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Professor Sir Michael Rutter and Romania

This programme is an interesting interview with Professor Sir Michael Rutter about the effects of Romanian Orphanages on children.

What I find particularly interesting is that his conclusion was that the children who left the orphanage before 6 months generally did not suffer from long lasting disorders.

"in all of our followups we have found no deficits in children whose institutional deprivation ended before the age of 6 months. That is not to say that at an individual level that there is no child that is affected, but it is to say that the differences were so small that we couldn't measure them."

"The rate of deficits jumped to a rate of 40% in the second half of the first year."

What is important about this is that it implies that the RAD seen in the large numbers of children taken into care in England in their first 3 months is not caused by their parenting, but by something else.

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