![]() ![]() Tom Szalay Izidor with his adoptive father on first arriving in San Diego from Romania.Īnd those feelings became increasingly intense. When you show me kindness, when you show me love, compassion, it seemed to make me even more angrier." "I respond better when you beat me, or when you smack me around," he says. Then he began to have a lot of conflict with his adoptive parents. At first things went pretty well, he says. ![]() In 1991, when he was 11, Ruckel was adopted by an American family and moved to San Diego. And that may have contributed to his troubles after leaving the institution. Izidor Ruckel says he suspects the wiring in his brain was changed by his time in the orphanage. So areas of the brain involved in vision and language and emotion don't get wired correctly. "Now what happens is that you're staring at a white ceiling, or no one is talking to you, or no one is soothing you when you get upset," Nelson says. "And then they form this bond or this relationship with this caregiver." But for many Romanian orphans, there wasn't even a person to take them out of the crib. Tom Szalay Children reach out from the windows of the orphanage in Sighetu Marmatiei in 1992.Ī baby "comes into the world expecting someone to take care of them and invest in them," Nelson says. It was a different kind of deprivation - the lack of a parent, or someone who acted like a parent. The scientists realized the cause wasn't anything as simple as malnutrition. "In other words, their brains were actually physically smaller." "We found a dramatic reduction in what's referred to as gray matter and in white matter," Nelson says. And once again, the results were troubling. "Instead of a 100-watt light bulb, it was a 40-watt light bulb," Nelson says.Īs the children grew older, the researchers were able to use MRI to study the anatomy of their brains. Many of the orphans had disturbingly low levels of brain activity. ![]() So he and other researchers began studying the children using a technology known as electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain. The odd behaviors, delayed language and a range of other symptoms suggested problems with brain development, Nelson says. It's a very disorganized way of interacting with somebody." And then the minute they got down they'd want to be picked up again. But then they'd push you away and they'd want to get down. "So you'd pick them up and they'd hug you. "They'd reach their arms out as though they're saying to you, 'Please pick me up,' " Nelson says. He also saw toddlers desperate for attention. When Nelson first visited the orphanages in 1999, he saw children in cribs rocking back and forth as if they had autism. And it soon became clear that many of them had stunted growth and a range of mental and emotional problems. At the time, there were more than 100,000 children in government institutions. Researchers began studying the children in Romanian orphanages after the nation's brutal and repressive government was overthrown in 1989. If you didn't listen to me, I'd beat you." I was put in charge of kids and I treated them just the way they treated us. "You didn't know the difference because you were never taught. "There was no right, there was no wrong in the orphanage," Ruckel says. But as he got older he found he had power over many of the other children who had more serious disabilities. Ruckel was on his own in a place where beatings, neglect and boredom were the norm. ![]() Then, when Ruckel was 5 or 6, his surrogate mother was electrocuted trying to heat bath water for the children in her care. "She was probably the most loving, the most kindest person I had ever met." A worker at the orphanage "cared for me as if she was my mother," he says. When he turned three, he was sent to an orphanage for "irrecoverable" children.īut Ruckel was luckier than many Romanian orphans. His parents left him at a hospital and never returned. When Ruckel was 6 months old, he got polio. Barry Gutierrez for NPR Izidor Ruckel dons a hat of a style common in his birthplace, Romania. ![]()
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