You’ve sent in so many adoption questions that we had two choices: re-christen ourselves the Department of Adoption for the foreseeable future, or don our querying cap, crack each of our knuckles in order and answer as many as we could in one go.
Who’s most likely to adopt — or get adopted
This week, we do a deep dive into your many, many — oh so many! — questions about adoption.
11 min
Analysis by Andrew Van Dam
How common is adoption?
We suspect reader Ryan Hanlon might have an ulterior motive for asking this, given that his LinkedIn lists him as president and CEO of the National Council for Adoption.
The answer: While adoption may have been more common in the tough-to-measure past, it’s surprisingly rare today.
Depending on the source, adopted children seem to make up 1 to 3 percent of America’s under-18 population. It’s the fifth most common relationship between a child and a head of household, narrowly ahead of foster care, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2022. The vast majority of kids are the biological children (88 percent) or grandchildren (8 percent) of the householder.
While the ACS provides stellar big-picture numbers, it’s hamstrung by its focus on a child’s relationship to a single head of household, regardless of the presence of their parent or parents. To map relationships further, we turned to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS). Unlike many of its rivals, the CPS lists both parents for every child.
