Children were much more likely to show secure attachment if they had been adopted before 12 months, and other studies of internationally adopted children suggest that babies placed in adoption under six months seem to show normal attachment patterns in early childhood. Although this figure is lower than the 70% of children left behind in orphanages who are disorganised in their attachment, only 15% would typically be expected to show this pattern. The Romanian adoptees showed an unusual pattern of attachment in later childhood for example 33% showed ‘disorganised’ attachment, where children are unable to trust their care giver but have no one else to turn to. Probably the most commonly used metric for emotional development is whether children show a healthy secure attachment to a care giver, as insecure attachment at around 12-18 months is associated with anxious behaviour and even pathological anxiety later in childhood.
In terms of social-emotional development, these children tend to fare less well. Notably though, the adoptees did fall short on school performance, suggesting that cognitive performance lags behind cognitive competence. Ĭognitive catch-up is also impressive in one fairly representative study a group of children adopted around their third birthday later showed IQ within the normal range, while their non-adopted peers were diagnosed as learning disabled.
Physically, institutional care has a huge impact on children’s height, weight and their head circumference, but after adoption into relatively much better off homes, children’s height and weight showed almost complete catch up. Institutionalisation severely effects all areas of child development yet after adoption, recovery is not equal across different areas.
The importance of the early years isn’t equal across different areas of development Tragically, we can consider the effects of such extreme early neglect through examples like the international adoption of children from Romanian orphanages in the early 90s after the fall of the Ceausescu regime. To not experience these basic environments, for a child to experience less than should be most basically ‘expected’ by a human brain, would require extreme neglect. In the case of language development, the most convincing sensitive period is for being able to perceive the speech sounds of a language, again quite a basic human skill. The kinds of things that have been convincingly shown to have sensitive periods in humans are very basic things like depth perception, and even then the sensitive period is thought to extend to age four. The idea of sensitive periods is compelling, but ultimately largely irrelevant to any typical child rearing environment. But to go wrong you have to go really wrong A broad implication could be, wrongly, taken that this means we must learn things early or we will not learn them at all. All animals studied, including humans, show sensitive periods as juveniles. A sensitive period is a time in a young animal’s life when their brain and behaviour are most susceptible to being changed by the environment for example, song birds must learn their species-specific song early in life. The intuitive importance of those early years was backed up by the emergence of some intriguing neuroscience, key among which was the idea of sensitive periods. Children develop from being almost entirely dependent new-borns to independent, communicating individuals who can dance, sing, and tell stories. Obviously the first three years of life are an extraordinary and vital part of child development. This is something that we wanted to address here because the policy implications have been huge, especially in the States, and the idea is based on some key findings in neuroscience, and yet it’s still not clear cut what’s true and what’s hype. This idea was first propounded in the late 90s in America, and became the ‘zero to three movement’, which aimed both to change parental attitudes to early development and to affect public health policy. This is the general idea that the first three years of life are a critical period for children’s brain development, and that deprivation over those years will result in persistent deficits in cognitive, emotional and even physical health.