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Study: Foster care boosts orphans' IQ

Toddlers who leave orphanages score higher.

WASHINGTON - Toddlers taken 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 the U.S. team that conducted the research.

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

The sooner 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 systems.

In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 children in Bucharest's six orphanages either to keep living there or to 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.

By 41/2, 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 age 2 saw an almost 15-point increase.

Nelson compared the ages at which children were sent to foster care. For every extra month spent in the orphanage, up to almost age 3, it meant roughly a half-point lower score on those later IQ tests.

Children raised in their biological homes still fared best, with average test scores 10 points to 20 points higher than the foster care kids.

What does that mean as these children grow up? Just this week an anxious acquaintance cornered Nelson to ask what to expect of a child who spent nine months in a Vietnamese orphanage.

"There's much more to functioning in life than your IQ," Nelson stresses.

[Last modified December 21, 2007, 01:33:35]