THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508050260
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Babies who had been held only when fed. Toddlers who had lain in empty cribs for years. Children who didn't know their names because they hadn't heard them enough.
Such were the orphans and abandoned children of Romania. In the early '90s, when news of the kids' plight reached the West, thousands of American families adopted Romanian youngsters.
Now a researcher has tracked 475 of the children to see how they've fared in the United States.
Victor K. Groze, an associate dean of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, found that most of the children he surveyed were doing well despite their harsh beginnings.
Although the majority of Romanian children arrived here underweight and shorter than the norm, most have caught up with their peers. Those children who did have problems most commonly experienced delays in language, social and motor skills.
Groze presented his findings Friday at the annual Conference of the North American Council on Adoptable Children, which is being held at the Waterside Marriott Hotel in Norfolk through Sunday.
But he cautioned that the findings didn't mean the children were home free. In fact, he expects these children to experience more problems than average children because of their early years of deprivation.
``Where we will see difficulties is when they reach school age, when they have to deal with a new system, and also when they reach adolescence,'' Groze said in an interview. Groze hopes to conduct follow-up surveys as the children grow up.
Romania's overtaxed orphanage system grew out of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's outlawing of birth control to increase the population. By the time Ceausescu was overthrown in December of 1989, thousands of children were being warehoused in institutions with medieval-like conditions because their parents could not afford to care for them. Americans adopted about 3,000 Romanian children in the first few years after Ceausescu's fall.
Since then, though, some families have experienced difficulties in raising the children. Some have even tried to give up their children for ``readoption.''
But Groze said the vast majority of families he surveyed - 91 percent - said the Romanian children had been positive additions. Thirty percent of the parents said they had experienced more ups and downs than they expected.
About half the children Groze surveyed had lived in an institution before adoption. One-third of the children were adopted directly from families. The remaining children were adopted from hospitals or other settings.
Groze said children who live in institutions before adoption are more likely to suffer from delayed development, attachment problems and such behavior as rocking or hitting themselves. Some of the children Groze surveyed had health problems because of past exposure to tuberculosis or hepatitis.
Groze's study is more optimistic, though, than a 1992 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed only 10 percent of the adopted Romanian children older than 1 were developmentally normal. That study estimated that children left in an institution for six months had a 75 percent chance of being normal. If left for longer than a year, they only had a 10 percent chance of normal development. MEMO: adoption by CNB