The Orphans of Davenport
Page 30
In her reply, Skodak told Schiff of several recent small studies and of what she learned from her 1966 longitudinal investigation—though, she confessed, the data had not yet been analyzed. She invited Schiff, soon arriving in the United States to prepare for his investigations, to visit her in Michigan to discuss his work and review her extensive library of past and recent adoption studies. The two met during the summer of 1972.
Schiff’s study grew out of a resurgence of hereditarian thought as expressed in a 1969 article by Arthur R. Jensen, once a student of British eugenicist Hans Eysenck. Jensen’s article suggested that the “educational lag of disadvantaged children” was explained by their heredity.38 Schiff designed his research specifically to test Jensen’s assertion.39 In the late 1960s, Jensen, a controversial psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, had become a figure in the resurgence of American hereditarian thought. A historic 1969 issue of the Harvard Educational Review brought together an important article by Jensen with responses from other scholars. Here Jensen argued that “compensatory education”—Head Start and similar programs—“has been tried and it apparently has failed” and that “the traditional forms of instruction have actually worked quite well for the majority of children.”40 Jensen argued that intelligence constancy, not systemic bias and socioeconomic factors, accounted for the failure of remedial programs to influence children’s intelligence.
One response to Jensen came from developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan, of Harvard University. Kagan pointed out that a study of identical twins reared in different environments found mean differences in IQ of 14 points and that 25 percent of the subjects differed by 16 points, “larger than the average difference between black and white populations.” Kagan added, “The value of Head Start . . . has not yet been adequately assessed.”41
The Harvard editors also presented Joseph McVicker Hunt’s review of current neuroscience literature, including Donald O. Hebb’s discovery of the mechanisms that govern how experience alters brain development. Hunt wrote, “Increases in the development of brain structures following enrichments of early experience are hardly consonant with [Jensen’s] position.”42 Hunt also described the effects of environment on the two groups reported in Skeels’s 1966 follow-up and argued that the “vast majority” of intelligence test results report on subjects who live in stable environments and produce stable intelligence test scores. Reliance on measures of consistent environment, not “intelligence constancy,” had led psychology to conclude that IQ test scores do not change.43
In the same issue William F. Brazziel, a psychologist from Virginia’s Norfolk State College who, since 1968, had followed Jensen’s writing, presented a Southerners’ perspective when he homed in on a dispute about Virginia’s local school integration then playing out in federal district court. In a letter to the Review, he quoted Virginia’s legal argument that since “white teachers could not understand the Nigra mind,” those students should attend schools where “teachers who understood them could work with them.” Brazziel wrote that the defense “quoted heavily from the theories of white intellectual supremacy as expounded by Arthur Jensen.”44
In the introduction to his paper, published in 1978, Schiff referenced Jensen and also Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (in 1994, with Charles Murray, Hernstein would coauthor The Bell Curve), who had written, “The class structure of modern society is essentially a function of the innately differing intellectual and other qualities of the people making up these classes.”45 In a paper that echoed Marie Skodak’s adoption studies, Schiff examined intelligence test results in two groups: a group of thirty-two working-class children adopted at about 4 months and placed with parents who had high socioprofessional status and a group of thirty-two of those children’s siblings, close in age to the adopted children, who continued to live with their birth families. He found the test scores of the adopted children “almost embarrassingly close to those expected solely on the basis of the social class of their adoptive parents” and the test scores of their nonadopted siblings close to those found in children of unskilled workers.46 In a 1982 follow-up, Schiff confirmed these results. As had Skodak, Schiff found that environment significantly influenced children’s IQ test outcomes. In words comparable to Skeels’s, Schiff wrote, “If French children of lower-class parents were reared under exactly the same conditions as the adopted children of our study, they would obtain IQ scores . . . close to those presently observed for upper-middle-class children.”47
After being fired in 1953 from the University of Illinois and then a year spent living in Princeton to consider his future, George Stoddard had returned to New York as a member of New York University’s administration and by 1960 had been named the university’s chancellor. Along with those duties, Stoddard served on the founding committee for UNESCO and aided Japan, Korea, and Iran as they restructured their educational systems. He also participated in New York’s creative life as a board member at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. During this period, Stoddard wrote several books, among them an autobiography, The Pursuit of Education, published in 1981. In August of 1981, he was selected by the American Psychological Association to receive the G. Stanley Hall Award in Developmental Psychology, the same honor Harold Skeels had received in 1967.
In presenting the award, Marie Skodak recognized Stoddard for transforming the Iowa station from its modest goals of examining the lives of rural children to one of the nation’s leading centers for studying a novel idea, that early experience influences intellectual development. Stoddard, she said, had the wisdom to appreciate the long-range implications of the station’s research and to take on the cascade of disapproval set loose against the station’s research by orthodox psychology’s belief in pseudoscience. Emphasizing Stoddard’s integrity, Skodak noted that with his confidence in the improvability of man Stoddard became an exemplar for his profession.48 A few months later, on December 28, 1981, Stoddard died at 84 years of age.
Marie Skodak’s Iowa experience turned her into a scholar and—even with her good-humored, pragmatic temperament—something of a rebel. Mentored by Skeels, she accomplished benchmark investigations into the development of infants and young children, reported on the outcomes of hundreds of adopted children, and with NIMH support embarked on her 1962 follow-up research about the adult status and cognitive outcomes of one hundred children, most of whom who were adopted early. Her discoveries shifted ideas about what normal development requires and led to further investigations, including Michel Schiff’s. Had female scholars of her day had greater access to academic opportunities, she might well have established a research career. But “in at least four different occasions,” she discovered, “the fact that I was a woman resulted in an appointment going to a man.”49 In one such occurrence, at the University of Michigan, where she worked as a part-time lecturer, she applied for a faculty appointment, knowing her request was hopeless—the one female on the faculty was the head of women’s physical education.
Yet like the young Ohio State student who, in the days of the Depression, had to decide whether to leave college to aid her family or invent a way forward, Skodak pushed ahead. Working in Michigan’s public schools, where she served with superintendents, principals, and agency heads, she routinely found herself the sole woman and the committee’s leader. Often she was the only person in the room, or the school, or the school district’s administration, with a PhD, which granted her access to ever greater responsibilities.
Known as a “red tape cutter,” Skodak used her school psychologist credentials and leadership expertise at the local level to set up programs that supported intellectually challenged students and their families, to create university internships for graduate students, and to establish and lead in-service training and counselor and school psychologist training, replicated in other school districts. She led at the state level as president of the Michigan Psychological Association and served on the national level as a member of the American Board of Profession
al Psychology and as president of American Psychological Association committees in the areas of retardation and school services. She served as president of two APA divisions, Consulting and Mental Retardation. When gender blocked her academic ambitions, she created missions that made her talents count.
Yet toward the end of her life, Skodak acknowledged obliquely, and with forgiveness, slights she sustained, perhaps including Harold Skeels’s failure to credit her as second author on his culminating 1966 paper, which she had written:
My professional life . . . has been . . . mostly among men. It was men who were my peers. There . . . have always been barriers to advancement . . . sometimes because you are a woman, or have a foreign name, or different philosophy of life. . . . What is remembered are the successes, the challenges that have been met. The inevitable disappointments, small heartaches, fade like old photographs, and that is probably the way it should be.50
Reflecting about her career decisions, Skodak wrote that if she had a chance to go back to 1930, she would choose the same professional path. But if she were making the choice in the 1990s, she would study the neuropsychological bases of behavior and how they mediated environment’s influence.51 And Skodak left unfinished business. Her research data from the 1960s, which demonstrated that modified environments led to changed development, as well as investigations she completed in Michigan’s public schools, never received the formal processing required for academic contributions. She called this her “major disappointment”: “Planned, executed, the data analyzed . . . they sit neatly boxed, waiting for the final writeup. There is decreasing hope that I will get to them in the years that remain.”52
In the 1930s, the Iowa station’s visionary, George Stoddard, had forecast that the mechanisms that changed the Davenport orphans would one day be explained by neuroscience. For that belief, he and his colleagues, Beth Wellman, Harold Skeels, and Marie Skodak, suffered unrelenting attack, yet insisted their discoveries represented new knowledge. On December 5, 2000, during a period when decisive neuroscience findings about early brain development had begun to emerge, the last of the Iowa gang, Marie Skodak, died at age 90. Those findings would offer profound insights into what shapes the minds of young children—concrete evidence, down to the cellular level, of what the Iowans had grasped decades before: the minds of children are handmade.53
Epilogue
THE MIRACLE OF SCIENCE
After a 1-hour trial, at exactly 4 p.m. on the freezing afternoon of December 25, 1989, Romanian soldiers executed the nation’s megalomaniacal Communist leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, and his wife, Elena, by firing squad. Ceauşescu had ruled for twenty-four years; when he died, more than 170,000 Romanian orphans, about 7.5 percent of the nation, were living in abusive state-run institutions.
Convinced that the human capital of a huge workforce would bring prosperity and international authority to one of Europe’s poorest countries, Ceauşescu had launched a radical plan to increase Romania’s birth rate: he outlawed contraception and abortion and reduced the legal age of marriage to 15. Girls and women who became pregnant were tracked to ensure that they did not abort their fetuses, but during his reign over 10,000 died in illegal abortions. Ceauşescu further ordered families with fewer than five children to pay a “celibacy tax.”1 When poverty-stricken Romanians could not support their politically mandated children, they turned them over to the state to raise in its overcrowded, understaffed, ill-funded government institutions.
Three decades and over 5,000 miles separate 1930s Depression-era Iowa from Communist Romania. Yet in each, children in state-run orphanages suffered callous neglect that severely impaired their development. As in Iowa, in Romania a scientific study and intervention aided the recoveries of some, adding significantly to our understanding of child development. The two landmark studies differ in period, scale, and complexity—yet history seemed to repeat itself in their strikingly similar findings. Using scientific tools never dreamed of by the Iowa psychologists, sophisticated neuroscience investigations of the Romanian children’s brain functions found that environmentally determined factors impacted the children’s emotional responsiveness, relationships, and intelligence. This suggests that similar effects may have changed the Davenport orphans.
During Ceauşescu’s rule, his regime succeeded in significantly raising Romania’s birth rate. But in a nation that sold most of its food products as exports and attempted to pay off its massive foreign debt by imposing harsh austerity measures, his policies only worsened conditions. Romanians had their food rationed and their electricity turned off at night, and in winter they lived and worked in barely heated buildings.2 Neither adoption nor foster care had become established in Romania, and each year thousands of infants were abandoned to state institutions by parents unable to provide for them. One observer reported that in Romania, child abandonment became “implicitly endorsed.”3
Staffed by poorly trained, overburdened, and often indifferent workers, Romania’s orphanage management bore no relation to any accepted childcare standards. The tens of thousands whom Ceauşescu boasted would lift the nation to international greatness instead suffered damaged health and impaired motor, social, and cognitive development due to poor nutrition and criminal neglect. The children lacked any environmental stimulation: like the Davenport orphans, they had no possessions or playthings, rarely left their institutional wards, and had almost no responsive interactions with adults. Due to unsanitary conditions 63 percent of Romania’s institutionalized children suffered from HIV/AIDS as well as hepatitis B.4 In some of the worst institutions, child mortality was 25 to 50 percent per year.5
Almost immediately after Ceauşescu’s death, the world’s media flooded the nation. They found scandalous conditions in state-run institutions for “normal” children and far worse in asylums for disabled children called “irrecoverables.” In 1990, ABC television’s 20/20 documented “naked underfed children sitting ankle deep in their own urine; scabrous children herded like pigs to ‘bathe’ in filthy troughs of black water; infants starving to death because of treatable conditions such as cerebral palsy.”6 A reporter for the Los Angeles Times described babies “in long rows of cribs [where] the caretaker walks down one aisle and sticks bottles in the babies’ mouths, and then walks up another aisle and removes bottles.”7 The New York Times told of babies and toddlers who remained in cribs all day without any attention, soothing themselves by rocking.8
Because they destroyed their clothes, many residents who lived in unheated institutions for the disabled were kept naked.9 A visiting French doctor labeled conditions for these “irrecoverables” as “something between Auschwitz and Kampuchea” and reported: “Children are handcuffed to beds so tightly that the cuffs eat into their wrists. . . . Those too small or unable to feed themselves often waste away because their nursing bottles propped on piles of rags, slip away and there is no one to right them.”10 Nonfiction author Melissa Fay Greene reported in The Atlantic that in these institutions, Romania applied the Soviet Union’s science of “defectology,” classifying even children with cleft palates or crossed eyes as “unsalvageable.”11
Exposing Romania’s orphanages to the world inspired a rush to the nation from potential adoptive parents. In 1992, 7,328 Romanian children were adopted by Americans, Canadians, and Europeans—2,450 by Americans alone.12 Needless to say, many of these children arrived in poor health, and that year the health and development of sixty-five Romanian orphans newly adopted into American families was assessed by Dana E. Johnson, a University of Minnesota pediatrician with expertise in the evaluation of international adoptees. Johnson and his team found that only ten of the children were physically healthy and developmentally normal, and eight of those were under 5 months and had very short orphanage stays.
Most of the children had been identified as HIV-free before parents agreed to take them, but other diseases were common: more than half had evidence of past or present hepatitis B infection; twenty-two had intestinal parasites; and twenty-nine
had evidence of two or more pathogens. Johnson also found that the children suffered from small stature and low weight as well as small head circumference. He classified 85 percent as having serious medical developmental or behavioral disorders. Neurological issues from nutritional and emotional deprivation had led to severe developmental delays that required professional attention. “The adverse effects of the orphanage on normal development,” Johnson wrote, “may explain why twenty percent or more of the Romanian children had been misdiagnosed as being mentally deficient.”13
In 1986, Johnson had founded the Adoption Medicine Clinic at the University of Minnesota and better than others understood that most of the Romanian children faced immediate and long-term developmental challenges. He shared his experience with a colleague, another scientist deeply committed to the study of the developmental effects of deprivation, cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Charles A. Nelson, then at the University of Minnesota, now at Harvard. Johnson also connected Nelson with Romania’s newly appointed first-ever minister of child protection, Cristian Tabacaru, a post-Ceauşescu government official who believed that foster families would provide better environments for children than institutions. Tabacaru aimed to shut the institutions down, but he needed scientific evidence to convince government skeptics.
“In countries like Romania,” Nelson said, “institutionalizing children was part of the culture. In a Communist system, officials and many citizens thought the state could do a better job of raising children than families.”14 Romanian officials expressed concern that in foster homes children would be treated harshly and would be vulnerable to pedophilia and organ trafficking. They also doubted that untrained foster parents had the expertise to handle the developmental problems of formerly institutionalized children.15