What If Nobody Held You as a Baby? | Stickman Themed | Whiteboard Style

Nobody is ever going to be allowed to run this experiment again. In 2000, three American researchers went into the state institutions of Bucharest, enrolled 136 infants and toddlers, and let a lottery decide which of them moved into a family and which stayed exactly where they were. Then they measured both groups for 16 years. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project is the only randomized trial ever run on whether a child grows up in an institution or in a home. It produced the clearest evidence anyone has on what the earliest years do to a human brain, and an argument bioethicists are still having in print. The wards were a policy accident. Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion and contraception in 1966 under Decree 770 to force Romania's population upward, and by the time the regime fell in 1989 roughly 170,000 children were being raised by the state. They were fed. They were vaccinated. Their laundry was clean. There was almost nobody to pick them up. What this covers: Charles Nelson, Nathan Fox and Charles Zeanah, and why they let chance assign the children What the EEG caps and the MRI scans found The 24 month threshold that made this study famous Smaller skulls, reduced gray matter, telomeres worn down years early Indiscriminate friendliness, and why a child hugging strangers is not a happy child Who is left to sign consent for a child the state is already housing Romania's 2004 ban, and the 2019 UN resolution every member state signed The 2.7 million children still living in institutions right now The institutions are mostly emptied now. What they proved about the opening years of a human life is not going anywhere.