Foster care boosts IQ, study says

Foster care boosts IQ, study says
Kids at orphanages receive lower scores.

Published Friday, December 21, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) - Toddlers rescued from orphanages and placed in good foster homes score dramatically higher on IQ tests years later than children who were left behind, concludes a one-of-a-kind project in Romania that has profound implications for child welfare around the globe.

The boost meant the difference between borderline retardation and average intelligence for some youngsters.

Most important, children removed from orphanages before age 2 had the biggest improvement - key new evidence of a sensitive period for brain development, according to research conducted by a U.S. team.

"What we’re really talking about is the importance of getting kids out of bad environments and put into good environments," said Charles Nelson III of Harvard Medical School, who led the study being published today in the journal Science.

The younger that happens, "the less likely the child is to have major problems," he added.

The research is credited with influencing child-care changes in Romania, and UNICEF has begun using the data to push numerous countries that still depend on state-run orphanages to start shifting to foster-care-like systems.

"The research provides concrete scientific evidence on the long-term impacts of the deprivation of quality care for children," UNICEF child protection specialist Aaron Greenberg said. "The interesting part about this is the one-on-one caring of a young child impacts ... cognitive and intellectual development."

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest’s six orphanages to either keep living there or live with foster parents who were specially trained and paid for by the study. Romania had no foster-care system in 2000 when the research began.

The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.

By 4½, youngsters in foster care were scoring almost 10 points higher on IQ tests than the children left in orphanages. Children who left the orphanages before 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.