To document the utility of the siblings reared apart cross-fostering design to identify environmental influences on child psychopathology, we examined the rearing environments of the two households (adoptive home and biological home) in EPoCh. As shown in Table 1, all parent, home, and neighborhood environment characteristics were significantly different between the adoptive and biological parent family, suggesting that the siblings reared apart experience very different rearing environments from one another. For example, there is about a threefold difference in the annual household income between the two households. Likewise, the sibling living in the biological mother’s home is reared by a mother with an official criminal record 62% of the time, whereas none of the siblings reared in the adoptive homes have this environmental exposure. Notably, the reared-apart siblings did not differ significantly on pregnancy-related variables, such as child birth weight or fetal alcohol syndrome facial features (Table 1). This is important because it suggests that the prenatal conditions of the siblings reared apart may be comparable, even when the postnatal environments are not, which allows for greater confidence that any
