Physical well-being and school enrollment:: a comparison of adopted and biological children in one-child families in China

Adoption has increased in China since 1980 when the government started the one-child policy. There were approximately six million adopted children living in China in 1988. The objective of this study was to compare adopted and biological children in one-child families across a number of measures of physical well-being and school enrollment. The 1992 National Sample Survey on the Situation of Children provided data on 2458 adopted and 194,760 biological children aged 0-14 years living in one-child families. Logistic regression models were used to adjust for confounders. We found that adopted children were not significantly different from biological children in reported diarrhea and nutritional outcomes (stunting, underweight, wasting) after controlling for other known demographic, socioeconomic and geographic correlates. However, there was evidence of significantly higher odds of never being immunized and not being currently enrolled in school, and evidence of slightly lower odds of having fever or acute respiratory infections among adopted children compared to biological children. These results suggest that adopted children were as healthy and well-fed as biological children, but adopted children aged 7-14 years were less likely to be enrolled in school than biological children.