Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, ran a network of “child gulags,” Melissa Fay Greene writes in The Atlantic, “in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu 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 couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival ‘Ceauşescu’s child,’ as in ‘Let him raise it.’” What happened to these children after Communism fell, and what was the effect of being raised without parents?

Unattached children see threats everywhere, an idea borne out in the brain studies. Flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the amygdala—the main part of the brain dealing with fear and emotion—seemingly 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 England’s 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 here’s 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 child’s 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 boy’s 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. He’s 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 doesn’t ‘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 didn’t say it.’

Unable to process his family’s affection, he just wanted to know where he stood. It was simpler in the orphanage, where either you were being beaten or you weren’t. ‘I responded better to being smacked around,’ Izidor tells me. ‘In America, they had “rules” and “consequences.” So much talk. I hated “Let’s talk about this.” As a child, I’d never heard words like “You are special” or “You’re our kid.” Later, if your adoption parents tell you words like that, you feel, Okay, whatever, thanks. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you want from me, or what I’m 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.

In other news: Daniel Johnson remembers the moment he discovered classical music: “In his 1910 novel Howard’s End, E.M. Forster divides families into the cultured (the Schlegels) and the practical (the Wilcoxes), who have ‘nothing in common except the English language’. As so often, Forster was wrong. Real families are commonly a mixture of both. I grew up in a family where culture was valued, perhaps even exceptionally so: the house was full of books — a growing number of them written by my father — and paintings, of course. He is a good artist; his father had been a professional one. My mother reviewed books for the TLS; I wrote my first book review aged 7 or 8 for a feature in the Evening Standard. You get the picture. But there was no music. We had a piano, but I never had lessons. There was a record player, but very few records, all fairly random. The only ones I recall listening to with my parents as a little boy were Noel Coward’s song The Stately Homes of England and the Beatles’ She Loves You. Home was no place for serious stuff. It wasn’t until I went to the grammar school that I could make friendships and develop independent tastes. It was only then that music — real music, though it never occurred to me to call it ‘classical’ — suddenly hit me with the force of an aural revelation.”

Put down Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and pick up Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Boyd Tonkin recommends shorter works of fiction in translation.

Oh, for the time when the controversy of the day was young men bathing naked in the sea: “In 1813, Richard Ayton, a travel writer, reported that Swansea, despite its being ‘a fashionable watering-place’, was witness to shocking scenes occasioned by so-called ‘bathing-sports’: ‘While the ladies are walking on the sands, or waiting at the water’s edge for their turn to be dipped, there is usually a parcel of naked men capering and roaring in the sea, who thus force themselves upon observation by startling both the eye and the ear’.”

Tetsuya Noda’s life in print: “Born in 1940, he began keeping illustrated diaries as a young boy, drawing and writing about growing up in the small town of Uki, on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. He later studied oil painting at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and earned degrees in 1963 and 1965, but he was uninspired by much of the coursework, which focused on Western techniques and concepts. Spurred by a friend’s discovery that mimeograph machines, largely consigned to secretarial tasks, could be used to turn photographs into stencils for printmaking, Noda returned to his childhood practice of making art about his life. For more than fifty years now, he has devoted himself to a single series: Diary.”

Ted Gioia explains why Gregory Bateson matters: “I was too young to participate in the Summer of Love or attend Woodstock, but when I reached my teen years not long after these events, I couldn’t imagine society going back to its earlier stodgy ways. And I wasn’t the only one. There was a pervasive feeling that things had changed in some irrevocable manner . . . Yet I now see that I was pretty much wrong on all counts. I had thought the counterculture had won the battle, but that was all a mirage. Peace and nonviolence didn’t prevail. Respect and tolerance didn’t become second nature. Crass materialism did not retreat; in fact, it didn’t budge an inch. As I look back on those days with the benefit of hindsight, I have a nagging feeling that things have gotten much worse. We are angrier than ever before, more violent and self-centered, with fewer rights and responsibilities, less tolerant and forgiving, and with less consensus on how to improve the degradations — environmental, cultural, political, technological — that encroach on every side. Perhaps that’s why I’ve started studying the 1950s and 1960s counterculture again. Not for a dose of nostalgia — although I can understand the appeal of that — but rather to grasp what went wrong and whether we can still fix it. The beatniks and hippies, with their poetry readings, love-ins, and flower power celebrations, actually did move the culture, at least for a decade or so. They had some wisdom to share. Maybe we should listen again. And that brings me to the topic of Gregory Bateson, one of the smartest and most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture.”

The men and women of Sparta: “[W]hile there was much to admire about the Spartans, they were not without their dark secrets. They did indeed live spartan lives. All males were educated in herds by the state until their 30th year, the system, echoing through British public schools, being light on blankets and heavy on deprivation, physical activity and corporal punishment, with regular naked inspections to ensure the young men were not putting on weight. This process was designed to produce world-beating fighters who would never yield and who would be called to serve up to their 60th birthday. Spartan women, on the other hand, had a reputation for beauty, freedom and promiscuity, as well as for the influence they enjoyed over their men. Aristotle mocked Sparta for being a gynarchy. They were famous for their rump jumps, leaping with their heels hitting their buttocks, and for their sharp wit: when asked why they were able to rule men, where elsewhere in Greece women could not, Leonidas’s wife quipped: ‘Because we are the only ones who give birth to men.’”

Photo: Namib-Naukluft National Park

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