in the sense of systematic effects of the environment. Adoptive children-- a third of adoptive families adopt a second child, and they're genetically unrelated to each other.They correlate zero. Whereas siblings who grow up together and share genes, they correlate substantially-- 0.2 for personality and 0.3 for, say, cognitive development.
I did a study in Sweden of over 100 pairs of identical twins reared apart, as well as other adoption designs like biological parents and their adopted-away kids, adoptive siblings, biological siblings adopted apart, and increasingly DNA.You can use DNA itself in unrelated individuals to estimate heritability, but it would take too long to explain that now, but it's kind of the hot new thing.
A good policy at this point, and I think it will continue to be improved upon, is inclusive, fully inclusive, of same-sex parents and adoptive parents. It equalizes the time offered to both women and men, doing away with this whole notion of primary and secondary parents. It allows for intermittent leave.
I always say that I'm lucky. And my adoptive father is now suffering from Alzheimer's.
I have an abundance of moms. I've got my adoptive mom, my twin's adoptive mom-- she's an actress, and so she has what she calls a momager. So this idea of reconceiving family not just as strict DNA.
And this summarizes 20 years of research. We also had matched non-adoptive families who share genes and environment with their kids. So general learning ability, which we call g to avoid the word intelligence, which is just like a red flag to a bull for people,
So there were same sex parents who had carried the baby and same sex parents who had not carried the baby. There were single moms, adoptive moms, moms who use surrogates. I really wanted to see what do we all have in common, and what parts of our experience can we pull from one another to be this giant working mom
There was a major drive, as in when it comes to family, no one would ever let go of family. And I didn't want to be disrespectful to my adoptive family, but in my latter age-- I'm coming up to 30. I'm an adult. I didn't tell them about my searching until later on I achieved what I wanted to achieve.
never met, but they share some genes, about 50% of their genes. Much closer to their weight than the weight of the adoptive parents, who again are deciding what they eat most of the time. So that suggests genes matter more than environment for this outcome, for weight.
And so, for the first time-- by that point, we were six or seven years into the company of, literally, just around the clock-- around the clock. I become the guardian of the court when he gets taken away from his abusive adoptive mother.
Dev and and the others there too is um it was just another sort of level I guess um which not only myself but my family got to see it too my adoptive family and um and also you know people um in the world too. What was it like to see it with your adopted family? I
So the book also describes a study I've done for 40 years called the Colorado Adoption Project, which is about 250 families-- adoptive families-- where we had data on the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and the adopted kids longitudinally through adulthood from infancy to adulthood. And this summarizes 20 years of research.
It started pretty sort of straightforward in that way, and then I started to just look for people who would talk to me. So immigration lawyers, immigration policy scholars, adoptive parents, because Kavya and Rishi end up being foster parents to Soli's child. Yeah, so in all of these realms, people who'd undergone fertility treatments, just anyone who would talk to me about their experience,
Because the imagery, presumably, was a lot different from when you had left, and your memories of it from when you had left. And I'm in the process of writing the prequel to "Lion," which is talking about how from adoptive mother
concrete plant in British Columbia. And so I went and met him. He's a great father with children that that he subsequently had and raised and and so he he's a very good man as well. And my my adoptive father is a a teacher and uh he gave me a lot of uh wonderful lessons and I think is responsible for my way with words.
And this is a universal for humans. In, humans the caregiver-- the primary caregiver might be the mother, the caregiver might be the father, the caregiver might be an adoptive mother or father, it might be the grandparent, and so on.
The adoption design separates that by studying parents who are related genetically to their kids-- these are birth parents who relinquish their kids for adoption at birth, so they share nature, but not nurture-- and then adoptive parents who adopt those kids early in life and share nurture, but not nature.
early in life and share nurture, but not nature. So the book also describes a study I've done for 40 years called the Colorado Adoption Project, which is about 250 families-- adoptive families-- where we had data on the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and the adopted kids longitudinally through adulthood from infancy to adulthood.
And it's not an unreasonable hypothesis. But if it's nurture, that is the parents are giving the kids the environment they need to develop cognitively, you'd have to predict that the adoptive parents ought to be just about as similar to their adopted kids.
Oh, that one. I have this-- I don't have children, but I do have a son that was a reborn baby. It's one of these things that they make them really seriously, and you have to get an adoptive mother to make it. And they take this baby doll.
Because the imagery, presumably, was a lot different from when you had left, and your memories of it from when you had left. Even though I went through so much trials and tribulations, I came out at the end, from my adoptive mother's perspective,
So I made that a part of what I did, and I started covering fatherhood a lot more. If I had a same sex domestic partner and he adopted a baby but I did not adopt his baby, so I'm not a co-adoptive parent, I
One of the things that I always thought was funny about Harry is that, as far as I can tell, Harry has never read a novel. You would think that, you know, having spent so much of his early life, locked in a closet, with his abusive kind of adoptive family, all he would have done would be to read and re-read the Narnia books, over and over and over again.
But that couple decided that they wanted a girl. Some part of Steve woke up when you he separated from his birth mother-- I mean I think so-- and after that, because his adoptive mother didn't embrace
residence, the more they adopted the same diseases and disorders, including mental diseases, of the new adoptive country that they've joined.
details. So you have to use the Web or some of the electronics, somewhere that's adoptive