Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 11 of 91
Romanian orphans and the window for bonding
There’s a window of several years during which babies strive to create these bonds and establish perceptions of safety. If it doesn’t happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In extreme cases, they can be scarred for life. We know this because of a powerful and heartbreaking story from Communist Romania, discovered circa 1990 by Western reporters. In 1966, in an effort to boost the country’s low birth rate, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned both contraception and abortion and taxed those who were childless after age 25—whether married, single, or infertile. As the birth rate rose, so did poverty and homelessness. Children were often simply abandoned. Ceausescu’s response was to create a gulag of state orphanages, with children warehoused by the thousands. The orphanages soon were stripped of resources as Ceausescu began exporting most of Romania’s food and industry to repay the country’s crippling national debt. The scenes in these orphanages were shocking. Babies were seldom held or given deliberate sensory stimulation. Many were found tied to their beds, left alone for hours or days, with bottles of gruel propped haphazardly into their mouths. Many infants stared blankly into space. Indeed, you could walk into some of these hundred-bed orphanages and not hear a sound. Blankets were covered in urine, feces, and lice. The childhood mortality rate in these institutions was sickening, termed by some Westerners “pediatric Auschwitz.” Horrible as these conditions were, they created a real opportunity to investigate—and perhaps treat—large groups of severely traumatized children. One remarkable study involved Canadian families who adopted some of these infants and raised them back home. As the adopted children matured, researchers could easily divide them into two groups. One group seemed remarkably stable. Social behavior, stress responses, grades, medical issues—all were indistinguishable from healthy Canadian controls. The other group seemed just as remarkably troubled. They had more eating problems, got sick more often, and exhibited increasingly aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable? The age of adoption. If the children were adopted before the fourth month of life, they acted like every other happy kid you know. If they were adopted after the eighth month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly caused immense stress to their systems. And that stress affected these children’s behavior years later. They may have been removed from the orphanages long ago, but they were never really free.