Adoption: Coping Constructively with the Social and Psychological Contexts

Abstract

The Demographic Context. Adoption has become a focus of growing public attention in the 1980s, reflecting a number of major demographic and attitudinal changes in the adopting parents, the children who are adopted, and the birth mothers who release them for adoption. People who adopt children today tend to be older than in the past. One reason for this is that many members of the baby-boom generation delayed starting their families until they entered the years of declining fertility. For many infertile couples, adoption becomes the most promising method of creating a family. Single people wishing to become parents also are turning to adoption. They, too, are usually older, having waited some years before concluding that they would not marry. Some couples who already have one or more children adopt older children because of a belief in zero population growth, or for health or other reasons.