Adopted Children as Objects

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Adopted Kids as Guinea Pigs

If you've been hanging out here for a while you know I love research studies. It's part of my job, admittedly, but it goes much deeper than that. It's that geeky need for knowledge for knowledge's sake. I've admitted to being a research-based parent -- mother-instinct? phooey! Give me something empirical!

But this study, How can we boost IQs of “dull children”?: A late adoption study, bothers me. Here's the crux of it:

Our study contributes in a direct manner to the question of the extent to which environment, defined by the SES of adoptive parents, can alter the cognitive development of disadvantaged children after early childhood. Late adoption represents the only human situation that provides a scientific opportunity to conduct a methodological evaluation of the impact of a total change from a deprived environment to an enriched one.

What's bugging me about the study, I think, is that it really isn't about adoption. It's simply using adopted kids to prove some unrelated point about the malleability of IQ. At least in other studies where adopted kids are the guinea pigs, we're studying adoption, and hopefully coming up with a better understanding of adoption that will directly benefit the guinea pigs. Here, the adopted kids are merely instruments who happen to inhabit "the only human situation" that allows for a study of something unrelated to adoption. There's just something icky about that, to my mind.