The impact of orphanage care to post adoption life

I have read that orphanages cause many, many problems. RAD is rare in kids, but prevelant in kids from orphanages, and I knew someone in foster care who had it. Think about how different their lives are! Some kids will also have other mental issues related to their life before the orphanage. I've never adopted, so I can't quite figure out the severity of all of these issues, and I'm trying to figure it out for myself and am getting VERY mixed views! I'm hypothesizing that it's HARD to deal with these issues but possible if you make LOTS of sacrafices.

Yes, there can be definite challenges, but a parent who takes them seriously and is willing to go to extra effort can overcome a lot of the effects. My daughter, Julia, spent most of her early life in a hospital here in the USA. Since she wasn't getting her emotional needs met, her behavior was very much like a child who had been in an orphanage in an impoverished nation, even though she was in one of the most high-tech hospitals in the country. They hadn't even been holding her to feed her. They put in a gastrostomy and just hooked her up to a machine to feed her. Her birth parents maintained custody of her, for four months, but they rarely visited her in the hospital and, when they did, they didn't hold her. I got her at six months old. She was very antisocial at first, expecially toward me. The only way she would let me hold her, at first, was facing away from me. If I tried to hold her facing toward me, she would turn her head away and put out her little hand and push me away. Fortunately, she was my fourth baby, and I had studied a lot about attachment disorder and what could be done about it. I decided to carry her around as much as I could. For about the first week, it was with her facing away from me. Then, she started to accept being held facing toward me and after a couple of weeks I started carrying her in a front pack, which she learned to love. By three weeks, she was very attached. It was an insecure attachment, but that was a huge improvement. If I got far enough away that she couldn't see me or hear my voice, she would start to panic. So, I just didn't leave her at all for a year. At that point, she was old enough for the church nursery, so i decided to try it. I expected her to fuss, but she was just as happy as a clam to sit there and play for an hour and a half, obviously trusting that I would be back for her. None of my other kids went to the church nursery that easily, so I felt that was impressive.Another thing I did was declare war on the tube and get her feeding by mouth, well. I had to teach her to take comfort in sucking, because she had no idea it was supposed to be comforting. That is an important thing for many children who have spent their early lives in an orphanage where the caregivers were spread too thin to sit and leisurely feed infants. They are often fed with bottles with nipples with huge holes, so that it takes only a few minutes to feed them. Many people have had success by getting children to spend time sucking while being held, even children who had been off of bottles for quite some time. I think it is helpful to be careful who you let know that you are encouraging an older child to spend time sucking and being held and rocked, like a baby. There are people who have no basis for understanding the needs of a child whose early life was spent not getting their emotional needs met and will disapprove. You need to be able to decide what you think is right and do it, without having to listen to criticism. That is true throughout parenting, but even more so when you are dealing with a challenge that most parents never have to face.There is a book called "Holding Time" which I haven't read, but have heard good things about it from parents who have adopted children with RAD or are high risk for it. Oh, and Julia is grown, now, and we are very close!

My youngest son who was in an orphanage for six years has very definite effects. He has been diagnosed with RAD and other things. He learned how to manipulate people because in the orphanage you had to compete to get attention. He learned how to bully other children, for the same reason. He learned not to get to close to anyone and not to trust adults, because so many adults were in and out of his life. He lies a lot, he is not used to having the same person there all the time, he is used to caregivers changing every 8 hours or so. The caregivers did not talk to each other so consequences for bad behavior did not last more than a few hours at most. He would lie to the new caregiver about having been especially good and they would give him treats or rewards. He has been home four years, but he had six years of that behavior and it's hard to undo. We have had tons of counseling and stuff, but so far he still trusts no one an is very dishonest an manipulative.

I'll second everything that Momraine said. It fits my kid from an orphanage to a T. He was in an orphanage four years and now home four years and only time will tell if he even partially overcomes those effects. And yes, I do think duration makes a difference. Our youngest was with birth family x 1 month then in two different baby homes (internationally) for the next four months. We did a lot of holding and sling time initially but she attached to us very quickly and I believe that now at sixteen months that she wouldn't be any more attached if she had come to us as a newborn.

I absolutely agree that the duration that a child spends in such a situation makes a huge difference. Even here in America, children who come to their adoptive homes well beyond the infant period tend to have problems, even though they have usually had much more attention in foster homes, than a child in an orphanage would. I also believe that the amount of trauma the child has experienced makes a difference, too. Julia was born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, which is fatal without complicated surgery, and often fatal even when the child has had the surgery. Julia was cut from one side of her body to the other, shortly after birth, to have her internal organs moved to where they were supposed to be, and a patch sewn onto her diaphragm. Over the next four months, she had two more major surgeries and countless tests and treatments, blood draws, etc. From what we know, a large percentage of the touching she got was to have something painful done to her. She was terrified of anyone in a white coat for her first several years. Had she been born healthy, and in a foster home all that time, I think things would have gone much more smoothly when she was placed with us, at six months. I don't think she would have been severely underweight (full-term baby, 9 pounds at six months old) had the developmental delays, or the suspicion of being mentally handicapped, either. She also had some other antisocial behaviors, and was diagnosed as being mildly autistic. Even at age 20, there is some of what could be called antisocial behavior. Had she stayed in a state of deprivation, I don't think she would be considered "normal" now. I have a friend whose child had even more severe antisocial behaviors than Julia, despite still being an infant at placement. When they got him, he had just been released from the hospital where he had been treated for a skull fracture that came from his birth mother throwing him down a flight of stairs. He'd had several other fractures before. So, I think it is very important to know all you can about your child's life. Momraine, I wish you the best with your son,and your other children, as well.