Humans are born biologically primed for stimulation. When a child is denied interaction with an adult who can give them loving, individualized care, they fail to produce the essential hormones that stimulate brain development. Without human interaction, without early exposure to all the different sights and sounds that caring parents offer to soothe or engage their babies, children’s brains fail to develop in the way that they should.
Babies who suffer the extreme emotional neglect of being in an institution also produce high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and this has a damaging effect on the architecture of their brains at a crucial stage in their development.
There is now 50 years of research documenting the effects on children of growing up in orphanages, including the structural and functional changes in their brains. This situation is particularly damaging for children who enter orphanages before the age of three; the younger the child, the more profound the damage to the child’s developing brain.
Research has also highlighted negative consequences of institutional care on behaviour, including social competence, play, and peer and sibling interactions. These include higher levels of apathy, restlessness, disobedience, hyperactivity, anxiety, depression, attention-seeking, sleep disorders, eating disorders and stereotypical behaviours (e.g. rocking, head banging, self-harming) and lower levels of social maturity, attentiveness, concentration and communication.
Children raised in orphanages can experience delays in terms of IQ, language, speech and vocabulary. A meta-analysis of 75 studies covering over 3,800 children in 19 countries found that children reared in orphanages had, on average, an IQ 20 points lower than their peers who were growing up in foster care.
As a consequence, children raised in orphanages often experience delays in physical growth – including height, weight and head circumference. Analysis of growth data from a variety of orphanage systems in Romania, the former Soviet Union and China has shown that children lose one month of physical growth for every three months spent in an orphanage.
Some studies claim children from orphanages are 10 times more likely to enter prostitution and 40 times more likely to get a criminal record. The impersonal environment of orphanages can leave children totally unprepared for life in the outside, world. United Nations (IOM) research from Moldova shows how girls growing up in orphanages are ten times more likely to be a victim of trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. And crucially, as adults, children from orphanages are far more likely to have their children placed in orphanages– thus perpetuating the cycle.
This suffering is totally unnecessary, as 80 per cent of children in orphanages today are not even orphans. They’ve been separated from parents because of poverty, disabilities or discrimination.
Those of us lucky enough to have grown up in a loving family environment can testify to the positive emotional connection we experience when we hear the sound, especially the music, that reminds us of our happiest times as children. The relationship between music and memory is powerful. It has been an important mnemonic device for thousands of year. Before narratives could be written down, they were chanted or sung. Oral tradition depended on memory.
The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory. They continually take in large amounts of information and retrieving that information is not always easy. Music helps with recall because it provides rhythm, rhyme and even alliteration, all of which can provide the cues we need to unlock the information in our brains.
Neuroscientists have analysed the brain mechanisms related to memory and found that words set to music are the easiest to remember. That’s why parents and teachers alike employ songs and rhymes to help the youngest children learn to speak, spell and count. Music helps us to tap into our implicit rather than explicit memory – the emotional and more durable kinds of memories.
That’s why the UK charity Hope and Homes for Children is tapping into the power of our musical memories to raise funds for its work, closing orphanages and finding loving, family based care for children. Their End the Silence campaign, supported by YouTube, is asking everyone to share the most precious musical memories from their childhood to raise over £1.5million by Christmas – donations will be doubled by the UK Government’s UKAid Match scheme – allowing them to transform the lives of over 120,000 children across Rwanda and Uganda who are suffering in silence in orphanages or at risk of being separated from their families and confined to institutions.”
The babies who suffer in silence: how overseas orphanages are damaging children
[The Telegraph 11/6/17 by
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