Abstract:

In Korea, overseas adoption has been prevalent compared to domestic adoption due to a focus on pure blood and purity of race for a long time. However, older-child adoption is increasing because of changes in policy and opinion in recent years. Due to limitation of research on older-child adoption, there is a lack of educational programs.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate an attachment improvement program for families adopting an older child. The objectives and contents of this program reflected on experiences of adopted parents and the characteristics of old-age adoptee children with attachment disruption. This program consists of three components: parent-child relationship building, parenting skills enhancement for adopted parents, and negative emotions mediation for old-age adoptees. The subjects were 16 parent-child dyads. Three types of programs were conducted and each program consists of 10 sessions for 70-80 minutes.
A pretest examination and posttest examination were done on both the experimental group(8 dyads) and the control group(8 dyads) with the differences evaluated in order to prove the effects of the program. As a result, the level of affection and level of achievement of the adoptive mothers’ child-rearing attitudes increased significantly. Also, the anxiety/avoidant level, avoidant/withdrawal level and the dysregulated aggression level of the children’s internal representation decreased significantly.The results showed improvements in quality of parent-child relationships, communication levels with parents, and parents' autonomic level. And the results also showed decreases in children's hostility and social problem. As a result of the program using a fairy-tale to mediate children's negative emotion, children's negative emotion is decreased and children's expression of positive feelings is increased.
Finally, the implications of this study were discussed to improve parent-child attachment for families adopting an older child. Although this program was based on a short-term basis, this study showed that it was effective for adoptive parents and children who have attachment disruption due to loss of their biological parents compared to general adoption for newborn baby. Thus, this program needs to extend to parents who have pure blood perspective.

Keywords:

Adoption, adopting an older child, attachment, parent-child relationship, attachment improvement program.