4 - Childhoods in care

Summary

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Introduction

As shown in the previous chapters, since 1990 Romania's ‘silent babies’ have been research subjects for international scholars, particularly in the field of psychiatry, who saw in them a research opportunity to study the effects of deprivation in early childhood. They have been described by mass media, state and private actors as ‘orphan’, ‘unwanted’, ‘unloved’ and ‘uncared for’. In 2020, the BBC published the latest results of the English Romanian Adoptee study: the brains of the Romanian adoptees were 8.6 per cent smaller compared to English born adoptees despite having received ‘top-notch care in loving adoptive families’. But although the article seems to suggest causality between early adversity and problems with motivation, organisation and memory, the researchers admit that ‘it is hard to work out the effect of other early life traumas such as abuse or being a refugee’. Presumably, that means to dissociate between the impact of neglect during their time in institution and the impact of the intercountry adoption. We now know for example that mother tongue is the language one hears during the first six months of life (Gauthier and Genesee, 2011) and that in itself suggests that the change of environment might impact more than we think on the child's development. Moreover, narratives about Romania's children referred constantly to what they had lacked for their development, with hardly any reference to what had sustained their lives and development (Dickens, 2004). This is why I wanted to find out from them how they made sense of their experiences growing up in different types of placement and how they navigated their journeys to adulthood; what mattered to them while they were in care and what helped them to become who they were at the time of the interview. I chose to conduct life-history interviews with open-ended questions in which I asked them about their childhood memories, about their current lives and future plans, and about what they believed made them the people they were. My last question was: if you were to describe your life to me in one word what would that be?

The young people in the study