by Kate Reder
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The Psychology Building at Wesleyan University --------- A child waiting to be adopted
"My sister adopted a child from Korea 7 weeks ago," Steve Petrill explains to me on a rainy afternoon in his office in the psychology department at Wesleyan University. "And my wife and I had a child 8 weeks ago. And it's kind of funny because, you know, I didn't set this stuff up to study my sister. I'm not like that!" He says, leaning back in his chair, arms spread wide above his head, laughing. It is, however, a convenient coincidence for Petrill, who is currently working on 2 studies focussing on adopted young children. Petrill's research has the broad goal of trying to distinguish genetic influences from environmental ones, something that is facilitated by the introduction of a biologically unrelated child into a family ripe with influence that can easily be differentiated from genetic traits.
One of the studies that Petrill is working on involves a mix of questionnaires and home-visits. The challenge for Petrill and his research partner at the University of Oregon is to try to at once quantify the environment, and to determine what the environment is comprised of. This is where the questions of early-language and number of books in the home come into play. Petrill explains common conceptions of "environment" as the idea that "many people feel that children lay back and are pumped full of environment. The problems I see are twofold: 1) that this neglects data which suggests that children seek out their own environments (as opposed to just passively receiving them) and 2) that we really have very little idea of what the environment really is or how to measure it.." With this in mind, Petrill and his colleague at The University of Oregon, Dr. Kirby Deater-Deckard, designed a study. He asks parents to fill out questionnaires, allow their children to be videotaped in different interactive situations, and he checks in with periodic home-visits. Just now, Petrill and his research partner are starting up an internet component, which is less expensive, and will clearly help to get a huge sample size. "We can't visit them all, but at least we'll have them somewhere," Petrill says. Plus, questionnaires "allow us not to bother familiesÖthey can do it on their own time." As a back-up, Petrill visits a sub-sample of homes, and finds that in general, "you find the same kind of result. You're doing something right."
Petrill's real interest is the early language, social, and cognitive development of children. "I am interested in what predicts why one child will have reading disabilities and why another won'tÖA lot of studiesÖsay 'here's an index of books in the home, and here's the child's reading score.' They try to find the connection between point A and point B. One of the major problems with that kind of research is that you have biologically related family members living together in the same home. So you don't know: are there a lot of books in the home because the parents are trying to encourage reading, or is it that the parents and the child share a love of and skill at reading?" The problem, he explains, is that this is a situation where genes and environment are tangled. In order to see more clearly, Petrill is looking at children who have been adopted and are between the ages of 5 and 10.
An obvious road-block here is that there are other environments in the children's lives, pre-adoption environments, that can never be known, especially because about half of Petrill's sample is drawn from outside the U.S.. Because there's evidence that early exposure to language sounds impacts later language-related abilities, Petrill explained, that in particular is an important factor to know. One adoption agency in China with whom Petrill deals is working on an experimental program to ease children's transition into American life. "It is pre-adoption, pre-life-change information."
And there obviously is a life change involved, as part of Petrill's research centers around bicultural socialization. When asked whether there is generally much discussion about the introduction of a child from another culture into a family, Petrill notes the common "need to understand that cultureÖwhere the child has come from." He points out that a sense of history is important to not only the child, but to the parents. Some children, he says, are given the choice to participate in cultural activities from their birth- place and decide not to. For others, the choice to blend into the adoptive family may not be such a viable option. "In my sister's case, my nephew is Korean and whenever he's with his parents, at school, at the grocery store, people are going to see that he's not biologically related to them. Parents reallyÖhave to prepare their child to deal with, unfortunately, [those] kinds of questions [of identity]."
One factor that is heartening, but that may muddle his study, is the amount of love and real effort put into gaining a child in adoptive households. "It's unlikely to find a really unhealthy adoptive family," Petrill notes, simply because of how hard a family must work to adopt. It is a matter of adults electing in the most conscious way to be parents. They are, by definition, the kinds of parents who are going to take no chances, to think the most about their influence on the child. "You're looking at the top portion of parents, if you have a distribution." This kind of household surely has an impact on a child, particularly those coming from more desperate circumstances in other countries. "I just visited a family a couple of weeks ago where a child had come from very deprived circumstances, and saw them last year and this year, and the improvement in that child is astounding, and that's because of the attentive parenting we see."
Petrill elected himself to be a part of this academic, study-littered
world of psychology. "I just wanted to find the best way to help people.
I found that after working in that situation [with mentally challenged
children and adults in a residential summer camp] I was burning out. There
were four of us and 40 people we were working withÖ.We didn't have the
right resources. I felt like for my own skills, I could do more for more
people through research. I really enjoy research, I enjoy having under-grads
in my lab." Another benefit to Petrill's lifestyle here, he says, is his
interaction with such involved parents. "I really enjoy going to the home
studies, and as a new parent I think: so this is how you parent. Now I
understand."