Extreme caregiver deprivation halted children’s physical and mental development

Evidence

Cyprian was one of about 170,000 Romanian babies crammed into orphanages that were like terrible zoos. The babies were barely fed and only occasionally changed. They were never taken outside into the fresh air. The rooms they were housed in reeked of urine and body odor. With a ratio of dozens of children to one or two caregivers, the abandoned babies were never cuddled. They had no toys to play with. Because they were often tied to their filthy cribs, they didn’t learn to crawl or walk. Instead of learning to talk, they banged their heads on the metal bars of their cribs. By the time Cyprian’s adoptive parents picked him up in Bucharest in the summer of 1992, he was “failing to thrive,” meaning that he’d stopped growing and developing. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 99

Categorization

• SHARE: A grim but riveting case for someone interested in attachment deprivation or institutionalization research.