December 21, 2007

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds

By BENEDICT CAREY

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.

“What makes this study important,” he went on, “is that it gives objective data to say that if you’re going to allow international adoptions, then it’s a good idea to speed things up and get kids into families quickly.”

In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted American families from adopting local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, Americans adopted 20,679 children from abroad, more than half of them from China, Guatemala and Russia.

The authors of the new paper, led by Dr. Charles H. Zeanah Jr. of Tulane and Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children, and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages, or join an adoptive family. The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Dr. Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared to 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon in Romania as they were known.

“Institutions and environments vary enormously across the world and within countries,” Dr. Nelson said, “but I think these findings generalize to many situations, from kids in institutions to those in abusive households and even bad foster care arrangements.”

In setting up the study, the researchers directly addressed the ethical issue of assigning children to institutional care, which was suspected to be harmful. “If a government is to consider alternatives to institutional care for abandoned children, it must know how the alternative compares to the standard care it provides. In Romania, this meant comparing the standard of care to anew and alternative form of care,” they wrote.

Any number of factors common to institutions could work to delay or blunt intellectual development, experts say: the regimentation, the indifference to individual differences in children’s habits and needs; and most of all, the limited access to caregivers, who in some institutions can be responsible for more than 20 children at a time.

“The evidence seems to say,” said Dr. Pollak, of Wisconsin, “that for humans, we need a lot of responsive care giving, an adult who recognizes our distinct cry, knows when we’re hungry or in pain, and gives us the opportunity to crawl around and handle different things, safely, when we’re ready.”

By MAURA HARTY — Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs

The Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, Maura Harty, is in the Hague today presenting the U.S. Government’s instrument of ratification of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption. She asked that we forward this piece to you, in commemoration of the event and in recognition of your interest in this issue.

Nearly everyone has family members or friends who are adoptive parents or adopted children. There are 150,000 adoptions in the United States http://www.inform.com/United+States every year. Though most of these are domestic adoptions - only 14 percent of adopted children are foreign born - the astonishing fact is that Americans adopt more foreign children every year than all the other countries in the world combined.

As a U.S. citizen, I am proud of what that says about Americans’ generosity and open hearts. As the person responsible for ensuring that these adoptions comply with the laws of the child’s country of birth and with U.S. law, I am dedicated to securing the integrity of the process. This month, the United States is joining a community of nations that has pledged adherence to the highest ethical and procedural adoption standards. U.S. ratification of the Hague Convention on Protection http://www.inform.com/Hague+Convention+on+Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption is a historic milestone that will benefit thousands of orphaned children around the world, and American families seeking to adopt them.

The convention establishes internationally accepted safeguards to ensure that intercountry adoptions occur in the best interests of children. It affirms the principle that such adoptions are an essential way to provide permanent, loving homes to orphans who have not been adopted within their extended families or local communities. It promotes transparency and ethical practice.

The United States traveled a long road to reach this milestone. Our country was one of the first to sign the Hague Adoption Convention http://www.inform.com/Hague+Adoption+Convention , in 1994. In 2000, Congress passed the Intercountry Adoption Act, the legislation that has guided our efforts. On Nov. 16, the president signed the ratification documents, which I have just deposited in the Hague.

Ratification is the culmination of 14 years of effort by my colleagues in the Department of State http://www.inform.com/U.S.+Department+of+State , as well as the steadfast support of hundreds of others in Congress, in other government agencies and in the adoption community. The process took longer than expected. We have moved toward this goal deliberately, but unceasingly, because we had a moral imperative to get it right. Joining the convention has been worth the effort and the wait.

What difference will this make? Here are some of the safeguards and why they matter:

-Federal certification of U.S. adoption service providers working in convention countries, and a complaint registry that will enable us to monitor and enforce compliance with convention standards.

-Required procedures and safeguards designed to keep adoption a not-for-profit activity whose sole purpose is to identify loving homes for children who need them.

-Training, best practices and other support for adoption officials, social workers and judges in source countries.

-Moral authority to encourage additional countries to accede to the Hague Convention.

The Hague Adoption Convention http://www.inform.com/Adoption+Convention fits seamlessly into the United States’ broader commitment to establish a global framework to protect children. With our partners in the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects http://www.inform.com/Hague+Convention+on+the+Civil+A spects of International Child Abduction, we work to secure the return of children who are victims of international parental child abduction.

A new Convention on the International Recovery http://www.inform.com/Convention+on+the+International+Recovery of Child Support was adopted Nov. 23, and I am proud to say that the United States was the first country to sign it.

Reaching this milestone on the Adoption Convention is truly a reason for celebration and for renewing America’s commitment to children. As we implement the convention, we reaffirm our goal to help children in need of permanent families find secure and loving homes, wherever that may be. The United States will continue to work with our many convention partners to build a better future for the world’s children.

This morning, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty deposited the United States’ instrument of ratification of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption at a ceremony in The Hague. The United States is now a full member of the Hague Adoption Convention, which will enter into force for the United States on April 1, 2008. As of that date, the Convention will govern intercountry adoptions between the United States and other Convention member countries in accordance with the provisions of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 (PL 106-279).

December 12, 2007.