ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief history of a study of three hundred adoptive families, the Texas Adoption Project. It presents a thirty-five-year research project involving three hundred families, each of whom adopted at least one child at birth from a Texas home for unwed mothers, the Methodist Mission Home (MMH) of San Antonio. Children adopted at birth have two sets of parents: both influential, but in different ways. The birth parents provide their adopted-away child with its genetic endowment but do not participate in shaping the child's environment. The majority of studies of adopted children are not primarily concerned with individual differences, but with average levels of achievement or psychological problems in adoptees relative to children growing up in families in the usual way with their biological parents. Some adoptive families contained one or more natural born children from the same parents who adopted children from the MMH.
