Every year, people travel the world with the hope of adopting a child and building a family. Excitement builds day by day as they jump through hoops, are met by towers of paperwork, and take hours of classes. After months, to years of waiting, they finally get the call that they have been matched with a child. After another long wait, they receive the call that their child is ready to come home. Once the child begins to settle in, displays of disruptive behavior such as uncontrollable tantrums and rejection of affection, begin to surface. This begins the long and difficult process of transitioning that child from the environment they have been raised in, to a new environment with caregivers that they will hopefully begin to form a bond with.
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This study involved evaluating children for several years, aged 6 months to 3 years, who had been living in Romania’s Bucharest institution since birth (Weir, 2014). They also assessed a control group of children who had never been institutionalized. Some of the institutionalized children were moved into foster care and the rest remained in the institution (Weir, 2014). The results were astounding. The children that remained in institutional care had “delays in cognitive function, motor development, and language, and experienced more psychiatric disorders as well as changes of electric activity in their brains” (Weir, 2014). The children who were moved to foster care showed “improvements in language, IQ and social functioning, as well as the ability to form secure attachments with their caregivers and to express emotion, but still lagged behind children who had never been institutionalized” (Weir, 2014). The most disturbing part of this study revealed that the impact of neglect had negatively affected the size of these children’s brains. The children who had remained in the institution had smaller brains, with less neurons and the fibers that transmit signals between neurons (Weir, …show more content…
Their findings were similar to the Bucharest study, where there was a reduction in brain volume and changes to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for memory, perception and cognitive processes (Siddiqui, 2008; Weir, 2014). Most toddlers adopted from institutions had formed strong attachments to their adoptive parents; however, it was often disorganized, which led to children resisting their caregivers or approaching them for comfort inconsistently (Weir,
This study involved evaluating children for several years, aged 6 months to 3 years, who had been living in Romania’s Bucharest institution since birth (Weir, 2014). They also assessed a control group of children who had never been institutionalized. Some of the institutionalized children were moved into foster care and the rest remained in the institution (Weir, 2014). The results were astounding. The children that remained in institutional care had “delays in cognitive function, motor development, and language, and experienced more psychiatric disorders as well as changes of electric activity in their brains” (Weir, 2014). The children who were moved to foster care showed “improvements in language, IQ and social functioning, as well as the ability to form secure attachments with their caregivers and to express emotion, but still lagged behind children who had never been institutionalized” (Weir, 2014). The most disturbing part of this study revealed that the impact of neglect had negatively affected the size of these children’s brains. The children who had remained in the institution had smaller brains, with less neurons and the fibers that transmit signals between neurons (Weir, …show more content…
Their findings were similar to the Bucharest study, where there was a reduction in brain volume and changes to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for memory, perception and cognitive processes (Siddiqui, 2008; Weir, 2014). Most toddlers adopted from institutions had formed strong attachments to their adoptive parents; however, it was often disorganized, which led to children resisting their caregivers or approaching them for comfort inconsistently (Weir,