ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine the development and adjustment of forty-eight children from South Korea adopted by Dutch families. All children were adopted in infancy, before the age of six months, and we followed them until they were seven years old as part of a larger study examining infant-parent attachment relationships and, later, child development. We start the chapter with a short introduction to international adoption in the Netherlands, with a special emphasis on Korean adoptees, and continue with an outline of our prospective, longitudinal study. For early childhood, we then focus on child and family characteristics, the Korean adoptees’ competence and temperament, and the quality of the parent-child relationship. For middle childhood, we focus on the Korean adoptees’ behavior problems, their social development and peer group popularity, and their IQ and cognitive development. In addition, Korean children’s experiences with discrimination are examined.
