Recently, a 17-year-old young man shared an incident he recently had with his parents in a post on AITA. “I was adopted at the age of 4, my biological mom was best friends with my adoptive mom and she adopted me after my biological mom passed away,” the author who goes by the handle Upbasis5231 wrote.

He then proceeded explaining how all three of his older siblings, who are biological children of his parents, received generous financial support from them.

“My parents covered their college tuition in full and then covered law and medical school for two of them as well (the other sibling didn’t go to grad school). They also gave them a stipend to cover living expenses,” Upbasis5231 wrote in a post.

But when the conversation turned to the author’s future and the help he could expect from them when he goes to college, his parents gave him a cold shower. What followed was a pretty serious family conflict which left the author wondering whether he had crossed the line.

Recently, a 17-year-old boy shared how his adoptive parents refuse to help him with college tuition although they were financially very generous with their biological children

Image credits: Charles DeLoye (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Priscilla Du Preez (not the actual photo)

A huge body of current legal and academic arguments state that children are best off with their biological parents. Similarly, evolutionary psychologists argue that parents dote on biological children more than their adoptive children since it’s more likely for your genes survive long after you do.

This recent study revealed that parents reported more negativity and less positivity as well as higher levels of externalizing behavior for the adopted child compared to the non-adopted child. Moreover, fathers and mothers did not differ significantly in their reports of positive and negative feelings towards their children or in regard to child externalizing and internalizing behaviors.

On the other hand, Nigel Barber, an Irish-born American biopsychologist and author of multiple award-winning books and studies, argues that actually, the opposite is true and parents do favor their adoptive children to their biological ones. One of the reasons may be because parents get invested more in the adopted children because they need more help.

“As to why human parents have no defense against nurturing non-relatives, it can be argued that adopting non-relatives is an artificial consequence of modern environments,” Barber writes in Psychology Today. “In the distant past, our foraging ancestors were likely to be fairly closely related to any unattached babies they encountered and so evolved no defense against investing in non-relatives,” he explains.

The story resonated with many people online as they showed their support for the author

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