A long-term follow-up with late-adopted children and their adoptive mothers: attachment models and developmental outcomes during adolescence.

Introduction. Attachment theorists and researchers (Van den Dries et al., 2009) have suggested that the adoption of abandoned children would be a powerful factor of change their own Internal Working Models (IWMs). Negative experiences built IWMs in children pre-adoption life and enacted in the adoptive families. The adoption success seems to depend also on the quality of adoptive parenting which is strongly associated with a secure states of mind with respect to attachment (Steele et al., 2008). Method. Aim of this study is the empirical exploration of the development of attachment patterns in late-adopted children from the time of placement to adolescence, and the association with their maternal attachment models. We planned a longitudinal research design with three steps of data collection: time 1 (T1) at the beginning of placement, time 2 (T2) 6 months later and time 3 (T3) around 6/7 years after T2 during adolescence. Participants were 28 late-adopted children - aged 4 to 7 years old at time of adoption and 11 to 14 at T3 - and their 20 adoptive mothers. The following measures were administered to the late-adopted children: (T1) the Separation/Reunion Procedure (SRP-1, Main & Cassidy, 1988), (T2) the SRP-2 and the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST, Green et al., 2000), (T3) the Friend and Family Interview (FFI, Steele et al., 2009). The adoptive mothers were assessed with the AAI (Main et al., 2002) at T1 and T3. Results and discussion. The results presented an over-representation of insecure classifications of the SRP at T1 and a significant revision of them towards security at T2 (p = .002). Furthermore, the children showing this change, were predominantly placed with secure-autonomous adoptive mothers (p =.047). All these data would need to be confirmed at long-term follow-up at T3. These findings seem to suggest that late-placed children would be able to gradually revise their attachment pattern and the attachment security of their adoptive mothers would make it more likely to occur.