Mother-Daughter Agreement on Adolescent Adopted Chinese Girls' Academic Performance and Internalizing Symptoms

This study reported mother-daughter agreement on adolescent adopted Chinese girls' adjustment. Data on the girls' academic performance and internalizing syndromes were collected from the adopted Chinese girls and their adoptive mothers separately. The adoptive mothers also provided data on mother-daughter relationship quality. There were 219 girls who were in secondary schools and were 13.6 years (SD = 2.1) and were adopted from China at 17.4 months (SD = 18.2). Consistent with existing literature on nonadopted adolescents, the mother-daughter agreement on the adopted Chinese girls' adjustment was modest to moderate. Age of the girls positively correlated with self-reported anxiety, depression, and attention problems. Better mother-daughter relationship quality was positively correlated with mother-reported and self-reported academic performance but negatively correlated with mother-reported depression, social problems, and attention problems and with self-reported depression. Finally, mother-daughter relationship quality was negatively correlated with mother-daughter discrepancy in adoptees' anxiety, depression, and attention problems. Implications of these findings for the practice of school psychologists were discussed.