romanian orphanage studies

• Institutionalisation:

  The effect of institutional care, especially how time spent in an institution such as an orphanage can affect the development of children. Possible effects include social, mental and physical underdevelopment. Some of these effects may be irreversible
• Disinhibited attachment

  Children show intense excitement or a lack of inhibition over meeting or interacting with strangers or unfamiliar adults. Their behaviours with strangers that are overly friendly, talkative, or physical and not age-appropriate or culturally acceptable. They show willingness or desire to leave a safe place or situation with a stranger.
• In the past institutions offered little emotional care. Today many institutions strive to avoid this, however, in some countries limited resources mean it is still not possible to offer a good standard of emotional care.
• Rutter led the English and Romanian adoptees study since the early 1990s. Of 165 Romanian children who had spent their early lives in Romanian institutions, 111 were adopted before the age of two while 54 were adopted by the age of four.
• They were tested at 4, 6, 11 and 15 years of age to assess their physical, cognitive and social development.

  Progress was compared to a control group of 52 British children adopted before the age of six months.
• At the time of adoption

  The Romanian children were behind the British children on all developmental measures.

  After adoption

  Early adopted children: Almost all Romanian children adopted before six months had caught up with British children.

  Late adopted children: Significant deficits remained in a substantial minority of the children and many showed disinhibited attachments and had problems with peer relations.
• Rutter concluded that:

  If children can form attachments the long-term consequences may be less severe than once thought. Consequences are less severe the earlier attachments are formed (as seen in children adopted before 6 months of age) However, continuing failure to form attachments can lead to substantial developmental deficits (as seen in children adopted after the sensitive period where attachments are more easily formed).
• effects:

  • Physical underdevelopment: institutionalised children are usually physically smaller. Lack of emotional care has been found to be the cause of deprivational dwarfism.
• effects:

  • Intellectual underfunctioning: Skodak and Skeels found institutionalised children scored poorly on intelligence tests, but their performance increased when cared for by adults in another institution.
• effects:

  • Disinhibited attachment: a form of insecure attachment characterised by overfriendliness with strangers and attention seeking.
• effects:

  • Poor parenting: Quinton (1984) found that women reared in institutions experienced more difficulties acting as parents and were more likely to have children who had spent time in care.
• Some research suggests that individuals who do not form a primary attachment within that early sensitive period are unable to recover. However, this is not true of all children who experience insitutionalisation. Rutter has suggested that it might be that some of the children did receive special attention in the institution, perhaps because they smiled more, and this would mean they did have some early attachment experiences. Bowlby el ais study of children hospitalised with TB (previous spread) showed that there were individual differences in the way Children cope.
• The outcome of research is to apply our understanding to improving the lives of children in care. Bowlby and Robertson research changed the way that children were locked after. The current research with Romanian orphans focuses on adoption. in the past, mothers who were going to give a baby up for adoption were encouraged to nurse the baby for a significant period of time. By the time the baby was adopted the sensitive period for attachment formation may have passed, making it difficult to form secure attachments. Today most babies are adopted within the first week of birth.
• the importance of the studies reviewed on this page is that they followed the lives of children over many years. these are called longitudinal studies. such studies take a lot of 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