Adoption

Abstract

The kind of home an adopted child finds himself in, the material circumstances, and the attitudes of parents and relatives towards adoption, and to the particular adopted child, are all important to the development and happiness of that child. In many respects adoptive families are like other families in that they tend to contain two parents and conform to accepted family norms. But, like single-parent families, foster families, and other ‘anomalous’ families, they do have distinctive characteristics; in evolution they do not conform to the usual family life cycle and because of their special characteristics they should be considered as a variant from the conventional family.