Privation and Institutionalisation

Privation.

Privation is the lack of any attachment forming during childhood. This could be because of death of both parents and being placed into care or by extreme deprivation in unsuitable institution.

Case Study of the Czech Twins - Koluchova 1976

Twin boys were placed into care after their mother died and their father remarried. After a while the twins were taken in by their father and lived with his new family, including a step brother. The twins were treated cruelly and locked in a cellar with no heating and were abused. When they were found they had low social skills and low intellectual development. They went on to being adopted, and made progress in both areas. They later on both had jobs and children. The affects of privation when younger had been reversed.  The case study provides data to show that quality of care after privation can help reduce the effects and allow the children to live normal happy lives in the future.

Institutionalisation.

When a child is placed into care or an orphanage and has no consistent caregiver

Hodges and Tizard 1989

Aimed to investigate the long term effects of privation of 65 children raised in children homes until the age of 4. They carried out a longitudinal study of 65 children who were placed in a home before they were 4 months old, and hadn't had an opportunity to form any attachments with any of their caregivers. By the age of 4 some had returned to their birth mothers, some where adopted and the rest stayed in the home. Hodges and Tizard visited families and interviewed them with an adult present until the children were 16. They also contacted the children's schools and same sex peers to complete a questionnaire on their behaviour. 16 year old adopted group had strong family relationships compared to the control group who had never been in care. Those who stayed in the home or were reunited with their mothers had weak relationships for both peer and family. 20/21 in the adopted group formed good attachments whereas only 6/13 in the restored group formed good attachments. Children can recover from maternal privation if they are in a good quality environment after being in care, this will help them to be able to form good relationships later in life.

Rutter et al 2007

111 Romanian orphans were adopted to UK families in three groups: adopted before the age of 6 months, between 6 months and 2 years and after the age of two (late adoptees) there was also a control group of adopted English children. Initially their development was under average, but by the age of 4 their development had equalized with the control group. He used semi-structured interviews of both child and parents and observations to see if child makes inappropriate physical contact. He based his results on the amount of disinhibited behaviour shown - attention seeking behaviour with a lack of selectivity.  He found that 40% of the UK children showed no disinhibited behaviour, 56% mildly did and 4% showed a high amount. Whereas in the Romanian groups younger than 6 months was 53%, 38% and 9% respectively and between 6 months to 2 years showed 30%, 44% and 26% perspectively.From this it is possible to infer that Romanian orphan child care is more traumatic in the initial development of children, but also the results suggest that the children recover better the earlier they are adopted. The younger their adopted the better they recover and less damage is done.

Evaluation.

Research into this area has changed social policy. Rutter's research promoted the importance of early adoption. Therefore the research is useful. This showed that early adoption avoids negative affects of privation/institutionalisation.

Research uses a variety of research methods, for example Hodges and Tizard 1989 used questionnaires and interviews of a variety of people in the child's life, this increases the reliability of their results.

However self report methods can be criticized in terms of their reliability, often the results suffer from social desirability bias, or example this could occur when interviewing parents of the adopted children, the parents could be lying when saying that their child was developing healthy behaviour in case it reflects on their quality of care or they fear that the child would be removed from their care. This lowers the validity of the findings.

Research tends to suffer from ethical issues due to being a longitudinal nature. The studies involve following the children throughout their development, for example in Hodges and Tizard the children are followed until they turn 16, this is intrusive and could be distressing for the children involved.

Privation

Institutionalisation

Evaluation