On Naps, Adoption and Spouseless Women

Feb. 13, 2007 — -- On stories ranging from the value of naps to the ministrations of adoptive parents, it has not been a terrific week for the sober reporting of scientific data.

Then again, it rarely is.

The week started on a suitably flat foot for data reporting when the Sunday New York Times published a piece by its ombudsman criticizing the paper for a Jan. 16 story that said that, apparently for the first time, more American women were living without a husband than with one.

Our internal advice at the time was for ABC News to steer clear of it, because it wasn't reflected in our own survey data or in our reading of the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Lo and behold, the Times now says its analysis counted 15- to 17-year-olds as women. Indeed, almost 90 percent of the women this age not only were spouseless, but were exactly where you might think they'd be -- living at home with their parents.

Today's new bundle of joy is a study on adoptive parents published in the American Sociological Review.The Associated Press report on this study looks darn newsy: "Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents."

What might have been made clearer is that this is so because adoptive families -- of which there were 161 in the sample -- have higher incomes and more education. When the data are controlled for income and education, there is no significant difference between married mom-and-dad adoptive parents and mom-and-dad biological parents. Both do equally better than other family types.

The report's basic finding is that compared with being raised by a biological mother and father, being raised by an adoptive mom and dad "does not unequivocally constitute a disadvantage" in the allocation of resources to young children.

That is not the same as saying it's an advantage over being raised by two biological parents. In fact, the study says that "We find that the two-adoptive-parent family structure is remarkably similar to the two-biological-parent family structure," and that both are better than alternatives.