Effects of instituionalisation

English and Romanian Adoptees project

Most intensive study on the effects of instituionaliation has been undertaken by the English and Romanian adoptees (ERA) project

Initial study was led by Rutter and colleagues and they focused on a group of 165 children who had been adopted by English families

The adoptees were from Romania and had spent their early years in large institutions

Aim of the ERA project was to investigate the extent to which good care could make up for poor early experiences in institutions

Physical cognitive and emotional development has been assessed when the children were age 4 6 11 15 and 22-25 years

A group of 52 children from the UK adopted around the same time have served as a control group

Effects of attachment

Appeared to be a difference in outcome related to whether adoption took place before or after six months of age

Those Romanian children who were adopted after they were six months old showed signs of a particular attachment style of insecure attachment, called disinhibited attachment

Characteristics of disinhibited attachment include attention seeking, clinginess and social behaviour directed indiscriminately towards all adults, both familiar and unfamiliar

This is highly unusual behaviour- most children in the second year show stranger anxiety

In contrast those children adopted before the age of sixth months rarely displayed disinhibited attachment

Rutter has explained disinihibited attachment as an adaptation to living with multiple caregivers during the sensitive period for attachment formation

In poor quality institutions, like those in Romania, a child might have 50 carers but doesn’t spend enough time with any one of them to be able to form a secure attachment

Later follow up studies

Sonuga- Barke et al. assessed the adoptees at age 22-25, finding a similar pattern of continued emotional and intellectual difficulties in those adopted late (after six months of age), though 20% were problem free

An even later follow up study looked specifically at parenting and found that only 20% of all the adoptees had become parents and, of this group, 20% had difficulties in parenting (i.e. 80% were problem free)

It is possible that the better adjusted adoptees were the ones who chose to be parents

Both sets of data suggest a strong lasting effect on emotional development

Effects on IQ

When the Romanian adoptees first arrived in the UK, half the adoptees showed signs of delayed intellectual devlopment, and the majority were severely undernourished

At age 11 the adopted children showed differential rates of recovery that were related to their age at adoption

The mean IQ of those children adopted before the age of six months was 102, compared with 86 for those adopted between six months and two years and 77 for those adopted after two years

These differences remained at age 16

It appears that, like emotional development, damage to intellectual development as a result of instutionalisation can be recovered provided adoption takes place before the age of six months- the age at which attachment form