Effects of Institutionalisation

• institutionalisation

  the effects of living in an institutional setting (outside of the family or family home) where children live for long, continuous periods of time whee often very little emotional care is provided
• effects of institutionalisation

  • quasi-autism
  • physical underdevelopment
  • affectionless psychopathy
  • emotional function/intellectual under functioning and low IQ
  • disinhibited attachment - seeking care from under familiar people
  • poor parenting
  • lack of internal working model
• orphan studies

  • orphan studies concern children in care
  • the opportunity to study institutionalisation arose in Romania in the 1990s
  • after the 1989 revolution, there were over 100 000 orphans in care
  • many of the children were adopted by British families
• Rutter et al (2010) - procedure

  • longitudinal study of 1665 Romanian children, since early 1990s
  • 111 were adopted by English parents by the age of 2, and the other 54 by the age of 4
  • adoptees were tested at ages 4, 6, 11 and 15 to assess their physical, cognitive and social development
  • compared with a control group of 52 British adopted children
• Rutter et al (2010) - findings

  • to start with, all the Romanian adoptees lagged behind British adoptees on all measures, many had caught up by aged 4
  • significant deficits still exist in many of the children who were in care beyond the age of 6 months
  • shows that if children have the opportunity to form attachments, the effects of institutionalisation may be less than previously thought
• Le Mare and Audet (2006)

  • measured physical development and health of 36 Romanian orphans in Canada
  • less developed at the age pf 4 1/2 but no difference by 10 1/2
• Zeanah et al (2005)

  • the Bucharest Early Intervention Project
  • 95 Romanian adoptees (aged 12-31 months) who had spent of average 90% of their life in orphanages compared to a control group
  • strange situation showed that the institutionalised children had poor attachment (disinhibited and cling attention seeking behaviour)
• evaluation

  • some children deal with it differently, some may have been slightly favoured and therefore built an attachment and some may have smiled more - individual differences, not generalisable
  • the earlier a child was adopted the less likely they were to suffer as they can still build a new attachment - real world application