Stress in parents of adopted children

Stress associated with adoptive parenthood was studied in a sample of parents of 104 children below the age of 12 adopted several years before. Most of the children were adopted when they were babies, all were adopted through national adoption programs and very few matched a profile of initial adversity or of special needs. High correlations were found between mothers' and fathers' stress scores, which were in some aspects similar to, and in others lower than, that of normative data. The hierarchical regression analysis on the stress experienced by the mothers showed that both the features of children and of parents, as well as features concerning the use of support resources, are significantly predictive of stress scores for adoptive parenthood.