Adoption is connected with a number of traumatic experiences, of which the experience of being abandoned by biological parents is of major significance. The fact of being abandoned usually involves a stay at a hospital and later on in various forms of family or institutionalized foster care, until the child is finally placed in an adoptive family. An important research question, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, concerns the psychosomatic dependencies between adoption and children's psycho-physical development. The article presents an attempted synthesis of the theoretical findings and the results of the conducted empirical research. Considerations, apart from its cognitive aim, also have a practical end, i.e. to indicate problems in adopted children's development which should be of special importance for adoptive parents.