Adoption: A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12541 |
| Author | Kevin J. A. Thomas,Ashley Larsen Gibby |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
A L G K J. A. T The Pennsylvania State University
Adoption: A Strategy to Fulll Sex Preferences of
U.S. Parents
Objective: This article examines adoption as a
strategy used by parents in the United States
to fulll their preference for a specic sex com-
position among their children.
Background: Evidence from the United States
suggests that parents with children of the same
sex are more likely to continue childbearing,
as parents generally desire at least one girl
and one boy. What is unknown, however, is
whether parents use adoption to fulll this same
preference.
Method: Using data from the 2016 American
Community Survey (n=1,107,800 children), the
authors test the relationships among the sex
composition of preceding siblings, child sex, and
adoption status.
Results: Children who had same-sex preced-
ing siblings were more likely to be adopted,
as opposed to biologically related to their par-
ents, than children who had mixed-sexpreceding
siblings. Furthermore, adopted children were
more likely to be of the missing sex (i.e., adopted
girls were more likely than were adopted boys
to have only preceding brothers).
Conclusion: These ndings suggest a need
to consider parental sex preferences and child
sex in studies on adoption decisions. Fur-
thermore, the results point to adoption as
an additional mechanism parents can use
to achieve a balanced sex composition among
their children.
Department of Sociology and Criminology, The
Pennsylvania State University,State College, PA 16801
(agl132@psu.edu).
Key Words: Adoption, Children, Demography, Family For-
mation, Gender,Siblings.
Parents in the United States tend to prefer a
“balanced” family, with at least one boy and
one girl (for a review, see Lundberg, 2005, p.
340). Several researchers have found that par-
ents with children of the same sex are more
likely to continue childbearing than are parents
with one son and one daughter, presumably in
the pursuit of creating a gender-balanced family
(e.g., Ben-Porath & Welch, 1976; Tian & Mor-
gan, 2015). What remains unknown, however,
is whether parents use adoption as an alternate
strategy to fulll these preferences.
Adoption may pose a strategy that is more
efcient for parents wishing to fulll their
sex preferences. As opposed to childbearing,
adoption grants parents greater control over the
demographic characteristics of their children,
as parents can decide whether to adopt based
on the characteristics of the child. Therefore,
as total fertility rates remain near or below
replacement level (2.1 children per woman) in
many industrialized countries, adoption could
be important to parents seeking to fulll their
preference for a gender-balanced family while
avoiding having more children than desired.
We use data from the American Commu-
nity Survey (ACS) to examine the relationships
among the sex composition of preceding sib-
lings, child sex, and adoption status. This study
provides the rst representative assessment of
the role sex preferences play in U.S. adoption.
B
Sex Preferences for Children
Research in the United States has documented
that parents continue childbearing if they have
Journal of Marriage and Family 81 (April 2019): 531–541 531
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12541
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