Who’s most likely to adopt — or get adopted

We suspect reader Ryan Hanlon might have an ulterior motive for asking this, given that his LinkedIn lists him as president and CEO of the National Council for Adoption.

The answer: While adoption may have been more common in the tough-to-measure past, it’s surprisingly rare today.

Depending on the source, adopted children seem to make up 1 to 3 percent of America’s under-18 population. It’s the fifth most common relationship between a child and a head of household, narrowly ahead of foster care, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2022. The vast majority of kids are the biological children (88 percent) or grandchildren (8 percent) of the householder.

While the ACS provides stellar big-picture numbers, it’s hamstrung by its focus on a child’s relationship to a single head of household, regardless of the presence of their parent or parents. To map relationships further, we turned to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Unlike many of its rivals, the CPS lists both parents for every child.

This measure, at least, shows adoption is so rare that it’s about as common to live with only stepparents, a situation faced by 1.4 percent of children, roughly evenly split between those who have a single stepparent and those who have two stepparents, presumably because of family upheavals.

Meanwhile, 63 percent of children live with two biological parents and 25 percent live with a biological single parent.

In the case of stepparents, the answer seems obvious. The rest usually rely on foster care or private agencies.

There were 368,530 children in foster care in as of September 2022, according to the Children’s Bureau at the Department of Health and Human Services. Of those, 108,877 were waiting to be adopted. That year, 53,665 children were adopted with public agency involvement, typically meaning they came from the foster care system.

We don’t yet have estimates for 2022 adoptions outside of the foster system. With no national source (yet), folks have to cobble together the data from state and county records as it dribbles out. But Hanlon estimates that there were about 50,000 domestic private adoptions in 2019 and a pandemic-reduced 40,000 in 2020. In both years, about half of those adoptions involved stepparents.

Another 1,275 children were adopted from abroad in the year ending in September 2023, according to the State Department.

You may remember reader Kevin Foster from his peerless paper-check data. Well, Foster was moseying home from a Massachusetts grocery store one day when he overheard someone say, “Well, I’m adopted, so it’s okay.” No other context, but it got him thinking: What demographic groups are most likely to adopt?

It turns out gay married men with kids are12 times more likely to have adopted at least one of them than their straight married counterparts, according to the ACS. Women in same-sex marriages are over eight times more likely to adopt.

Paradoxically, as we’ll see later, the states with the fewest same-sex couples often adopt at the highest rates. That’s because same-sex couples, even today, only lead 1.6 percent of U.S. households, and a large majority of such households don’t include children. So even with sky-high adoption rates among same-sex couples with children, such couples only account for about 3.6 percent of adoptive families — usually not enough to move the needle.

Instead, national trends seem to be driven by race, particularly by high adoption rates among America’s White majority — only Native Americans have higher adoption rates. Adoption is also more popular among rural Americans and veterans.

Older couples with children are also more likely to have adopted. We assume that, as with same-sex couples, they’re choosing adoption due to biological factors as much as cultural ones.

West Virginia! It also had the fastest-rising adoption rate in the country between 2008 and 2022, according to the ACS. Based on your questions, we’re guessing some of you might point to the state’s abortion rate as an explanation — it was the fourth lowest in the country in 2019 and 2020 according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Beyond that Appalachian enclave, we saw a correlation between higher abortion rates and lower adoption rates, but it wasn’t entirely consistent. The states with the second and third highest adoption rates, Montana and Alaska, both protect abortion in their state constitutions according their courts and to KFF. They are, however, two of the states with the largest concentrations of Native Americans.

These demographic trends appear to drive most adoption trends. In addition to race, immigration — or lack thereof — seems to play a starring role. Native-born Americans are about twice as likely to adopt, and West Virginia has the lowest immigrant concentration of any state. Three of the states with the lowest adoption rates — California, New York and New Jersey — also have the most immigrants, even after adjusting for population size.

We had no answers until Angelique Day, associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and faculty affiliate at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, stepped in and did all our work for us. She confirmed her theories with a colleague, then called to walk us through an elegant explanation.

Native Americans are much more likely to be in the foster care system than their peers, ACS data shows. But while other marginalized groups with high foster care populations, notably African Americans, often get adopted by White families, many Native American children get placed with Native families thanks to the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Passed in 1978 to help counteract the horrific legacy of a system that removed a third of Native children from their homes, the act allows tribes to participate in adoption cases involving their citizens and prioritizes placing the child with relatives or members of the tribe.

Day encouraged us to think of Native American adoptions as similar to international adoptions, in which the rules are set by agreements between two governments — because that’s really what agreements between tribes and the feds are. This relationship has helped the large Native population in foster care translate into many adoptions by Native American families in a way that’s not possible for non-tribal communities.

The inverse relationship between immigration and adoption has, of course, one glaring exception: the adoptees themselves. Adoptees are about twice as likely to come from abroad as biological children, though that’s changing as international adoptions plummet.

State Department data shows international adoptions peaked in 2004 at 22,987 and have fallen more than 94 percent since then. In 2023, a year when 3,591,328 children were born in America, a record low of just 1,275 were adopted from abroad. Over that time, the flow of adoptees from China has fallen from 7,038 to 16, according to the State Department.

It’s not that Americans have lost interest in adopting from abroad or even just that geopolitics have changed, Hanlon told us. Instead, he ties plunging adoption rates to an international agreement to standardize adoptions that took effect in 2008. Meant to limit sketchy adoptions and human trafficking, it has instead raised costs and wait times to the point where many parents don’t dare begin the process.

“There’s still plenty of children who need and would greatly benefit from intercountry adoption, and there’s plenty of U.S. families that are open to adoption,” Hanlon said. But “we’ve put up a lot of red tape.”

A spokesperson for the State Department, which now oversees overseas adoptions, pointed out that such adoptions started their decline before the international agreement. Political changes, better living standards and other social and economic factors have reduced the number of children globally in need of adoption, the spokesperson said.

Beth Herman in Colorado was one of several readers who asked about transracial adoptions. From 2020 to 2022, more than a third of adopted children came from a different racial background than their head of household. That’s more than three times the rate for biological children, and substantially higher than the rates for grandchildren or stepchildren.

Put another way, most adoptions aren’t transracial. But only because 92 percent of White kids get adopted by White families, by far the highest in-group adoption rate. If you leave them out, the majority of non-White kids (56 percent) are adopted by parents of another race, and by “another race” we usually mean White.

Most notably, White people have adopted 2 out of 3 Asian adoptees in America. Most Black and Hispanic adoptees are adopted by Black and Hispanic parents, but in both cases, it’s a narrow majority (54 and 51 percent respectively) with White families close behind.

Herman tacked on a twist to the transracial adoption question: Do adoptees identify with the race of their adopted parents?

Adoptees almost always identify with their birth group, at least according to whoever took the time to fill out the Census Bureau’s exhaustive survey (we have no way of measuring how the child would have described themselves). For example, 98 percent of adoptees born in China are listed as Asian, a decent match for the 98 percent of China-born American adults who identify as Asian.

The only consistent exceptions, albeit minor ones, involve children from Hispanic countries. For example, 99 percent of Mexico-born adults in the United States describe themselves as Hispanic, compared with 95 percent of Mexico-born adopted children. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republican show similar patterns.

That makes sense. Hispanic ethnicity has long been a cultural designation rather than a racial one, though the lines could blur under upcoming Census Bureau policy changes. If an adoptee has been removed from that cultural context, it makes less sense to apply the designation.

Our friends at the Pew Research Center have seen the same trend among Americans descended from folks who hailed from Hispanic countries: Almost all first-generation immigrants identify as Hispanic, but their children and grandchildren are less likely to do so.

We don’t have enough data quite yet. We do not see adoptions of younger children rising in the states with abortion bans based on the CPS, but a better picture will emerge as more detailed data is released and our friends in academia start cracking their knuckles, too.

Greetings! The Department of Data craves questions. What are you curious about: What we now know about LGBTQ+ America? Whether Substack newsletter revenue is still growing? Who’s most likely to move in with their in-laws after marriage? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. We’ll mail this week’s envelopes to Hanlon, Foster, Herman and a ton of other readers, eveincluding Marvin J. Wolf in Asheville, N.C., who asked about Korean adoptees; Lesley Morgan of Carrollton, Tex., who asked about the effects of Roe being overturned; and David J. Smith of Rockville, Md., who asked about the geography of adoption, among other things.