Family experience shapes how children view nature vs. nurture
Adopted and donor-conceived children hold reduced genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived children (Peretz-Lange, 2024)
Peretz-Lange R, Kaebnick H. (2024) Adopted and donor-conceived children hold reduced genetic-essentialist beliefs relative to traditionally-conceived children. Dev Psychol. 2024 Oct 31. doi: 10.1037/dev0001846.
Geographic Region: United States, United Kingdom, Australia
Research Question: Do adopted and donor-conceived (ADC) children differ in their genetic-essentialist judgments compared to traditionally conceived (TC) children?
Note: The authors describe genetic essentialism as a belief that a person's characteristics are primarily determined by their biological inheritance or genetic material rather than their environment or experiences.
Design: Researchers developed a cross-sectional experimental trial to investigate how children think about inherited traits. Children watched and listened to cartoon adoption stories accompanied by simple illustrations. After each story, researchers asked children to predict whether the baby would grow up to be more like their birth parents or their adoptive parents. They tested five different characteristics: hair color (a physical trait), spoken language (a learned trait), personality (quiet/loud), interests (sports/music), and intelligence (smart/not so smart). They included comprehension checks to ensure children understood the stories, counterbalanced the order of presentation to prevent sequence effects, and carefully designed the cartoon parents to avoid visual matching biases. They also had parents fill out a questionnaire about their beliefs about inherited traits.
Sample:
95 children aged 4 - 8 years. 30 were adopted or donor conceived. 65 were traditionally conceived, meaning they were biologically related to both their parents.
More than 80% of the children knew about how they were conceived or their adoption story, whether they were adopted, donor-conceived, or traditionally conceived.
The thirty children who were either adopted or donor-conceived included:
4 kids in two-parent families who were adopted and not biologically related to either parent
17 kids in two-parent families who were donor-conceived and related to one parent
1 child in a two-parent family who was conceived using eggs and sperm from donors
1 child in a two-parent family who came from a donor embryo
6 kids who had a single parent and were conceived using a donor
1 child with a single parent who used a donor embryo
Most of the kids lived in the United States (78 children), some lived in the United Kingdom (10 children), and a couple lived in Australia (2 children). Five families didn't say where they lived.
Participants were mostly white (61%) and female (62%), and the median household income was $100,000/year.
Participants were recruited via social media.
Key Findings
Children who were adopted or donor-conceived were less likely to think that babies would grow up to be like their genetic parents compared to traditionally conceived children.
When asked whether a child would be like their genetic parents or adoptive parents, traditionally conceived children were three times more likely to choose birth parents than adopted or donor-conceived children were.
As children got older, they started to think differently about different kinds of traits. For example, they might think hair color comes from birth parents but language comes from the parents who raise you. This understanding of different traits became even stronger in adopted and donor-conceived children as they got older. Both groups of children - adopted/donor-conceived and traditionally conceived - were more likely to say that physical traits like hair color came from birth parents compared to other characteristics.
No significant differences found in parents' genetic-essentialist beliefs between groups.
Limitations: Grouped adopted and donor-conceived children together despite important differences. Sample only included children who knew their conception history early. Focused solely on genetic-essentialism rather than other dimensions of essentialist thinking. Limited sample size for detecting subtle differences between subgroups. Potential self-selection bias in recruitment through support organizations.
Applications: The results provide new information about how adopted and donor-conceived children conceive of children’s relatedness to nonbiological parents and suggest that adopted and donor-conceived children who are aware of their conception histories are more inclined than traditionally conceived children to view parents as shaping their children through the family environments (nurture) in addition to biological material (nature).
Funding Source: Society for Personality and Social Psychology Small Grant (Award #22-1-012)
Lead Author: Rebecca Peretz-Lange is a faculty member at Vassar College who brings both academic expertise and personal experience as a parent of a donor-conceived child and as an egg donor.