I. Theoretical, Empirical, and Practical Rationale

Abstract

A fundamental quest of the developmental social and behavioral sciences is to specify the necessary and sufficient early experiences that lead to typical human development in childhood and adulthood. Because the opportunity to experimentally manipulate early human experiences is very limited, one approach is to observe the development and long-term outcomes of children who are tragically reared in atypically deficient early environments.Unfortunately, these studies usually are limited by a variety of confounds (J. McCall, 1999), among them sample selection, selective adoption, and the multifaceted nature of the early experience. For example, children reared in substandard orphanages (i.e., those in which some aspect of care is substantially inferior to that suggested by best practices) display developmental delays in most physical and behavioral domains, and such children who are later adopted into advantaged homes have higher frequencies of extreme behaviors and problems than nonorphanage children. But are these contemporary and long-term outcomes associated with the particular children who are sent to orphanages (e.g., unusual prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, adverse birth circumstances) rather than the orphanage experience per se? Which aspects (e.g., deficiencies in nutrition, medical care, toys, equipment, social-emotional neglect, lack of experience with relationships, abuse) of what is usually a globally deficient orphanage environment are associated with these delays and long-term problems?This monograph reports a study that comes closer to validating that one attribute of the orphanage environment, namely very limited caregiver-child social-emotional interactions and the lack of opportunity to develop caregiver-child relationships, can be responsible for contemporary delays in most major domains of development in institutionalized children.Specifically, in a quasi-experimental design, two social-emotional interventions were introduced in orphanages for children birth to 48 months in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, that otherwise had acceptable medical care, nutrition, sanitation, toys, equipment, and the absence of abuse but were primarily deficient in the children's social-emotional experience and opportunity for adult-child relationships. The results show substantial improvement in children's physical, mental, and social-emotional development; improvements for typical children and those with a variety of disabilities; and a dose-response effect for many developmental outcomes in which the more positive social-emotional experience given to children and the longer they spent in the interventions, the greater the developmental gains. These results substantiate the potential importance of early social-emotional experience and adult-child relationships for the contemporary development of young children in institutions.WITH COMMENTARY BY Susan C. Crockenberg., Michael Rutter Marian J. Bakermans-Kranenburg, Marinus H. van THEORETICAL RATIONALEMost developmental theories (e.g., psychoanalytic th...

The Development of Children Placed Into Different Types of Russian Families Following an Institutional Intervention

“…Although Time in BH (months) was not different for children who transitioned to different types of families in a previous study (McCall et al, 2014), it was related to the extent of BH intervention effects on children’s development at departure (St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008) and it is generally related to longer-term outcomes for post-institutionalized children (Julian, 2013).…”

“…Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2005, 2008), which was designed to promote caregiver-child relationships and provide children with more stimulation. Three institutions for children birth to four years called Baby Homes (BHs) received one of three conditions.…”

Effects of Institutionalization and Parental Living Status on Children’s Self-Esteem, and Externalizing and Internalizing Problems in Rwanda

“…Residential child care institutions, known as orphanages in Rwanda, rarely meet the average acceptable environmental conditions for children’s normal development (1). They often lack stable caregiving as well as open opportunities for exploration and mastery of the world (2, 3).…”

The Effect of a Social–Emotional Intervention on the Development of Preterm Infants in Institutions

“…Ten percent of children are born preterm worldwide (World Health Organization, 2015), and the most recent data in the Russian Federation (RF) shows 4.3% are preterm (Skripnichenko, Baranov, & Tokovaya, 2014). Some studies reported that there is a substantial number of preterm children in institutions for children left without parental care (Chernego, 2015; The St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008; Vorria et al, 2003). In the RF in 2014, there were nearly 28 million children, 50,227 of them lived in 1076 institutions for children 0–18 years old, and 11,530 lived in Baby Homes (BH) for children 0–4 years old (Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation, 2014).…”

“…Generally, children exposed to the psychosocial deprivation of institutional care display deficiencies in development (van IJzendoorn et al, 2011). Interventions in institutions have produced developmental improvements in physical and developmental domains for children (Groark et al, 2013; The St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008). Despite the presence of preterm children in orphanages, this group has never been studied specifically.…”