Institutional childcare and the affective deficiency syndrome: consequences on growth, nutrition and development

It is generally accepted that, in the face of certain family and social circumstances, a minor may need to be taken into care within an institution, a course of action that provides, at least, an alternative to the risks of abandonment and life "on the street". Nevertheless, the reality of life in childcare centres can lead to children undergoing an additional trauma after escaping the miserable situation of the family home. After the advances made in recent years (economic, healthcare, social, legal, etc.), it has been suggested that the institutionalization of a minor, as a rule, does not in itself represent a negative factor for the child's wellbeing. In order to test this hypothesis, we studied two groups of children in care. The first group comprised 101 children being cared for in a large traditional institution during 1986. The second group was composed of 66 children studied in 1996, resident in a smaller, charitable institution, providing a more family-like atmosphere. Growth evaluation methods were applied, including anthropometry (weight, height, weight/height ratio, body mass index, Rorer index and weight index), nutrition (skin folds, body density, percentage of body fat and weight of the fat) and development (psychometry: Boehm test, CMMS, Raven and EIT). The data were analyzed by means of the Student's t-test. The most important result obtained was the demonstration that the second group of children presented results that were clearly higher in nearly all the studied variables, thus showing that institutionalization in itself does not have a negative influence on child development.