Parents of children adopted as older babies or toddlers from institutional care settings have a lot on their plate. They have to assess the child's immediate physical needs which could include malnutrition, undiagnosed diseases and developmental gaps, all depending on the quality of care the child has been receiving and for how long. In addition to these physical concerns, adoptive parents of older children must work hard to create safe, nurturing environments and healthy emotional attachments for their kids.
The good news is that thousands of parents do this all quite successfully every year.
The bad news is that researchers are beginning to suspect that even once these things are addressed, children who began life in stressful conditions--particularly institutional care--have ongoing, lifelong health concerns.
The alarming study found that:
"Even the health of children adopted before the age of 3 who then spent more than a decade with their new families was no better than the health of children who had spent their entire childhoods in abusive families."
The study was done at the Child Emotion Laboratory in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center by Seth Pollak, Elizabeth Shirtcliff and Christopher Coe. It measured immunity by comparing teens adopted from institutions as young children, teens raised in abusive families and teens from a control group. By comparing the teens' levels of antibodies for the herpes simplex virus, they found that children living in abusive situations and children living in healthy families but with a history of institutionalization had similar immune responses to the latent virus.
The researchers conclude that children under stress have compromised immune systems, putting them at risk for other health problems throughout their lives.
Hopefully, learning about this phenomenon will help doctors whose patients have these kinds of early childhood stress histories. Researcher, Christopher Coe advises the thousands of international and foster-adoptive parents out there to "go into adoption with your eyes wide open...[and] love these children. Give them all the support they need."
See also:
image: gleasonworks.com
