What are they doing to our children?

Reactive Attachment Disorder is a condition that afflicts infants who are either cared for in institutions (ie children's homes) and who get no consistent affection from a carer, or who experience the loss of a primary caregiver for other reasons (death, imprisonment, separation). If a child is, say, adopted after no more than 6 months, the damage can to some degree be overcome; beyond that it becomes more difficult.

It can affect people throughout their lives, leading to problems with relationships. This can either occur through being inhibited and not knowing how to form attachments - if they lost their primary caregiver, or had a very inconsistent primary caregiver, and had no opportunity to form a good relationship with another one. Alternatively they can be disinhibited to such a degree that they form loose relationships with anyone - if they have had a series of carers throughout their young lives - fluttering on from person to person. Anyone who has worked with young people with a background of being passed around (think of children of drug users who regularly go to (different) foster carers as their parents go through crises) can recognize the signs. Actually, it's a form of child abuse, and the state pays for it in countries where children are put into orphanages easily. What's more, if people themselves had problems with attachment, they won't always appreciate the need of providing consistency to their children.

So I was rather surprised to come across the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a piece of research carried out by the Tulane Infant Mental Health Institute between 2000 and 2004. It was a trial of foster care in Romania, as an alternative to institutional care. Apparently 'one hundred and thirty children between the ages of 6 and 31 months were assessed at baseline and then randomized to routine institutional care or to placement in foster care'.

Read that again. An American research institute experimented on Romanian children to see if foster care worked for them, by placing them randomly in different scenarios. Now we know that generally fostering or adoption is better for children, which is why many countries no longer have infant homes (though consistently being with Mum or another permanent carer is nearly always best).

How dare they mess about with the children of other countries? Where's the consideration of 'in the best interests of the child' when making decisions on people who cannot give their consent? Where was the ethics committee that should assess all research? (I've written to the institute to ask!) I realise that much experimental research used to be carried out by causing distress to infants (apparently in the US 35% of infants [people] have insecure attachments) , which can only be identified by separating the infants from their parents for a brief period (minutes, hours [?]), and of course you can't interview a small child easily, but I would have thought that nowadays there are ways other than distressing experiments to assess such factors.