Foster care better than orphanages for kids' IQs — when the orphanage is in Romania, and the foster care is provided by specially trained parents:
In the study, U.S. researchers randomly assigned 136 young children in Bucharest’s six orphanages to either keep living there or 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.The team chose apparently healthy children. Researchers repeatedly tested brain development as those children grew, and tracked those who ultimately were adopted or reunited with family. For comparison, they also tested the cognitive ability of children who never were institutionalized.
By 4½, 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 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.