Browsing by Author "Tuomi, Ilona"

Objective: The goal of this review was to gather information about the mixed families with both adopted and biological children. Special characteristics of these families are reviewed and the positive and negative effects of biological children in the adoptive family are considered in the light of the wellbeing of the family. Adoption research has focused on family structure, but only a few studies include mixed families. The data collected during the last decades has been diverse and few conclusions have been made about the generalization of the results. Some adoption agencies however refrain from placing children into families where there are several children already in the family. In this review the main question is “how the mixed family structure affects the adoption outcome”. Methods: The data was gathered mainly by using Google Scholar with combinations of the search terms ”adoption, family structure, biological children, natural families, mixed family, biological families” and looking at the references form the found studies. Unfortunately, some of the potential articles were not available in university the University of Helsinki library service. Finnish articles and masters theses were also looked for, but only one was found on this subject. Results and conclusions: The presence of biological children in the family might affect the adjustment and problem behavior of the adopted children. However not all the studies in this review found the link between these variables. Greater number of children also predicted increased parental stress. Parents evaluated their adopted and biological children differently and provided more resources for the adopted child. It seems like parents compensated for the poorer early childhood and basis of the adopted children compared to the biological children and supported the adopted ones to bring them to the same level as their biological ones. The conclusion is that family structure matters. However, it should not be given too much value when choosing a family for a child because it is not obvious what kind of an effect it has on the lifelong outcome.