Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why are babies born young?

Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin