4/7/23
Little Defectives
Little Defectives
As the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe fell one-by-one in 1989, the people of Romania exacted retribution on their particularly cruel leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu. After he lost control of the secret police, the military, and the security forces, he and his wife were forced to surrender, promptly tried, and executed as a Christmas present to their people.
The Romanian dictatorship was known to be more independent than typical for countries in the Warsaw Pact. It was more aggressively committed to repressing its own people, more committed to the ideals of Marxist-Leninist theory. It had refused to partake in the loosening of repression that swept its neighbors between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s ouster in the Soviet Union. And as populations throughout the Soviet empire began to stagnate and fall in the late 1960s, the Ceaușescu dictatorship developed innovative policies that essentially declared women’s wombs the property of the state, commandeered to produce more citizens for the people of this workers paradise. Divorce was outlawed, and abortion and contraceptions were banned for any woman younger than 45. Lavish medical benefits were provided to pregnant mothers. Those who had more than five children were paid more.
Parenting didn’t matter according to communist theory. Collective government could do just as well as families at raising the young. There was no special consideration in the ideology to deal with some unexpected side effects of the family policy: a lot of abandoned and unwanted infants—particularly those with birth defects. The defective ones were placed in orphanages for “irrecoverable” children. Here they were warehoused until adulthood, when they could perhaps work menial jobs. They received little adult attention, other than the annoying ones being abused and/or sedated.
Journalist Bob Graham described what one of these orphanages looked like when he visited in 1990, as published in Mamamia online magazine (unfortunately heavy on ad spam):
"Usually when you enter a room packed with cots filled with children, the expectation is of noise, chatter or crying, sometimes even a whimper. There was none, even though the children were awake," he told GlobalPost. "They lay in their cots, sometimes two to each cot, sometime three, their eyes staring. Silently. It was eerie, almost sinister."
Staff seemed to ignore them. There was no play, no comfort, no books, toys or paintings in the room.
"[There were] stalls where children, babies, were treated like farm animals," he continued. "No, I am wrong — at least the animals felt brave enough to make a noise."
The orphans that resulted from this inhumane treatment became the object of academic study—as well as of very loving, caring adoption by families with the best intentions in the world. Researchers quickly compared those in orphanages with adopted peers and children in their native families within the Romanian cultural context to try to understand the differences. Suffice it to say, the warehousing approach led to irreparable harm to brain development.
The neuropsychologist Ron Federici was another of the first wave of child-development experts to visit the institutions for the “unsalvageables,” and he has become one of the world’s top specialists caring for post-institutionalized children adopted into Western homes. “In the early years, everybody had starry eyes,” Federici says. “They thought loving, caring families could heal these kids. I warned them: These kids are going to push you to the breaking point. Get trained to work with special-needs children. Keep their bedrooms spare and simple. Instead of ‘I love you,’ just tell them, ‘You are safe.’ ” But most new or prospective parents couldn’t bear to hear it, and the adoption agencies that set up shop overnight in Romania weren’t in the business of delivering such dire messages. “I got a lot of hate mail,” says Federici, who is fast-talking and blunt, with a long face and a thatch of shiny black hair. “ ‘You’re cold! They need love! They’ve got to be hugged.’ ” But the former marine, once widely accused of being too pessimistic about the kids’ futures, is now considered prescient.
The excerpt is from the July/August 2020 issue of The Atlantic by Melissa Fay Greene. (I do not have access to non-paid versions of the article; it was “my last free” one, according to the site.)
It has been 33 years since these maltreated wards of the Ceaușescu regime were discovered and set free in their hundreds of thousands. The human toll of this brutal dictatorship was lasting. Our own political squabbles don’t typically produce such dire results—not on such a scale. If anything, it should serve as a reminder of what it means to say that liberal democracy may seem like the worst form of government—except when compared to the alternatives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhuvaKLJbNw
Baby otters!
An interesting read this morning. Katie and I originally applied to adopt from Romania, and were in queue when they shut down their adoption program. I had friends who tried to adopt from Romania, and they had a very negative experience. But they had adopted older kids, where the damage had largely set it.
I disagree about "I love you" vs "you are safe". They need both, and they need to hear the two overlap. "I am safe because they love me".
We adopted from Ukraine, and we adopted a little girl, who was 14 months old when we first met her. She had no toys in the orphanage, and was fed 3x a day, mostly porridge. They sat in a semi-circle, the worker had one spoon and one bowl for 6-10 kids. She put a spoonful in their mouth, moved to the next kid. If you were looking away, or had your mouth shut, she moved to the next kid. So kids were trained to lean forward, their mouths wide open. It'd be cute if you didn't know they had been underfed. On the other hand, since we brought food with when we visited (including bananas), our daughter thought we were heroes! A month after we got there she weighed less than 15 pounds, even though she in the 90th percentile for height (between 5-10 percentile for weight). And she had put on a pound or two with us! We visited twice a day, for about an hour.
They do not allow visitors into the bedrooms, or really into the main part of the orphanage, but it is a mostly bare room. Think "patient waiting area" of a older doctor's office, but remove the magazines and tv. The playground was dirt, no grass. There was a swing set and a monkey bar (and not a big one). The kids went everywhere single file, quietly. Go to a daycare, and the noise is loud. The orphanage is quiet.
Our daughter is now 21 (this year is our 20th anniversary of adopting her), she cannot keep her room clean; she does better with less stuff. She still hoards food! We find little stashes periodically throughout the house. She nibbles. She rarely eats a lot of anything, but would prefer to eat 10x a day. Going to restaurants is frustrating because she'll order a "large", when she won't eat a kid's portion.
She does well with special attention, taking her for a drive, going to a store, etc. She acts up when it is someone else's special day, as she doesn't get a lot of attention. That is why she bonded with us. She had two hours a day of mostly individual attention. We fed her food, we helped her walk, our son (9 at the time) swung her. His gameboy fascinated her, it made noise! The nurse we rented our house from told us she would do fine with us because she napped in my arms--that meant she had learned to trust us. I terrified her at first because the staff at the orphanage was all female, she had never seen a beard before! I might be a grizzly bear! Although after feeding her cookies every day she might have decided I was the cookie monster's little brother.
Overall, she is so much better off here, than there. She is safe, well fed, well loved, goes to community college (phlebotomy) part time. Most people who meet her do not know she is adopted (we told all our friends and family), she is reasonably well adjusted. But if we go out to dinner and I order shrimp she'll still steal one or two off my plate.