Adoptive Families Referred for Psychiatric Advice

In our previous paper (Humphrey and Ounsted, 1963) we found that the symptoms and behaviour problems of children adopted in early infancy resembled those of children reared by their own parents. A significant trend appeared only among children adopted after the age of 6 months, who were more prone to anti-social conduct. But the proportion of adopted children referred to the Park Hospital for Children over a four-year period (2·9 per cent.) was more than double the corresponding estimate for the general population. It is tempting to attribute at least part of this excess to the relatively large number of delayed adoptions in our sample, of whom 34 out of 80 (43 per cent.) were aged 6 months or more at the time of placement.