Does what does not bend me strengthen me? The case of adoptive families in the face of the pandemic

The spread of Covid-19 has represented a great challenge for all families and numerous studies have documented an increase in parental stress and the incidence of psychological distress in parents. Most of the knowledge to date concerns parents with biological children. We know very little about adoptive families. We asked ourselves: how did they deal with the challenges posed by the pandemic? We asked a sample of 1,011 Italian parents (average age of 52) in different family forms (e.g. intact, separated/divorced, adoptive families, etc.) to participate in an online survey in the period between May and October 2021.

The results (Canzi et al., submitted) showed four ways in which parents perceived changes in family life during the pandemic: we identified them with the categories "light shade", "light shade", "dark shade", "hyper-reactive shade". Specifically, some parents (36.4%) perceive a medium-high level of positive changes and a medium level of negative changes (a modality called "chiaroscuro shade"). About a third of parents (30.6%) perceive a high level of positive changes and a low level of negative changes (a modality called "light shade") and report lower levels of psychological distress, both compared to parents characterized by high levels of negative changes and low levels of positive changes ("dark shade").", 12.4%), and those that show high levels of negative changes and equally high levels of positive changes ("hyper-reactive", 20.1%).

How do adoptive families fit into this framework? They are more likely to manifest what we have called "light tones", thus demonstrating that they are able, better than others, to proactively deal with the changes related to the pandemic. It is likely that the challenges related to the adoption process have somehow served as "training" to enhance one's skills.

From an in-depth study conducted on a portion of this large sample, selecting only mothers with both biological and adopted children aged between 6 and 25 years (Ferrari et al., submitted), results emerged that go in the same direction.

These results showed that adoptive mothers appear less vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic than mothers with biological children, as they show that they have more resources at the individual, couple and social level: in fact, adoptive mothers show higher levels of sense of coherence (i.e. the ability to perceive stressful events as manageable and controllable), And they feel more supported both by their partner and by their friend network. However, the picture is not entirely rosy: compared to mothers with biological children, they show lower levels of satisfaction in the relationship with their child, probably as a result of the greater fragility that adopted children often manifest.

In conclusion, adoptive families seem to have many resources on an individual, relational and social level to cope with the challenges posed by the pandemic, to an even greater extent than families with biological children. It is also true that they face additional challenges related to the path of adoption, and that they therefore need specific support from the social network so that they can fully exploit those numerous resources widely identified in the research just presented.