romanian orphan studies

• P: it may not be true that all children who experience institutionalisation are unable to recover

  E: research shows that some children are not as strongly affected as others. Rutter has suggested that it might be that some of the children received special attention in the institution, perhaps because they smiled more, and this might have enabled them to cope better

  L: this means that it is not possible to conclude that institutionalisation leads to an inability to form attachments
• p: the research into institutionalisation can be applied to improving the lives of children placed in such care

  E: early research by bowlby and robertson changed the way that children were looked after in hospital. the research on this spread points to the importance of early adoption. in the past, mothers who were going to give a baby up for adoption were encouraged to nurse the baby for a period of time. by the time the baby was adopted the sensitive period for attachment may have passed, making it difficult to form secure attachments with new mother
• link for real life application

  L: the result has been that most babies are now adopted within the first week of birth and research shows that adoptive mothers and children are just as securely attached as non-adoptive families
• P: a strength of the studies reviewed on this spread is that they followed the lives of children over many years

  E: longitudinal studies take a long time, which means a lot of planning and waiting for results, but the benefits are large. without such studies we may mistakenly conclude that there are major effects due to early institutional care, whereas some of these studies show that the effects may disappear after sufficient time and with suitable high-quality care
• link for longitudinal studies

  L: this research, taken together with the consideration of individual differences, shows that it is wrong to assume that institutionalisation causes negative effects