Romanian Orphan Studies

7 Key excerpts on "Romanian Orphan Studies"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development

  • Kathleen McCartney, Deborah Phillips, Kathleen McCartney, Deborah Phillips(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Rethinking Orphanages for the 21st Century (pp. 79–102). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

  Lowrey, L. G. (1940). Personality distortion and early institutional care. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry , 10 , 576–585.

  McCall, R. B., Muhamedrahimov, R. J., Groark, C. J., Palmov, O. I., & Nikiforova, N. V. (2003, April). Research design and measurements in the St. Petersburg–USA Orphanage Project . Paper presented in R. B. McCall (Chair), Improving stability and responsiveness of caregiving for children birth to four in St. Petersburg, Russia, orphanages. Symposium conducted at Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, FL.

  McKenzie, R. B. (Ed.). (1999). Rethinking orphanages for the 21st century . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

  McMullan, S. J., & Fisher, L. (1995, April). Developmental progress of Romanian orphanage children in Canada. Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis.

  Marcovitch, S., Goldberg, S., Gold, A., Washington, J., Wasson, C., Krekewich, K., & HandleyDerry, M. (1997). Determinants of behavioral problems in Romanian children adopted in Ontario. International Journal of Behavioral Development , 20 , 17–31.

  Marshall, P. J., Fox, N. A., & the BEIP Core Group (2004). A comparison of the electroencephalogram between institutionalized and community children in Romania. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 16 , 1327–1338.

  Morison, S. J., Ames, E. W., & Chisholm, K. (1995). The development of children adopted from Romanian orphanages. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly , 41 , 411–430.

  Muhamedrahimov, R. (2000). New attitudes: Infant care facilities in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In J. D. Osofsky & H. E. Fitzgerald (Eds.), WAIMH handbook of infant mental health: Vol. 1. Perspectives on infant mental health (pp. 245–294). New York: Wiley.

  Nelson, C. A. (2004, April). The effects of early institutionalization on brain–behavior development:

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  An Introduction to Developmental Psychology

  • Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • BPS Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  We will focus on one group of children who have been assessed at 4, 6, 11 and 15 years, and have provided the short- and long-term psychological sequelae of early global deprivation: those investigated by Michael Rutter and the English and Romanian Adoptees Team (ERA) (e.g. Beckett et al., 2006; Colvert et al., 2008; Kumsta et al., 2015; Rutter et al., 1998, 2012). These children had spent their first few months or years in the extremely deprived Romanian orphanages, where the conditions in the 700 institutions ‘varied from poor to appalling … There were few, if any, toys or play things; very little talk from caregivers, no personalised caregiving … Staff was underpaid and not properly trained, with a staff to child ratio of about 1:30’ (Kumsta et al., 2015, p. 139), 96 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY before being adopted by good quality foster families in the UK: the adopting parents had educational attainments and occupational levels above the general population. At the time of entry to the UK the Romanian children were severely developmentally impaired ‘with about half below the third percentile on weight, on head circumference, and on developmental quotient. Many were also in poor physical state with recurrent intestinal and respiratory infections’ (Rutter et al., 1998, p. 465). At the time of the 4-year assessment there had been a great deal of developmental catch-up, much of which was related to the children’s age of entry to the UK. For those who came to the UK when under 6 months of age the catch-up was complete in that there were no differences in cognitive ability when compared with two control groups – a group of within-UK adopted children who, prior to adoption, had not experienced a deprived background, and a small group of children from Romania who entered the UK after the age of 6 months, but had not experienced institutional rearing.

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  Give Sorrow Words

  Perspectives on Loss and Trauma

  • John H. Harvey(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Thus, with regard to generalizability, it is clear that the ideas and conclusions of the present analysis must be viewed with caution. While daunting, Romania’s different dilemmas probably are less imposing in terms of potential solutions vis a vis different miseries affecting large groups of people throughout the world. For Western psychology, part of the value of studying Romania now is that there is a large number of knowledgeable, English-speaking psychologists in the country who are amenable to collaboration. The same cannot be said for all parts of the world that are undergoing rapid and large-scale social transitions. An exasperating loss issue for Romanian psychology in the late 1990s is the fact that research is becoming extinct because of financial deprivations in the universities and the pressure on researchers to work other jobs in order to survive (Dr. Ilie Vasilescu-Puiu, personal communication).

  As I hope this chapter attests, Romania has a richness of psychological phenomena for students of loss and coping, as well as scholars working in other areas, that should be of great interest to Western psychologists. They and their psychology colleagues in Romania cannot solve Romania’s many social problems. But they can study them. There is a wealth of information regarding the orphans’ and beggars’ obstacles and potential that awaits psychological investigation. Even more potential for discovery is available to interdisciplinary research teams working on these problems (e.g., psychologists working in concert with political scientists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the like).

  I believe that Romania represents not only a place where we as scholars of loss and coping can learn a lot about these topics in the 1990s, but also as a place where courage and persistence in the face of adversity are qualities for which we likewise can be greatly enlightened. These qualities come through in various ways to the outsider. Many well-educated Romanians have left the country, or will leave, for better jobs elsewhere. On the other hand, many other well-educated but economically suffering young to middle-aged Romanians remain committed to the country and to addressing its problems. They expect to stay there and raise their families, even if they have to return to living with their parents or relatives in order to make ends meet. They believe in the country and its traditions in spite of all, and they want it to be better for their children.

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  A Community Health Approach to the Assessment of Infants and their Parents

  The CARE Programme

  • Kevin D. Browne, Jo Douglas, Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, Jean Hegarty(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  However, this was not true of emotional development. If they were adopted after the age of six months, they still showed a marked catch up but not as great as the earlier group (Rutter et al., 1998). The research so far does not allow a distinction to be made between the effect of nutritional and psychological privation as the Romanian infants experienced both in institutional settings. However, when the children’s social and emotional development were examined, there was a close association between the duration of the children’s depri-vation and the severity of their attachment disorder (O’Connor et al., 1999, 2000, 2003). Hence, the child’s social and emotional experiences in the first year of life are critical for later development. Children who are placed in resi-dential care rather than family-based care (e.g., foster care) are at risk of harm due to the institutional nature of their environment (Browne et al., 2005). There is also growing clinical evidence that later adoption of chil-dren in mid-childhood who have suffered severe neglect or abuse in their early years does not repair the early emotional damage. They continue to have major relationship and behavioural difficulties. Therefore, inter-vention with children who are emotionally at risk within their families needs to be very early, immediate and effective in order to prevent the later continuation of problems. Indeed, over 30 years ago, Clarke and Clarke (1976) commented that children in adversity require a permanent placement before the age of three years to avoid any later developmental problems. 56 THE ASSESSMENT OF INFANTS AND THEIR PARENTS ‘GOOD ENOUGH’ PARENTING The basic needs of children are reflected in attempts to define ‘good enough’ parenting, a term coined by Winnicot (1960). This term indicates the parent’s ability to recognise and respond to the child’s needs without having to be a perfect parent all of the time.

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  The Nation's Gratitude

  World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania

  • Maria Bucur(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In a strict sense of comparing what available services and policies existed in Romania in 1917 and how services evolved into the 1920s, this is also a story of partial success on the part of private initiative in the form of NGOs. But beyond statistics at the national level there is a more complicated story, for which we have only partial data. Therefore, my conclusions are more speculative in this chapter. The story for the 1920s is also one of exceptional growth in ethnic Romanian women’s public activities in the area of orphan care and education. This development is both implicitly and also directly connected for many women to the work feminist and eugenicist groups were doing in the interwar period regarding women’s rights.

  Orphans and gender norms

  The story of most war orphans is also that of the impoverished widows who constantly looked for ways to survive and put food on the table for their children. The privations those children suffered were a product not only of the war’s horrible military toll. They were also a result of how their mothers before and after the war continued to be considered lesser citizens than men in terms of legal rights (civil, economic, political), as well as actively discriminated against in terms access to stable jobs, equal wages, housing, etc. This is a case study for understanding how, at a time of extreme need and in a context where women’s caretaking skills were becoming professionalized, the state, through its male representatives, chose to address the need by refusing to consider the underlying structural problems. By doing so, the legislators and IOVR administrators limited the effectiveness of their solutions.

  Figure 5.1 War orphan students swearing allegiance to Apostol Zamfir’s Fire Generation Front

  Credit line: © Frontul de Foc, 15 November–15 December, 1934, p. 1

  Two main issues stand out among those structural problems: to begin with, state funding for orphan related services was chronically low during the entire period and greatly undercut the SOOR institutional network that was ramped up through private initiative, making it impossible for that private network to continue to function long-term (SOOR 1936

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  Child Development

  • Michael Little, Barbara Maughan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The adoptive families of both UK and Romanian children were generally middle class and slightly better educated than the general UK population but did not differ in these respects from one another (Rutter & the ERA Research Team, 1998). Differences that did exist between parents adopting from the UK and from Romania were a direct consequence of UK adoption policies (e.g., with respect to the presence of biological children in the family); these demographic variables were not associated with outcomes and were therefore dropped from the analyses. Among the families adopting from Romania, no association was found between family characteristics and the child’s age at entry into the UK. Also, children who entered the UK at a relatively young age were similar to those who entered later in terms of the age when they were placed in the institution and in terms of subnutrition at entry into the UK (O’Connor, Rutter, Beckett, et al., 2000). In the great majority of cases, the Romanian children entered the institution in early infancy (85% within the 1st month of life), and it is evident that institutionalized children were not placed there because of developmental delay or handicap. Children adopted from Romania had experienced unusually severe and pervasive deprivation (Castle et al., 1999), as reflected in their marked physical and developmental delay evident at the time of UK entry (Rutter et al., 1998).

  Measures

  A wide range of measures was obtained similarly on all children at the ages of 4 and 6 years (see Kreppner, O’Connor, Dunn, Anderson-Wood, & the ERA Study Team, 1999; Kreppner, O’Connor, Rutter, & the E.R.A. Study Team, 2001; O’Connor, Bredenkamp, Rutter, & the English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) Study Team, 1999; O’Connor, Rutter, Beckett, et al., 2000; O’Connor, Rutter, & the English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team, 2000; Rutter, Kreppner, O’Connor, & the ERA Study Team, 2001; Rutter et al., 1998, 1999). Details are given here only of the physical, cognitive, and social measures used in the present set of analyses.

  Measures concerning the child’s state at the time of UK entry

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  Nurturing Natures

  Attachment and Children's Emotional, Sociocultural and Brain Development

  • Graham Music(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Harlow et al., 1965 ).

  Serious early deprivation also often leads to a stunting of physical growth (Sonuga-Barke et al., 2022 ). On the other hand, when premature infants receive touch, such as via the well-researched intervention of kangaroo care (Cristóbal Cañadas et al., 2022 ), they gain weight, as has also been shown when premature infants receive massage therapy (Lu et al., 2020 ). One more anecdotal early study (Widdowson, 1951 ) examined children in orphanages. Those who were looked after by a kindly, generous matron grew physically much more than children in the other orphanage, even though food intake was kept identical in both. Indeed, when the loving matron was transferred to the other orphanage, the growth of the previously deprived children caught up! Such cases are now technically known as ‘non-organic failure to thrive’, which is very linked to neglect (Burge et al., 2019 ).

  Generally the more severe the deprivation, the worse the effects. Many adopted from Romanian orphanages showed serious attachment issues, such as indiscriminate sociability, but those with the worst symptoms had generally spent much longer in institutional care as opposed to those who were adopted or fostered (Smyke et al., 2014 ). Those placed in foster care dropped much of their symptomatology such as rocking, developed better social skills and became more able to accept help. A battery of tests showed that in many respects those placed in good foster care did not differ from children who were never institutionalised. This contrasts with the children who remained institutionalised, who were more withdrawn, unresponsive and disinhibited. Indeed, big differences were seen even in immune and metabolic function when these children reached adolescence (Slopen et al., 2019 ). Excitingly, researchers also found hopeful brain changes, such as growth in white matter, in those placed in foster care as well as large gains in IQ (Humphreys et al., 2022 ), signifying that, if caught earlier, many of these effects can be reversed. Similar gains were shown in a large sample of UK children adopted from institutional settings who lost many of their symptoms (Román et al., 2022

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