CHALLENGES IN SCHOOL ADAPTATION AMONG ADOPTED CHILDREN

Abstract

The essential, if not the dominant part of a child’s life, takes place in the school environment as well as an adult’s life is spent at work. Therefore, a good relationship at school community and academic achievements are important for a child’s general psychological well-being. In addition, aspiration to estimate a child’s success on its progress at school is traditional. Perhaps, the most popular questions a child is asked by adults are the ones like, ”How are you doing at school?”, ”How is your study?”, "What are your favorite subjects?", etc. The comparative research of the adaptation process among Belarusian adoptive and biological families allowed us to obtain some information on how parents from both groups evaluate the academic performance of their children, to what extent they are concerned about this issue and how children’s school adaptation actually proceeds. The main research group involved 64 adoptive mothers and 50 adoptive fathers. The control group consisted of 62 biological mothers and 49 biological fathers. All parents responded to the specially designed questionnaire. The study has shown that the vast majority of adoptive fathers (81%) consider that their children are generally good (or even very good) at learning. Only 19% of them note that the children cope with their studies not too well (or even too bad). The same trend is observed in adoptive mothers’ responses. However, they are generally more critical about their children’s academic performance. Thus, while 73% of adoptive mothers believe in school successes of their children, 27% of them indicate that children are not too good (or even very bad) at learning.