The Love Value of Food

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Part 1: Press, Study Slam Adoptive Parents

Adding fuel to the flames ignited by publication of research in the prestigious Economic Journal, a BBC report announced that "adopted children 'get fed less'," cited the researchers' inference that parents care more about their children when there's a biological connection, and blandly stated that a 5% difference in spending tends to go to the purchase of alcohol and tobacco.

Once again, we see journalism portraying adoption and adoptive families in a highly negative light, and published research promoting inferences and assumptions taken at face value without input from the adoption social research community.

What follows is a brief review of wording directly from the online version of the study, and some relatively simple observations.

What the Study Actually Says

More of this Feature
•Part 2: S. African Data?
•Part 3: Our Response

Elsewhere on the Web •Mothers & Others: Health
•The Study - Full Text

Titled How Hungry is the Selfish Gene?,
the study was a product of the MacArthur Research Network on Poverty and Inequality in a Broader Perspective, in cooperation with Princeton University. It claims that the type of relationship (biological, adoptive, step, foster) between mothers and the children in their homes has a direct bearing on how much money is spent on food - and on nutritional food.

Data and findings are reported for adoptive and foster families as well as step families, which appear to be the primary target of the study. The researchers summarize the results of earlier studies which found that children in stepfamilies are "less successful" than children raised by two biological parents (as measured by academic success, behavioral problems, and a variety of other outcomes) and suggest in the online version of the study:

A complementary explanation is that step parents may not care about sustaining someone else's genetic line, and may for this reason invest less heavily in non-biological children.

Offering this possibility as one reason for stepchildren's decreased success, the researchers expanded the focus of this earlier research by studying food expenditures, as one example of investment in offspring, for all types of non-biological parent-child relationships, including adoptive parents. The researchers report their results as follows:

We find, comparing food expenditure by family type, holding constant household size, age composition and income, that in those households in which a child is raised by an adoptive, step or foster mother, less is spent on food.

and imply that adoptive and other non-biological parents systematically make less of an investment in food (as an "important input into the production of healthy children") because they are not genetically related.

And when US data didn't offer enough information to support conclusions, they were supplemented with data from South Africa:

While we can say with some certainty that a woman's relationship to thechildren in her household has an effect on food spending in the United States, we cannot pinpoint where the reductions occur. It is possible that less food spending has positive effects on children, if the spending foregone were, say, on sugars and fats. [emphasis added] As a test of the robustness of our results, and to see where the reductions occur, we turn to South Africa...

And we learn from South African data that:

...when young children live with their biological mothers, the household spends significantly less on tobacco (about 5 percent less), less on alcohol (about 15 percent less)...

and the study concludes:

The presence of a child's biological mother appears to increase expenditure on an important input into the production of healthy children - food.

Researchers based their conclusions on US data during the period 1968-1985, and on South African data from 1995.

Next page > Why South African Data? > Page 1, 2, 3

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