The neuroscience of regulation in adopted children

It starts in the everyday, maybe your child freezes during a transition at school, or erupts over something small at home: the wrong cup, a forgotten sock, a sound that no one else seemed to notice. You stay steady. You do what you have been told helps. But still, something in them disconnects or floods. They seem unreachable in that moment. Not rude, not dramatic, just lost in something deeper.

For many adoptive parents, these moments raise quiet, persistent questions. Is this about today, or is it about something from before? Why does my child react as though they are under threat when we are safe, when we are calm? You might not say it aloud, but you start to wonder whether their emotional world, and their brain, is wired differently.

In the last decade, neuroscience has begun to catch up with what adoptive families have been living for years. We now have clearer, more precise insight into how early adversity impacts the developing brain, not just structurally, but in the way children experience emotion, stress, and safety. And just as importantly, we now understand more about what helps.

What follows is not a technical breakdown or a neat summary of findings. It is a conversation, about what we have learned, how that knowledge has changed, and what it tells us about supporting adopted children with compassion, clarity, and confidence.

Neuroscience stress responses are not just emotional, they are physical, and deeply shaped by early experience

Let’s start with cortisol, the hormone you produce in response to stress. In the early 2000s, Dr. Megan Gunnar’s research on children raised in institutions revealed something striking: many of these children showed blunted cortisol patterns. That means their stress systems had adapted to constant threat by becoming underactive. Not hyper, flat. The children were not always outwardly anxious, but they struggled to regulate or respond appropriately to stress. It was as though their internal alarm system had stopped ringing altogether.

This was backed up by Bruce and Fisher’s work in 2009, which looked specifically at fostered children in the US. They found that dysregulated cortisol rhythms, either too high or too low, correlated with emotional lability and disrupted sleep. Children were not just reacting emotionally; they were biologically stuck in a survival mode that wasn’t turning off.

You can imagine what this means in a classroom or a family kitchen. A sudden change in routine, a perceived tone, an ambiguous social interaction, and their nervous system floods or goes offline. Not because they are “naughty,” but because their brain has never learned how to feel safe in those moments.

The brain changes shape in the presence of early adversity, but not irreversibly

By the time Dr. Eamon McCrory and his team at UCL published their landmark MRI research in 2011, the conversation had shifted. This was not just about hormones, it was about structure. They scanned the brains of children with known histories of maltreatment and found reductions in grey matter in key areas: the amygdala (which processes threat), the hippocampus (which supports memory and learning), and the prefrontal cortex (which regulates decision-making and inhibition).

That sounds alarming, and it is, but it is also what kicked off a more nuanced understanding of what we now call neurodevelopmental trauma. The good news came a few years later, in studies like that of Nim Tottenham (2020), who showed that even children with structural differences in the amygdala could recalibrate their response to threat over time, if they had access to stable, responsive caregiving.

That word, recalibrate, is critical. Because what neuroscience is showing us now is that many of these early adaptations are not irreversible. They are adaptations, not defects. And like all adaptive systems, they can shift again.

Regulation begins with co-regulation, and that is a physiological process, not just a parenting concept

One of the most important figures in this field is Dr. Allan Schore. His work in the early 2010s reframed regulation as a dyadic, or two-person, biological process. In other words, young children learn to regulate through the repeated experience of having their emotions held by another person, usually a caregiver. Over time, this scaffolds their own nervous system.

Schore’s work showed that the right brain, which develops earlier than the left, is especially responsible for emotional regulation. And it is shaped through nonverbal cues, tone of voice, facial expression, body posture. That’s why children who lacked consistent early care may find it hard to read those signals, or send them.

This was reinforced by Mary Dozier’s work with fostered children, where she found that children placed with responsive carers by the age of three showed normalisation of their cortisol patterns. Those placed later, or in inconsistent care, often didn’t. But again, this wasn’t a doom-and-gloom story. What Dozier highlighted was that even brief, focused relational interventions, like her Attachment and Biobehavioural Catch-up (ABC) programme, could make measurable changes to children’s biological stress regulation.

Executive functioning is often misunderstood in the classroom, and it's regulation's quiet twin

By the time children reach school, regulation becomes more than emotional survival. It becomes the ability to concentrate, shift focus, retain instructions, and stop impulses. These are the executive functions, and they sit right at the edge of our understanding of trauma’s long-term impact.

Beauchamp et al. (2015) found that post-institutionalised children adopted into Canadian families had significant deficits in working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory controlm even when they had been in nurturing homes for several years. This challenges the idea that a safe home “undoes” early adversity. Safety matters, but cognitive scaffolding also needs to happen explicitly, with support for transitions, reduced cognitive load, and visual structure. If you are an adoptive parent whose child forgets things constantly, gets overwhelmed by two-part instructions, or seems to give up before starting a task, this is not laziness. This is a neurodevelopmental reality.

What have we learned recently that’s changing the game?

One of the most hopeful shifts in the last ten years is the emphasis on neuroplasticity. We now know that the brain continues to adapt well into adolescence, and even early adulthood. There is more time, and more possibility, than we once thought. Tottenham’s 2020 review showed that even children with high early adversity could show typical amygdala development by adolescence if they were placed in stable, emotionally attuned homes. Another major voice, Bessel van der Kolk, helped bridge the gap between neuroscience and everyday therapeutic practice. In The Body Keeps the Score (2014), he brought attention to how sensory-based therapies, like movement, rhythm, and safe touch, regulate the nervous system in ways that talking alone cannot. That insight has shifted practice. We now see more use of DDP, Theraplay, sensory integration therapy, and even trauma-informed yoga in adoption support programmes across the UK.

So what does this mean for adopted children, at school and at home?

First, it means that our expectations need to adjust. Regulation is not a skill all children learn equally. For many adopted children, especially those who’ve experienced early disruption, regulation is a daily task, not a given. That includes:

• Emotional regulation (feeling safe enough to express sadness or anger without shutting down)

• Social regulation (managing peer conflict or rejection)

• Cognitive regulation (staying on task, remembering what’s needed)

Second, it means that behaviour is always communication. A child who lashes out, withdraws, or seems overly dramatic is not seeking attention, they are seeking connection, often without the tools to ask for it.

Third, it shows us that environments matter. Children learn to regulate in relationships, not in isolation. At home, this means consistent routines, repair after conflict, and caregivers who can hold big emotions without shutting them down. In schools, it means trauma-informed practice, not punishment.

And finally, it means hope is justified. The research now backs what so many adoptive parents have long suspected: that what we offer our children, in presence, in patience, in regulated responses, shapes their brains as much as anything that happened before.

Final thoughts

We are no longer guessing. Neuroscience is showing us what early adversity does, and what secure relationships can do in return. If this article has left you with more questions or new ways of thinking, you are not alone. Join our next event or explore our resource hub to learn more about the growing science behind adoption, regulation, and resilience.

Speak soon,

The Walk Together Team

References

• Beauchamp, M.H., Anderson, V., Catroppa, C., Godfrey, C. and Rosema, S., 2015. Executive functions: Development, individual differences, and clinical insights. Handbook of clinical neurology, 128, pp.63–80.

• Bruce, J., Fisher, P.A., Pears, K.C. and Levine, S., 2009. Morning cortisol levels in preschool-aged foster children: Differential effects of maltreatment type. Developmental Psychobiology, 51(1), pp.14–23.

• Dozier, M., Peloso, E., Lindhiem, O., Gordon, M.K., Manni, M. and Sepulveda, S., 2014. Developing evidence-based interventions for foster children: An example of a randomized clinical trial with infants and toddlers. Journal of Social Issues, 62(4), pp.767–785.

• Gunnar, M.R. and Quevedo, K., 2007. The neurobiology of stress and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, pp.145–173.

• McCrory, E., De Brito, S.A. and Viding, E., 2011. The impact of childhood maltreatment: A review of neurobiological and genetic factors. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2, p.48.

• Raby, K.L., Roisman, G.I., Fraley, R.C. and Simpson, J.A., 2017. The enduring predictive significance of early maternal sensitivity: Social and academic competence through age 32 years. Child Development, 86(3), pp.695–708.

• Schore, A.N., 2012. The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: Norton.

• Teicher, M.H., Samson, J.A., Anderson, C.M. and Ohashi, K., 2016. The effects of childhood maltreatment on brain structure, function and connectivity. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(10), pp.652–666.

• Tottenham, N., Gabard-Durnam, L.J., Goff, B., Flannery, J., Tanaka, M., Sullivan, R.M., et al., 2020. The impact of early adversity on the amygdala and the role of parenting. Neuropsychopharmacology, 45(1), pp.109–120.

• Van der Kolk, B.A., 2014. The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.