Abstract
Abstract The institutional care of young, parentless children (be they orphaned or abandoned) is a practice that dates back centuries. Despite decades of research that document the hazards of institutional care, many countries throughout the world continue to rear children in institutions; indeed, current estimates place the number of parentless children living in institutions at approximately 8 million. The focus of this chapter is the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, which is a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an intervention for early institutionalization. It seeks to examine the developmental sequelae of early institutional rearing and whether placement into a family—in our case, high‐quality foster care—can ameliorate such sequelae. After discussing the context for launching this project and the history of institutional care in Romania, we describe our foster care intervention. We then turn our attention to describing the project itself and its main findings. We conclude by situating the project into a broader framework of developmental psychopathology.
Published Version
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