Romanian Adoption Project Study

The result was burgeoning orphanages, where babies were ignored because there wasn’t enough staff, and many children were malnourished and diseased.

When Ceausescu’s regime fell in late 1989, the curtain lifted. Photos of silent skinny babies, rocking themselves in cribs, spread around the world.

More than 600 Romanian children were adopted by Canadians, including Calgary mom Dawn Kinney, who, spurred by the horrifying images, went there and brought Mirela home. At the time Kinney was a 28-year-old mother of four boys.

“It was a combination of events: wanting a girl and having my heartstrings pulled by the plight of these children, because it really was heartbreaking,” Kinney said of her decision.

Kinney knew the early days and months of adjusting to life in Canada would be difficult for Mirela, but the family didn’t anticipate her struggles would be permanent. Now 25, Mirela has undiagnosed developmental and social issues, which Kinney pins on the orphanage conditions during her daughter’s formative years.

Romania’s adoptees weren’t the first in history to be born into turmoil. But the news of their isolation and neglect dovetailed with academic interest in studying the impact of early deprivation on human development.

 

“People have described that situation as a natural experiment,” said Lucy Le Mare , a Simon Fraser University professor of developmental psychology, who studied Romanian adoptees for 16 years, and is about to embark on more research.

“It’s the kind of experiment that one could never ethically do . . . Obviously we’re not going to design an experiment where we deprive a bunch of kids and compare them to kids who weren’t deprived. But this situation allowed us to look at things that we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to look at.”

In the Orphanage

When Dawn Kinney arrived in Bucharest in March 1991, a lineup of hopeful parents snaked around a government building in the Romanian capital.

Kinney had made her own arrangements based on a “how-to” guide left with a Romanian Orthodox Church in Calgary by a family who had already adopted. The process ultimately cost about $10,000, including flights, hiring a translator — a Romanian college student who helped speed up the approval process — and a home study, required for adoption in Canada.

Kinney took a three-hour train trip west to an orphanage in Craiova, where in a barren office she was introduced to children one by one. After holding the first little girl, she was told she needed permission for adoption from the birth parents. But locating them in the country where paperwork was incomplete was next to impossible. She tried to find the parents of several children but ran into the same problem.

Then Kinney met Mirela, a dark haired 3-year-old with bald patches on the back of her head, who stumbled as though she’d just learned to walk and didn’t know how to play with toys. Only her mother’s name was listed on her birth certificate and when Kinney tracked her down she gave her consent. “She said, ‘If you don’t adopt her, she’ll end up being a prostitute,’” Kinney said.

Other hopeful parents from Canada had already made similar trips to Romania. The Swansons travelled to an orphanage in Arad, close to the Hungarian border, where they were presented with a baby girl dressed up in a polka dot sleeper.

The Mississauga couple, who knew orphanage staff through a Canadian volunteer group that had sent over supplies, met with the baby’s mother, who agreed to the adoption through a translator.

By the time the Swansons brought Daniella back to Ontario, she was 6 weeks old. She had only been in the orphanage for three and a half weeks.

“I didn’t have a lot of concerns about medical background — I figured we’d just deal with whatever it is,” said her adoptive mother Catherine Swanson.

Maria Di Giandomenico was also prepared to deal with any health issues her new Romanian son and daughter might have. What the Grimsby, Ont. mother didn’t anticipate were the developmental issues.

Already 47, she specifically wanted older children and adopted a boy and girl from the same orphanage when they were both 5 years old.

It was on the flight home that she realized how many milestones they’d missed. While her husband filled out forms, her daughter’s eyes “became huge, like saucers,” said Di Giandomenico. “Her dad had a stick in his hand and this stick was leaving a trace behind. That’s when we realized, ‘My god, these kids have never held a pen or crayon in their hands.’”

Other parents, including Felix Benzimra, hired a facilitator in Canada to go to Romania to help with the adoption. He first met his 4-month-old son, Daniel, at Pearson International Airport in 1990, when his wife arrived home with the boy.

Daniel, whose 17-year-old birth mother gave him up, was never placed in an orphanage. At the time the family didn’t realize how significant that was.

“It was all by pure luck,” Benzimra said.

Research begins

Soon after the Romanian revolution in 1990, Elinor Ames got a phone call. A church group in British Columbia, interested in facilitating adoptions from Romanian orphanages, was looking for advice from the Simon Fraser University psychology professor.

“They were just talking about how they wanted children and love would conquer all,” Ames said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.”

The subject sparked her interest and within months Ames was on a “fact-finding mission” to Bucharest to see the orphanages first hand.

By the next year, she was tracking 46 kids adopted by Canadian families after being in orphanages for varying amounts of time. Her Romanian Adoption Project studied the children 11 months after their arrival in Canada and again two years later, videotaping the families at home, testing the children’s school readiness and interviewing the adoptive mothers.

Her second period of testing, when the children were between 4 and 9 years of age, found that one-third of the adoptees had developmental, social and behavioural problems that required professional help.

Another third had the same issues to a lesser degree and the rest appeared to be doing well. All were indiscriminately friendly with strangers and the children who had been in the orphanage for the longest generally had the most severe issues.

Ames’findings in 1997 prompted her to recommend that Canadian parents and adoption officials consider all orphanage children as special-needs adoptions. Plus, she said, officials should aim to place the youngest children possible because the likelihood of having development issues increases with each month of institutionalization. For older children, she said parents should be told about the extra commitment.

One child in Ames’ research was Kayla Bourque , who was sentenced late last year after pleading guilty to killing animals, causing unnecessary harm to animals and possessing a knife.

After serving time in jail, the B.C. Ministry of Justice issued a warning early this year about her “escalating criminal history” and interest in harming people. She was put on strict probation that includes 46 court-ordered conditions.

The sentencing judge highlighted the 23-year-old’s adoption at 8 months of age from a Romanian orphanage, her early developmental delays and other stresses growing up. Bourque declined to comment for this story through her lawyer.

It’s impossible to know how much of a factor her first months of life were, said SFU professor Le Mare, cautioning that the case is unique and extreme.

“My hunch is, in her case, she had a vulnerability and that was very exacerbated by her early experience,” said Le Mare, who took over the Romanian Adoption Project from Ames when she retired in 1997.

Le Mare revisited some of the project’s original adoptees at age 10 1/2. She observed that some of the children with only a few months of orphanage experience were starting to exhibit issues, including high rates of ADHD, which hadn’t presented when they were younger.

But there was a lot of variation within the group. Some children with extensive institutionalization were doing well.

“The impact of institutional experience is not going to be the same on every child because every child comes into the world biologically different,” she said.

Brain structure was actually altered in some children who experienced severe deprivation in orphanages, according to research released last year by the U.S.-based Bucharest Early Intervention Project , which found it’s beneficial to move children into foster care early. Comparisons between children in institutional and foster care revealed there’s a “sensitive period” in the brain for social development.

When the adoptees were 17, Le Mare went back to the original group and introduced new teenagers to the study. She found adoptees with two or more years in an orphanage had “significantly higher levels of behaviour problems” but that factors within adoptive homes could help with development. This included parents being open and supportive of the adoption.

Le Mare is contacting the adoptees again now they’re adults, and hopes to study mental health, employment, romantic relationships and their understanding of adoption.

Adjusting to adulthood

Since Daniella Swanson can remember, her parents have been telling her about the orphanage where she spent the first weeks of her life, how they had to teach her to eat new foods and even how to cry as she adjusted to a life with doting parents.

Now 22, she’s curious about Romania’s culture. But often when she thinks about her roots she’s contemplating if there’s a link to her weak immune system, asthma and mild dyslexia.

“It’s kind of embarrassing to me but I think it might also be developmental. Although my mother was healthy, I don’t think that she was properly nourished. It just wasn’t a feasible thing at the time,” she said. “Over the years, I’ve always kind of thought, ‘Hmm, maybe this is because I’m adopted, or biologically I’m this way.’”

Swanson, now a college student focused on becoming an event planner, grew up in Mississauga taking art classes, hanging out with her older brother and playing sports.

Not far away in Toronto, Daniel Benzimra went to private school for years and later went to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute where he got “really into Shakespeare.” During school, he worked at a shoe store and did volunteer work before heading to Laurentian University.

Generally, Benzimra thinks his adoption is irrelevant, partially because he avoided an orphanage. “I have zero recollection of it and it means absolutely nothing to me because I don’t have any emotional attachment to it,” said the newly qualified teacher, 23, who will return to university in the fall.

By the time Maria Di Giandomenico’s son was 9, his learning problem was apparent, while her daughter, adopted at the same age from the same orphanage, was excelling in school.

Di Giandomenico thinks the difference is because her son was 2 ½ when he was “abandoned,” while her daughter was placed in the orphanage shortly after birth. “He remembers the hand letting go,” said Di Giandomenico.

He had trust and attachment issues, she explained. “We’d talk about it. I’d say, ‘You’re stuck with me, I’m not giving up on you.’ ”

Potential identity issues collided with other risk factors in some Romanian adoptions, said University of Guelph psychology professor Michael Grand . So there’s a lot to be learned from the cohort of adoptees and the range of experiences.

“It isn’t just the orphanages,” Grand said, referring to the lack of prenatal education and the unstable conditions in Romania at the time. “If the mother was taking alcohol at the wrong point in her pregnancy, the child’s at risk. If the mother was malnourished, the child was neurologically at risk . . . I can go on and on. All of these things contribute to development.”

Experience and policy changes have helped improve sensitivity to risk factors in international adoptions, he said, adding more awareness is needed.

Canada signed on to the Hague Convention on international adoptions in 1993, which set out a system of safeguards to protect children. Grand said Romania halting international adoptions also forced the country to focus on improving care for children there. “That’s really where it begins, more than anything else,” he said.

On the bus earlier this year in Calgary, a little late on the way to meet her mom for lunch, Mirela Kinney said she knows her time in an orphanage shaped her.

Fears of grass, dogs and unusual foods were quickly overcome after she settled in with her parents and brothers, but long-lasting conditions arose, which her mother says haven’t fit into a specific diagnosis but include a low I.Q. and being “perpetually adolescent.”

Mirela prefers to focus on how being adopted changed her. She’s proud she takes the bus by herself, has moved out of her parents’ home and goes grocery shopping alone.

“I’ll be mentally challenged, probably for the rest of my life, right? But having said that, when I was growing up, if my mom hadn’t taken me to speech therapy, to schooling, special classes, stuff like that, I wouldn’t be who I am now,” she said. “I wouldn’t be this independent.””