Romania’s Abandoned Children: Deprivation, Brain Development and the Struggle for Recovery, by Charles A. Nelson, Nathan A. Fox and Charles H. Zeanah
This article reviews a new book by Charles A. Nelson, Nathan A. Fox and Charles H. Zeanah who conducted seminal studies in Romania on children who were institutionalised, comparing their developmental and well-being outcomes to children who were placed in foster care or adoptive families. The study found that placing children in foster care, even relatively late in infancy (the average age was 22 months), brought benefits in a number of domains of cognitive and emotional functioning, including language, positive emotion and attachment. Families appear to have helped the process of brain development via their normal activities of caring for the child and providing verbal and emotional support. The success of parenting was greater the earlier it was provided. One of the most interesting parts of the book, according to the review, are those addressing the ethical dilemma of conducting this study, which entailed randomly assigning infants either to adoption or to continued institutional deprivation.