By Jason Szep

BOSTON, March 31 (Reuters) - A single woman in the United States can raise a child adopted from China just as well as a married couple, a study showed on Saturday, countering claims by Beijing that single parenting is bad for Chinese children.

Dr. Tony Xing Tan, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, compared 144 Chinese girls aged 1-1/2 to 11 years old adopted by 126 single-mother families, with 509 Chinese girls adopted by 415 families with two parents.

"Overall, the present study found no evidence that the adjustment of the adoptees from single-parent families differed from their peers from dual-parent families," Tan said in his study, presented on Saturday in Boston.

China ruled in 2001 that only 5 percent of Chinese children could be adopted into single-parent families, cutting the quota from 25 percent to 30 percent on grounds it "would be best for the adopted children to live in an adoptive family with both parents," said Tan, quoting Chinese state policy.

The policy will tighten even further starting May 1, barring anyone who is single, overweight, depressed, married less than two years, divorced and remarried less than five years, or over 50 years of age, from adopting a child from China.

"If single parents were well equipped emotionally and socio-economically, their children would not be more susceptible to maladjustment than those in dual-parent families," said Tan, who presented his findings at a Society for Research in Child Development conference in Boston.

Girls were chosen for the study because they make up about 95 percent of adoptions from China, where stringent rules on family planning that allow couples to have just one child bolster a traditional bias for male offspring.

PROBLEM BEHAVIOR

Tan asked single parents and couples recruited for the research in 2002 to fill out a "Child Behavior Checklist" measuring "internalizing" problem behaviors of their adopted Chinese children.

For preschoolers, these included emotional reactions such as twitching, or anxiety and depression. School-aged children were examined in areas such nervousness, sadness and complaints of nausea.

Another series of tests measured "externalizing" problem behavior areas, such as whether a preschooler can sit still or is prone to fight, and whether school-age children broke rules by lying or acted up by threatening others.

"The adopted Chinese girls from the single- and dual-parent families did not differ from each other on the internalizing and externalizing problem behavior scales," said Tan, who considered variables such as different types of families.

China has been the No. 1 choice for U.S. foreign adoptions for the past six years, according to the U.S. State Department. The Chinese government says four-fifths of its foreign adoptions in the past decade went to U.S. families.

When it announced its latest tightening in adoption rules in December, the Chinese government said it was an effort to shorten the wait -- now up to 16 months -- for prospective parents as international demand for Chinese babies skyrockets.

But the regulations have been criticized in the United States, where the divorce rate is about six times that of China's and where thousands of single mothers have already provided homes for Chinese babies.

In 2006 Americans adopted 6,493 children from China, the largest number of any country, while in the past 21 years U.S. parents have adopted 55,446 Chinese children.

Tan said as a group, the single adoptive parents were mostly middle-aged white women with high levels of education, full-time employment, and adequate income.

"These factors, plus their determination to adopt internationally, might have served as protective factors in raising orphanage girls," he said.

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