Marriage, Adoption and What's Best for Children

by Marcia Segelstein

A recent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlights the ever-growing research that children are substantially better off when raised by their married parents.

Writer Jim Wooten cites the work of Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor of Family Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. Wilson spoke recently at a summit on Children, Marriage and Family Law. She analyzed research studies about what is best for children, and the results were crystal clear. “In virtually every study, weighing every variable – family structure, age, income, race, education – the evidence is overwhelming that children do better in families where married adults are rearing their biological children.”

But what about adopted children? Perhaps because Wilson herself was adopted as a child, she has paid special attention to this issue. In preliminary results, she found that adoptive parents “invest more [of themselves] in adoptive chidlren, on average, than biological parents do in their children.” She believes that adoption “shows that adults can be bound to children and protective of them…But what distinguishes adoptees from kids in boyfriend households that are fraught with peril for some kids is that both adults are committing to the child, permanently, for good, and with identical connections to the child. And they mean to be conneccted to the child, not just to one another.”

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