Seventeen percent of adopted children under age 18 lived with a householder with a graduate or professional degree, according to American Community Survey statistics available in a new report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. In comparison, 12 percent of biological children and 6 percent of stepchildren lived with a householder with at least one of these degrees.

The report, Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2010, examines the characteristics of adopted children and stepchildren and the parents they live with using multiyear data from the American Community Survey (2009-2011) in addition to the 2010 Census and the 2012 Current Population Survey.

In 2010, of the 64.8 million children of the householder under age 18, 93 percent were the biological children of the householder, 4 percent were stepchildren and 2 percent were adopted children.

Adopted children lived in households that had higher incomes and were less likely to live in poverty (14 percent) than stepchildren (16 percent) or than biological children (21 percent).

"Since the circumstances that lead to children living with an adoptive parent or stepparent differ, the profiles of these groups may be distinct from each other, and from that of children living with a biological parent," said Rose Kreider, chief of the Census Bureau's Fertility and Family Statistics Branch. "In this report, we use several data sources to explore the particular characteristics of each group."

• Of the estimated 4.3 million children who lived with at least one stepparent, 88 percent lived with stepparents who were married.
• Stepchildren who lived with unmarried parents were younger than those living with married parents. Twenty-five percent of stepchildren living with unmarried parents were under age 6, while this was true of 9 percent of stepchildren living with two married parents.

(householder parent and adopted child are of different race or origin groups):

• 28 percent of all adopted children under age 18 were adopted by a parent whose race or Hispanic origin was different than the child's.
• 28 percent of these adopted children were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 30 percent were Hispanic (of any race).
• Overall, 37 percent of adopted children whose parents were of a different race or ethnicity were foreign-born, compared with 9 percent of their other adopted counterparts.

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