether this can be explained by differential parenting practices. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that as parents' education increases, children in single mother families experience a lower boost in their achiev...

In Finland, all parents, regardless of gender, are eligible for parental leave and there no restrictive eligibility criteria. practice, however, the statutory options not equally available to parents. Since 1970s, steps have been taken in redesigning scheme make it more inclusive. Several reforms made promote equality, mainly between women men, but also diverse families, such as adoptive multip...