Children’s Recovery after Early Adversity: Lessons from Intercountry Adoption Sheila Greene, Ruth Kelly, Elizabeth Nixon, Greg Kelly, Zofia Borska, Sı ´le Murphy & Aoife Daly Research on children who have been internationally adopted provides many strong examples of resilience. This paper discusses what counts as resilience in intercountry adoption and includes new data from the first study in this area conducted in Ireland. As with studies conducted in other jurisdictions, the Irish data indicate a remarkable capacity for recovery from adversity in most, but not all, children after adoption and exposure to pervasive and permanent environmental change. Examples of recovery and failure to recover from adverse experiences in early childhood have long been of interest to students of human development. They cast light on some of the key issues about the place of early childhood in the life course. For example, is experience more important than genetic or constitutional factors? Do the events of the early years shape later development permanently, for good or ill? Do positive early experiences inoculate children against the effects of adverse later experiences? Can children recover from early adversity? Intercountry adoption (ICA) typically provides a very stark example of a change from an early period of life in adverse conditions to an adequate or better than adequate environment. It is dramatic and all pervasive in the extent of contextual change. Furthermore, for the researcher, ICA is unusual in that it involves relatively large numbers of children and therefore some of the conclusions drawn on the basis of research findings can be drawn with reasonable confidence. Additionally ICA is of interest since the adversity to which the children are exposed is more or less independent of the child’s characteristics or behaviour. Thus environmental change is Sheila Greene, Elizabeth Nixon, Zofia Borska, Sı ´le Murphy and Aoife Daly are with the Children’s Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Ruth Kelly is from the Children’s Research Centre and Health Services Executive. Greg Kelly is from Queen’s University Belfast. Correspondence to: Sheila Greene, Children’s Research Centre, 30 Anglesea Street, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. Email: sheila.greene@tcd.ie ISSN 1357-5279 print/1476-489X online/08/010075-07 # 2008 The Child Care in Practice Group DOI: 10.1080/13575270701733757 Child Care in Practice Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 7581