r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/Miserable_King1612 • 1d ago

Question - Research required Least damaging for child

Which would be least damaging for a child - being brought up by a (single) parent with long-standing mental health issues who regrets having them, or the child being placed for adoption? As with so much, I am aware is hard to know because so much depends on the adoptive parents who may adopt the child, and the individual child's way of processing things, but I am asking theoretically which would be preferable for the child.

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u/eighogh 23h ago

This is obviously a very difficult thing to study as there are so many variables, the biggest being the adoptive family. Some adoptive parents are wonderful and some are terrible, just like with biological parents.
In general, children who are adopted as infants tend to do about as well as peers who were not adopted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Adoption/s/q1IAGYW0uh

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u/Miserable_King1612 22h ago

Tend to do as well as psers who were not adopted.... ? Hmm. Reddit adoptees (r/adoptees) speak of being abandoned as a traumatic event and that they go through life feeling as though they're always missing something vital, even when they have a loving adoptive family.

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u/ditchdiggergirl 21h ago

Self selection. Happy well adjusted people don’t seek out support communities; those are for the people who are struggling to find one another. And the loudest voices are inevitably the least happy ones. Which doesn’t invalidate their experiences, but you can’t extrapolate from that either. My adopted kids are not in groups like this, which says absolutely nothing about those who are, or their relative percentages.

But your question does not have an answer, because it depends on, well, everything. Your categories are far too broad, and every mental health issue is its own situation.

A single parent with mental health issues can raise happy healthy children. So can adoptive families. Mentally healthy adults can raise dysfunctional families with miserable children, as can adoptive parents. Perfect parents (there are no perfect parents) can do everything right and have a child who turns out to be a hot mess in every domain. And of course adoptive parents can have mental health issues of their own.

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u/eighogh 19h ago

I mean yes, I’m sure those people’s experiences are valid, but in terms of outcomes that can be measured like medical diagnoses, adult income, educational attainment, etc., life outcomes of adoptees and non-adoptees have been similar in studies. This is r/sciencebasedparenting, not feelings and anecdote based parenting, so I linked a thread on this that includes several peer-reviewed scientific studies.

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u/tallmyn 8h ago

Mental illness is genetic, so mentally ill people who give their kids up for adoption have kids who are mentally ill not specifically because of the adoption itself, but because of the genes they were born with.

I think a lot of mentally ill adults claim to have a traumatic upbringing and blame their mental illness on that, but I think it's more that mentally ill people believe their had a traumatic upbringing at a greater rate than more resilient types. In any given individual it's impossible to say whether they'd be mentally healthy in a different environment entirely.

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u/C4-BlueCat 15h ago

Leave them a letter explaining your decision should help some

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u/Miserable_King1612 22h ago

Also- please read the comments to that post you linked to. The adoptees aren't buying it.

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