lives. It is still too soon to know how these changes will
influence the lives of individuals who are touched by
adoption.
There is no question that adoption, as a social ser-
vice practice, has become exceedingly complex. In
turn, this complexity has given rise to many contro-
versies among social service and mental health pro-
fessionals, and has fostered a greater degree of
challenge for adoptive family members. Yet for all the
changes that emerged in this field in the twentieth
century, it is important not to lose sight of one impor-
tant point: Adoption was created, in part, to provide
family permanency for children and to foster their
physical, psychological, educational, and spiritual
well-being. Although certainly not a perfect system,
adoption has been quite successful in achieving these
goals.
See also: PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS;
PARENTING
Bibliography
Brodzinsky, David M., Daniel W. Smith, and Anne B. Brodzinsky.
Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Is-
sues. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
Brodzinsky, David M., Marshall D. Schechter, and Robin M.
Henig. Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self. New York:
Doubleday, 1992.
Grotevant, Harold D., and Ruth G. McRoy. Openness in Adoption:
Exploring Family Connections. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
Melina, Lois R. Raising the Adopted Child. New York: HarperCollins,
1998.
Register, Cheri. Are Those Your Kids? American Families with Children
Adopted from Other Countries. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Reitz, Miriam, and Kenneth W. Watson. Adoption and the Family Sys-
tem. New York: Guilford Press, 1992.
Sachdev, Paul. Unlocking the Adoption Files. Lexington, MA: Lexing-
ton Books, 1989.
Schulman, Irving, guest ed. ‘‘Adoption’’ (special issue). Future of
Children 3, no. 1 (1993).
David M. Brodzinsky
AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHILDREN
African-American children are individuals under the
age of eighteen who include among their ancestors
individuals who were forcibly brought from African
countries to the Americas as slaves beginning in the
early 1600s. In 1998, of the 69.9 million children in
the United States, 15 percent were African American.
Although the majority of poor children in the United
States are of European ancestry, annual rates of pov-
erty among African-American children typically are
two to three times that of non-Latino European-
American children. In 1997, for example, 37 percent
of African-American children lived in families with in-
comes below the official poverty threshold, compared
to 15 percent of European-American children. Afri-
can-American children also are far more likely than
non-Hispanic European-American children to expe-
rience long-term poverty. Poverty among non-
Hispanic European-American children is primarily a
transitory phenomenon. An analysis that focused on
children who were between birth and five years of age
in 1982 tracked these children over a ten-year period
(1982–1991). Although 41 percent of the African-
American children never experienced poverty during
this period, 43 percent were poor for at least three of
the ten years, 28 percent were poor for six or more
years, and 17 percent were poor for at least nine
years. The comparable figures for non-African-
American children were 79 percent, 9 percent, 3 per-
cent, and 1 percent, respectively (U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services 1999). These racial dis-
parities are alarming because it is well established that
experiencing poverty year after year has more detri-
mental effects on cognitive development, school
achievement, and socioemotional functioning than
experiencing poverty occasionally (Duncan and
Brooks-Gunn 1997).Equally as striking are racial differences in net fi-
nancial assets (readily liquid sources of wealth that
can be used for a family’s immediate needs and de-
sires such as savings accounts, stocks, and bonds)
within households at similar income levels. In the late
1980s, African Americans in high-income households
(over $50,000) possessed only 23 cents of median net
financial assets for every dollar of assets held by Euro-
pean Americans. African-American children are fur-
ther disadvantaged because they are more likely to
live in poor, isolated urban ghettos than European
Americans of similar economic status. On average,
these communities have fewer social, educational,
and occupational resources that enhance children’s
development (e.g., high quality child care), and in
many cases are plagued by high rates of crime and vi-
olence related to gang- and drug-related activities.
Even when African Americans escape poverty at the
family level, they have a 50 percent chance of encoun-
tering it in their neighborhoods. The social, educa-
tional, and economic resources of neighborhoods can
influence children in a multitude of developmental
areas. For example, children who grow up in affluent
neighborhoods or neighborhoods with a higher per-
centage of affluent families have higher cognitive
functioning, complete more years of school, and have
lower school dropout rates than children from eco-
nomically similar families who grow up in poor neigh-
borhoods or neighborhoods with proportionately
fewer affluent families.14 AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHILDREN