Image above: Izidor Ruckel near his home outside Denver

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

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In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking papooses. The women dont coo or sing to the babies. You see the small faces trying to fathom whats happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping maneuvers.

In his hospital, in the Southern Carpathian mountain town of Sighetu Marmaiei, Izidor would have been fed by a bottle stuck into his mouth and propped against the bars of a crib. Well past the age when children in the outside world began tasting solid food and then feeding themselves, he and his age-mates remained on their backs, sucking from bottles with widened openings to allow the passage of a watery gruel. Without proper care or physical therapy, the babys leg muscles wasted. At 3, he was deemed deficient and transferred across town to a Cmin Spital Pentru Copii Deficieni, a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children.

The cement fortress emitted no sounds of children playing, though as many as 500 lived inside at one time. It stood mournfully aloof from the cobblestone streets and sparkling river of the town where Elie Wiesel had been born, in 1928, and enjoyed a happy childhood before the Nazi deportations.

The windows on Izidors third-floor ward had been fitted with prison bars. In boyhood, he stood there often, gazing down on an empty mud yard enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. Through bare branches in winter, Izidor got a look at another hospital that sat right in front of his own and concealed it from the street. Real children, children wearing shoes and coats, children holding their parents hands, came and went from that hospital. No one from Izidors Cmin Spital was ever taken there, no matter how sick, not even if they were dying.

Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for irrecoverables, Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked. Out-of-control children were dosed with adult tranquilizers, administered through unsterilized needles, while many who fell ill received transfusions of unscreened blood. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.

Izidor was destined to spend the rest of his childhood in this building, to exit the gates only at 18, at which time, if he were thoroughly incapacitated, hed be transferred to a home for old men; if he turned out to be minimally functional, hed be evicted to make his way on the streets. Odds were high that he wouldnt survive that long, that the boy with the shriveled leg would die in childhood, malnourished, shivering, unloved.

This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romanias last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauescu, whod ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of child gulags, in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romanias economy, Ceauescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as heroine mothers women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldnt possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival Ceauescus child, as in Let him raise it.

Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nicolae Ceauescu, megalomaniacal tyrant, friend of America

To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.

At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copiichildrens homeswhile deficient children wouldnt get much of anything in their Cmine Spitale. The Soviet science of defectology viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issuesperhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lipwere classified as unsalvageable.

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After the Romanian revolution, children in unspeakable conditionsskeletal, splashing in urine on the floor, caked with feceswere discovered and filmed by foreign news programs, including ABCs 20/20, which broadcast Shame of a Nation in 1990. Like the liberators of Auschwitz 45 years before, early visitors to the institutions have been haunted all their lives by what they saw. We flew in by helicopter over the snow to Siret, landing after midnight, subzero weather, accompanied by Romanian bodyguards carrying Uzis, Jane Aronson tells me. A Manhattan-based pediatrician and adoption-medicine specialist, she was part of one of the first pediatric teams summoned to Romania by the new government. We walk into a pitch-black, freezing-cold building and discover there are youngsters lurking abouttheyre tiny, but older, something weird, like trolls, filthy, stinking. Theyre chanting in a dronelike way, gibberish. We open a door and find a population of cretinsnow its known as congenital iodine deficiency syndrome; untreated hypothyroidism stunts growth and brain development. I dont know how old they were, three feet tall, could have been in their 20s. In other rooms we see teenagers the size of 6- and 7-year-olds, with no secondary sexual characteristics. There were children with underlying genetic disorders lying in cages. You start almost to disassociate.

I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon, and there was a small child standing there sobbing, recalls Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Childrens Hospital. He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I asked, Whats going on with that child? A worker said, Well, his mother abandoned him this morning and hes been like that all day. That was it. No one comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my introduction.

The Romanian orphans were not the first devastatingly neglected children to be seen by psychologists in the 20th century. Unresponsive World War II orphans, as well as children kept isolated for long periods in hospitals, had deeply concerned mid-century child-development giants such as Ren Spitz and John Bowlby. In an era devoted to fighting malnutrition, injury, and infection, the idea that adequately fed and medically stable children could waste away because they missed their parents was hard to believe. Their research led to the then-bold notion, advanced especially by Bowlby, that simply lacking an attachment figure, a parent or caregiver, could wreak a lifetime of havoc on mental and physical health.

From the April 1996 issue: Anne F. Thurston describes life in a Chinese orphanage

Neuroscientists tended to view attachment theory as suggestive and thought-provoking work within the soft science of psychology. It largely relied on case studies or correlational evidence or animal research. In the psychologist Harry Harlows infamous maternal deprivation experiments, he caged baby rhesus monkeys alone, offering them only maternal facsimiles made of wire and wood, or foam and terry cloth.

In 1998, at a small scientific meeting, animal research presented back-to-back with images from Romanian orphanages changed the course of the study of attachment. First the University of Minnesota neonatal-pediatrics professor Dana Johnson shared photos and videos that hed collected in Romania of rooms teeming with children engaged in motor stereotypies: rocking, banging their heads, squawking. He was followed by a speaker who showed videos of her work with motherless primate infants like the ones Harlow had producedswaying, twirling, self-mutilating. The audience was shocked by the parallels. We were all in tears, Nelson told me.

In the decade after the fall of Ceauescu, the new Romanian government welcomed Western child-development experts to simultaneously help and study the tens of thousands of children still warehoused in state care. Researchers hoped to answer some long-standing questions: Are there sensitive periods in neural development, after which the brain of a deprived child cannot make full use of the mental, emotional, and physical stimulation later offered? Can the effects of maternal deprivation or caregiver absence be documented with modern neuroimaging techniques? Finally, if an institutionalized child is transferred into a family setting, can he or she recoup undeveloped capacities? Implicitly, poignantly: Can a person unloved in childhood learn to love?

Tract developments fan out from the Denver airport like playing cards on a table. The Great Plains have been ground down to almost nothing here, to wind and dirt and trash on the shoulder of the highway, to Walgreens and Arbys and AutoZone. In a rental car, I drive slowly around the semicircles and cul-de-sacs of Izidors subdivision until I see him step out of the shadow of a 4,500-square-foot McMansion with a polite half-wave. He sublets a room here, as do others, including some familiesan exurban commune in a single-family residence built for Goliaths. At 39, Izidor is an elegant, wiry man with mournful eyes. His manner is alert and tentative. A general manager for a KFC, he works 60-to-65-hour weeks.

Read: American child detention centers degrading, inhumane conditions

Welcome to Romania, he announces, opening his bedroom door. Its an entryway into another time, another place. From every visit to his home country, Izidor has brought back folk art and souvenirshand-painted glazed plates and teacups, embroidered tea towels, Romanian flags, shot glasses, wood figurines, cut-glass flasks of plum brandy, and CDs of Romanian folk music, heavy on the violins. He could stock a gift shop. There are thick wine-colored rugs, blankets, and wall hangings. The ambient light is maroon, the curtains closed against the high-altitude sunshine. Ten miles southwest of the Denver airport, Izidor is living in an ersatz Romanian cottage.

Everyone in Maramure lives like this, he tells me, referring to the cultural region in northern Romania where he was born.

Im thinking, Do they, though?

You will see that many people there have these things in their homes, he clarifies.

That sounds more accurate. People like knickknacks. Do you sound like a Romanian when you visit? I ask.

No, he says. When I start to speak, they ask, Where are you from? I tell them: From Maramure! No one believes him, because of his accent, so he has to explain: Technically, if you want to be logical about it, I am Romanian, but Ive lived in America for more than 20 years.

When you meet new people, do you talk about your history?

No, I try not to. I want to experience Romania as a normal human being. I dont want to be known everywhere as the Orphan.

His precise English makes even casual phrases sound formal. In his room, Izidor has captured the Romanian folk aesthetic, but something else stirs beneath the surface. Im reminded of the book he self-published at age 22, titled Abandoned for Life. Its a grim tale, but once, when he was about 8, Izidor had a happy day.

A kind nanny had started working at the hospital. Onisa was a young lady, a bit chubby, with long black hair and round rosy cheeks, Izidor writes in his memoir. She loved to sing and often taught us some of her music. One day, Onisa intervened when another nanny was striking Izidor with a broomstick. Like a few others before her, Onisa had spotted his intelligence. On the ward of semi-ambulatory (some crawled or creeped), slightly verbal (some just made noises) children, Izidor was the go-to kid if an adult had questions, like what was that ones name or when had that one died. The director would occasionally peek in and ask Izidor if he and the other children were being hit; to avoid retribution, Izidor always said no.

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On that day, to cheer him up after his beating, Onisa promised that someday shed take him home with her for an overnight visit. Skeptical that such an extraordinary event would ever happen, Izidor thanked her for the nice idea.

A few weeks later, on a snowy winter day, Onisa dressed Izidor in warm clothes and shoes shed brought from home, took him by the hand, and led him out the front door and through the orphanage gate. Walking slowly, she took the small boy, who swayed on uneven legs with a deep, tilting limp, down the lane past the public hospital and into the town. Cold, fresh air brushed his cheeks, and snow squeaked under his shoes; the wind rattled the branches; a bird stood on a chimney. It was my first time ever going out into the world, he tells me now. He looked in astonishment at the cars and houses and shops. He tried to absorb and memorize everything to report back to the kids on his ward.

When I stepped into Onisas apartment, he writes, I could not believe how beautiful it was; the walls were covered with dark rugs and there was a picture of the Last Supper on one of them. The carpets on the floor were red. Neighborhood children knocked on Onisas door to see if the strange boy from the orphanage wanted to come out and play, and he did. Onisas children arrived home from school, and Izidor learned that it was the start of their Christmas holiday. He feasted alongside Onisas family at their friends dinner table that night, tasting Romanian specialties for the first time, including sarmale (stuffed cabbage), potato goulash with thick noodles, and sweet yellow sponge cake with cream filling. He remembers every bite. On the living-room floor after dinner, the child of that household let Izidor play with his toys. Izidor followed the boys lead and drove little trains across the rug. Back at Onisas, he slept in his first-ever soft, clean bed.

The next morning, Onisa asked Izidor if he wanted to go to work with her or to stay with her children. Here he made a mistake so terrible that, 31 years later, he still remembers it with grief.

I want to go to work with you! he called. He was deep into a fantasy that Onisa was his mother, and he didnt want to be parted from her. I got dressed as fast as I could, and we headed out the door, he remembers. When we were near her work, I realized that her work was at the hospital, my hospital, and I began to cry It had only been 24 hours but somehow I thought I was going to be part of Onisas family now. It didnt occur to me that her work was actually at the hospital until we were at the gate again. I felt so shocked when we turned into the yard it was like Id forgotten I came from there.

He tried to turn back but wasnt permitted. Hed found the most wonderful spot on EarthOnisas apartmentand, through his own stupidity, had let it slip away. He sobbed like a newcomer until the other nannies threatened to slap him.

Today Izidor lives 6,000 miles from Romania. He leads a solitary life. But in his bedroom in a subdivision on a paved-over prairie, he has re-created the setting from the happiest night in his childhood.

That night at Onisas, I ask, do you think you sensed that there were family relationships and emotions happening there that youd never seen or felt before?

No, I was too young to perceive that.

But you did notice the beautiful furnishings?

Yes! You see this? Izidor says, picking up a tapestry woven with burgundy roses on a dark, leafy background. This is almost identical to Onisas. I bought it in Romania for that reason!

All these things I gesture.

Yes.

But not because they signify family to you?

No, but they signify peace to me. It was the first time I slept in a real home. For many years I thought, Why cant I have a home like that?

Now he does. But he knows there are missing partsno matter how many shot glasses he collects.

In the early 1990s, Danny and Marlys Ruckel lived with their three young daughters in a San Diego condo. They thought it would be nice to add a boy to the mix, and heard about a local independent filmmaker, John Upton, who was arranging adoptions of Romanian orphans. Marlys called and told him they wanted to adopt a baby boy. Theres thousands of kids there, Upton replied. Thatll be easy.

Marlys laughs. Not much of that was accurate! she tells me. Were seated in the living room of a white-stucco house in the Southern California wine-country town of Temecula. Kids and dogs bang in and out of the dazzling hot day (the Ruckels have adopted five children from foster care in recent years). Marlys, now a job coach for adults with special needs, is like a Diane Keaton character, shyly retreating behind large glasses and a fall of long hair, but occasionally making brave outbursts. Danny, a programmer, is an easygoing guy. Marlys describes herself as a homebody, but then there was that time she moved to Romania for two months to try to adopt a boy she saw on a video.

Undone by Shame of a Nation, Upton had flown to Romania four days after the broadcast, and made his way to the worst place on the show, the Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children in Sighetu Marmaiei. He went back a few times. On one visit, he gathered a bunch of kids in an empty room to film them for prospective adoptive parents. His video would not show children packed together naked like little reptiles in an aquarium, as hed described them, but as people, wearing clothes and speaking.

By then, donations had started to come in from charities around the world. Little reached the children, because the staff skimmed the best items, but on that day, in deference to the American, nannies put donated sweaters on the kids. Though the children seemed excited to be the center of attention, Upton and his Romanian assistant found it slow-going. Some didnt speak at all, and others were unable to stand up or to stand still. When the filmmakers asked for the childrens names and ages, the nannies shrugged.

At the end of a wooden bench sat a boy the size of a 6-year-oldat age 10, Izidor weighed about 50 pounds. Upton was the first American hed ever seen. Izidor knew about Americans from the TV show Dallas. A donated television had arrived one day, and he had lobbied for this one thing to stay at the hospital. The director had assented. On Sunday nights at 8 oclock, ambulatory kids, nannies, and workers from other floors gathered to watch Dallas together. When rumors flew up the stairs that day that an American had arrived, the reaction inside the orphanage was, Almighty God, someone from the land of the giant houses!

Izidor knew the information the nannies didnt. He tells me: John Upton would ask a kid, How old are you?, and the kid would say, I dont know, and the nanny would say, I dont know, and Id yell, Hes 14! Hed ask about another kid, Whats his last name?, and Id yell, Dumka!

Izidor knows the children here better than the staff, Upton grouses in one of the tapes. Before wrapping up the session, he lifts Izidor into his lap and asks if hed like to go to America. Izidor says that he would.

Back in San Diego, Upton told the Ruckels about the bright boy of about 7 who hoped to come to the United States. Wed wanted to adopt a baby, Marlys says. Then we saw Johns video and fell in love with Izidor.

In May 1991, Marlys flew to Romania to meet the child and try to bring him home. Just before traveling, she learned that Izidor was almost 11, but she was undaunted. She traveled with a new friend, Debbie Principe, who had also been matched with a child by Upton. In the directors office, Marlys waited to meet Izidor, and Debbie waited to meet a little blond live wire named Ciprian.

When Izidor entered, Marlys says, all I saw was him, like everything else was fuzzy. He was as beautiful as Id imagined. Our translator asked him which of the visitors in the office he hoped would be his new mother, and he pointed to me!

Izidor had a question for the translator: Where will I live? Is it like Dallas?

Well no, we live in a condo, like an apartment, Marlys said. But youll have three sisters. Youll love them.

This did not strike Izidor as an interesting trade-off. He dryly replied to the translator: We will see.

That night, Marlys rejoiced about what an angel Izidor was.

Debbie laughed. He struck me more like a cool operator, a savvy politician type, she told Marlys. He was much more on top of things than Chippy. Ciprian had spent the time in the office rummaging wildly through everything, including desk drawers and the pockets of everyone in the room.

No, hes an innocent. Hes adorable, Marlys said. Did you see him pick me to be his mother?

Years later, in his memoir, Izidor explained that moment:

The pediatric neuroscientist Charles Nelson is famously gregarious and kind, with wavy, graying blond hair and a mustache like Captain Kangaroos. In the fall of 2000, he, along with his colleagues Nathan A. Fox, a human-development professor at the University of Maryland, and Charles H. Zeanah, a child-psychiatry professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. They had permission to work with 136 children, ages six months to 2.5 years, from six Bucharest leagne, baby institutions. None was a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children, like Izidors; they were somewhat better supplied and staffed.

By design, 68 of the children would continue to receive care as usual, while the other 68 would be placed with foster families recruited and trained by BEIP. (Romania didnt have a tradition of foster care; officials believed orphanages were safer for children.) Local kids whose parents volunteered to participate made up a third group. The BEIP study would become the first-ever randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of early institutionalization on brain and behavioral development and to examine high-quality foster care as an alternative.

To start, the researchers employed Mary Ainsworths classic strange situation procedure to assess the quality of the attachment relationships between the children and their caregivers or parents. In a typical setup, a baby between nine and 18 months old enters an unfamiliar playroom with her attachment figure and experiences some increasingly unsettling events, including the arrival of a stranger and the departure of her grown-up, as researchers code the babys behavior from behind a one-way mirror. Our coders, unaware of any childs background, assessed 100 percent of the community kids as having fully developed attachment relationships with their mothers, Zeanah told me. That was true of 3 percent of the institutionalized kids.

Nearly two-thirds of the children were coded as disorganized, meaning they displayed contradictory, jerky behaviors, perhaps freezing in place or suddenly reversing direction after starting to approach the adult. This pattern is the one most closely related to later psychopathology. Even more disturbing, Zeanah told me, 13 percent were deemed unclassified, meaning they displayed no attachment behaviors at all. Ainsworth and John Bowlby believed infants would attach to an adult even if the adult were abusive, he said. They hadnt considered the possibility of infants without attachments.

Until the Bucharest project, Zeanah said, he hadnt realized that seeking comfort for distress is a learned behavior. These children had no idea that an adult could make them feel better, he told me. Imagine how that must feelto be miserable and not even know that another human being could help.

In October 1991, Izidor and Ciprian flew with Romanian escorts to San Diego. The boys new families waited at the airport to greet them, along with Upton and previously adopted Romanian childrena small crowd holding balloons and signs, cheering and waving. Izidor gazed around the terminal with satisfaction. Where is my bedroom? he asked. When Marlys told him they were in an airport, not his new home, Izidor was taken aback. Though shed explained that the Ruckels did not live like the Ewings in Dallas, he hadnt believed her. Now hed mistaken the arrivals area for his new living room.

A 17-year-old from the orphanage, Izabela, was part of the airport welcoming committee. Born with hydrocephalus and unable to walk after being left all her life in a crib, she was in a wheelchair, dressed up and looking pretty. Rescued by Upton on an earlier trip, shed been admitted to the U.S. on a humanitarian medical basis and was being fostered by the Ruckels.

Izidor was startled to see Izabela: Who is your mother?

My mother is your mother, Izidor.

I didnt like the sound of that, he remembers. To make sure hed heard correctly, he asked again: Who is your mother here in America?

Izidor, you and I have the same mother, she said, pointing at Marlys.

So now he had to get used to four sisters.

In the car, when Danny tried to click a seat belt across Izidors waist, he bucked and yelled, fearing he was being straitjacketed.

Marlys homeschooled the girls, but Izidor insisted on starting fourth grade in the local school, where he quickly learned English. His canny ability to read the room put him in good stead with the teachers, but at home, he seemed constantly irritated. Suddenly insulted, hed storm off to his room and tear things apart. He shredded books, posters, family pictures, Marlys tells me, and then stood on the balcony to sprinkle the pieces onto the yard. If I had to leave for an hour, by the time I got home, everyone would be upset: He did this; he did that. He didnt like the girls.

Marlys and Danny had hoped to expand the family fun and happiness by bringing in another child. But the newest family member almost never laughed. He didnt like to be touched. He was vigilant, hurt, proud. By about 14, he was angry about everything, she tells me. He decided hed grow up and become the American president. When he found out that wouldnt be possible because of his foreign birth, he said, Fine, Ill go back to Romania. Thats when that startedhis goal of returning to Romania. We thought it was a good thing for him to have a goal, so we said, Sure, get a job, save your money, and when youre 18, you can move back to Romania. Izidor worked every day after school at a fast-food restaurant.

Those were rough years. I was walking on eggshells, trying not to set him off. The girls were so over it. It was me they were mad at. Not for bringing Izidor into the family but for being so so whipped by him. Theyd say, Mom, all you do is try to fix him! I was so focused on helping him adjust, I lost sight of the fact that the other children were scraping by with a fraction of my time.

Danny and I tried taking him to therapy, but he refused to go back. He said, I dont need therapy. You two need therapy. Why dont you go? So we did.

Hed say: Im fine when nobodys in the house.

Wed say: But Izidor, its our house.

As early as 2003, it was evident to the BEIP scientists and their Romanian research partners that the foster-care children were making progress. Glimmering through the data was a sensitive period of 24 months during which it was crucial for a child to establish an attachment relationship with a caregiver, Zeanah says. Children taken out of orphanages before their second birthday were benefiting from being with families far more than those who stayed longer. When youre doing a trial and your preliminary evidence is that the intervention is effective, you have to ask, Do we stop now and make the drug available to everyone? he told me. For us, the effective drug happened to be foster care, and we werent capable of creating a national foster-care system. Instead, the researchers announced their results publicly, and the next year, the Romanian government banned the institutionalization of children under the age of 2. Since then, it has raised the minimum age to 7, and government-sponsored foster care has expanded dramatically.

Meanwhile, the study continued. When the children were reassessed in a strange situation playroom at age 3.5, the portion who displayed secure attachments climbed from the baseline of 3 percent to nearly 50 percent among the foster-care kids, but to only 18 percent among those who remained institutionalizedand, again, the children moved before their second birthday did best. Timing is critical, the researchers wrote. Brain plasticity wasnt unlimited, they warned. Earlier is better.

The benefits for children whod achieved secure attachments accrued as time went on. At age 4.5, they had significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety and fewer callous unemotional traits (limited empathy, lack of guilt, shallow affect) than their peers still in institutions. About 40 percent of teenagers in the study whod ever been in orphanages, in fact, were eventually diagnosed with a major psychiatric condition. Their growth was stunted, and their motor skills and language development stalled. MRI studies revealed that the brain volume of the still-institutionalized children was below that of the never institutionalized, and EEGs showed profoundly less brain activity. If you think of the brain as a light bulb, Charles Nelson has said, its as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.

One purpose of a baby attaching to just a small number of adults, according to evolutionary theory, is that its the most efficient way to get help. If there were many attachment figures and danger emerged, the infant wouldnt know to whom to direct the signal, explains Martha Pott, a senior lecturer in child development at Tufts. Unattached children see threats everywhere, an idea borne out in the brain studies. Flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the amygdalathe main part of the brain dealing with fear and emotionseemingly worked overtime in the still-institutionalized children.

Comparing data from orphanages worldwide shows the profound impact institutionalization has on social-emotional development even in the best cases. In Englands residential nurseries in the 1960s, there was a reasonable number of caregivers, and the children were materially well provided for. Their IQs, though lower than those of children in families, were well within the average range, up in the 90s, Zeanah told me. More recently, the caregiver-child ratio in Greek orphanages was not as good, nor were they as materially well equipped; those kids had IQs in the low-average range. Then, in Romania, you have our kids with really major-league deficits. But heres the remarkable thing: Across all those settings, the attachment impairments are similar.

When the children in the Bucharest study were 8, the researchers set up playdates, hoping to learn how early attachment impairments might inhibit a childs later ability to interact with peers. In a video I watched, two boys, strangers to each other, enter a playroom. Within seconds, things go off the rails. One boy, wearing a white turtleneck, eagerly seizes the other boys hand and gnaws on it. That boy, in a striped pullover, yanks back his hand and checks for teeth marks. The researcher offers a toy, but the boy in white is busy trying to hold hands with the other kid, or grab him by the wrists, or hug him, as if he were trying to carry a giant teddy bear. He tries to overturn the table. The other boy makes a feeble effort to save the table, then lets it fall. Hes weird, you can imagine him thinking. Can I go home now?

The boy in the white turtleneck lived in an institution; the boy in the striped pullover was a neighborhood kid.

Nelson cautions that the door doesnt slam shut for children left in institutions beyond 24 months of age. But the longer you wait to get children into a family, he says, the harder it is to get them back on an even keel.

Every time we got into another fight, Izidor remembers, I wanted one of them to say: Izidor, we wish we had never adopted you and we are going to send you back to the hospital. But they didnt say it.

Unable to process his familys affection, he just wanted to know where he stood. It was simpler in the orphanage, where either you were being beaten or you werent. I responded better to being smacked around, Izidor tells me. In America, they had rules and consequences. So much talk. I hated Lets talk about this. As a child, Id never heard words like You are special or Youre our kid. Later, if your adoption parents tell you words like that, you feel, Okay, whatever, thanks. I dont even know what youre talking about. I dont know what you want from me, or what Im supposed to do for you. When banished to his room, for rudeness or cursing or being mean to the girls, Izidor would stomp up the stairs and blast Romanian music or bang on his door from the inside with his fists or a shoe.

Marlys blamed herself. He said he wanted to go back to his first mother, a woman who hadnt even wanted him, a woman he didnt remember. When I took him to the bank to set up his savings account, the bank official filling out the form asked Izidor, Whats your mothers maiden name? I opened my mouth to answer, but he immediately said Maria. Thats his birth mothers name. I know it was probably dumb to feel hurt by that.

One night when Izidor was 16, Marlys and Danny felt so scared by Izidors outburst that they called the police. Im going to kill you! hed screamed at them. After an officer escorted Izidor to the police car, he insisted that his parents abused him.

Oh, for Christs sake, Danny said when informed of his sons accusation.

Continued here:
30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact - The Atlantic