Romanian Orphan Studies: Effects of Institutionalisation

• During the 1990s, horrific images flooded the news of children in poor conditions in Romanian orphanages
• The former Romanian president, Nicolai Ceausescu, had required Romanian women to have 5 children
• Many of the parents could not afford to keep their children and so many children ended up in large orphanages, where they were kept in poor conditions and received little in the way of emotional care
• After the Romanian Revolution of 1989 many of these children were adopted, some by British families
• Institutionalisation


  Living in an institutional setting, like a hospital or an orphanage, for long, continuous periods of time with very little emotional care
• Rutter et al. (2011) study

  1. Conducted a longitudinal study on 165 Romanian orphans adopted by British parents

  2. Children were split into 4 groups based on age of adoption

  3. Each group was assessed at the ages of 4, 6, 11 and 15
• At the start of the observations, over half of the Romanian children were suffering from severe malnutrition and a low IQ, showing delayed intellectual development, compared to the control group
• Disinhibited attachment


  • Overly friendly behaviour towards unknown adults
  • Attention-seeking, clinginess and social behaviour directed indiscriminately towards all adults, whether familiar or unfamiliar
• Age of adoption


  Attachment type
• Those adopted before 6 months, showed signs of a secure 'normal' attachment
• Those older than 6 months displayed disinhibited attachment
• At age 11 there was a significant difference between children adopted before 6 months and those adopted later in terms of attachment style and IQ
• Mean IQ scores


  • For those adopted before 6 months = 102
  • For those adopted between 6 months and 2 years = 86
  • For those adopted after the age of 2 = 77
• Children as old as 9 or 10 made a good recovery if they were adopted by sensitive, loving parents
• Strengths of Romanian Orphan Studies


  • Due to research on institutions and the negative effects they have, policy changes were made to benefit children; for example, children's homes now avoid having large numbers of caregivers for each child and instead now have one or two 'key workers' who play a central role in their emotional care
  • In the Romanian orphans study there is a lack of confounding variables. The Romanian orphans had, in the main, been handed over by loving parents who could not afford to keep them
  • The Romanian orphanage study allowed psychologists to study cause and effect, which is usually incredibly hard to do with adoptions studies, as those children being adopted have been removed for neglect or abuse reasons, however, this was not the case with the Romanian orphanages
  • Hodges and Tizard (1989) stated the adverse effects of institutionalisation could be reversed if children were adopted by effective families or had adequate care. They found children who had been adopted by adequate families, often, coped better on measures of behavioural and peer relationships than those children returned to their biological families
• Limitations of Romanian Orphan Studies


  • Children were not randomly allocated to conditions in this study, which means the more sociable children could have been adopted first
  • This study could lack external validity as the quality of care was so poor in Romanian orphanages that it cannot be compared to others. This means the harmful effects seen in the studies of Romanian orphans may represent the effects of poor institutional care rather than institutional care in general
  • There is a current lack of adult data on adult development. The latest data only looks at children in their early to mid-20s