SAN FRANCISCO – Young children adopted from foreign orphanages show initial delays in nonverbal social communication, developmental behaviors, and adaptive behaviors that resolve within 6 months to 1 year, according to two posters that were presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies.
The results suggest that it may be more difficult to read the social cues of institutionalized children shortly after adoption and that it may be worthwhile to focus attention on helping these children develop better means of social communication, wrote Dr. Yasmin Senturias of Children's Hospital Medical Center of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Anne Roth of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., and their colleagues.
Both of the studies were conducted on the same group of 23 adoptees, who were 9–24 months old at the time of adoption. Eighteen of the children came from China and the remainder came from Russia and other Eastern European countries.
In the study on nonverbal social communication, the children were compared with age-matched controls from a study on nonadopted children.
The assessment involved videotaped observation of 25 semistructured situations designed to elicit interaction between a tester and a child with minimal verbal cueing. The videotapes were scored based on the frequency of events showing behavioral regulation, social interaction, and joint attention.
At baseline, the international adoptees showed significantly lower frequencies of social interaction, joint attention, and total nonverbal social communication than the controls. These differences disappeared completely 6 months later, with the adoptees and controls showing virtually identical scores and no statistically significant differences.
The study on adaptive skills and developmental outcomes was based on three measuring tools: International Adoption Questionnaires given to parents; the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, which yielded a Mental Developmental Index (MDI) score and a Psychomotor Developmental Index (PDI) score; and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale, which measures personal and social skills used for everyday living.
Fifty-two percent of parents reported gross motor delays at the time of adoption, and that declined to 0% at 1 year. Likewise, parents said that 21% of the children had fine motor delays initially, and that declined to 5% at 1 year. Speech and language delays, however, did not show such substantial improvement. Thirty-four percent of parents reported speech and language delays at the time of adoption, and that declined to 25% 1 year later, wrote Dr. Senturias and Dr. Roth.
The MDI and PDI scores both increased significantly over the course of the study, from 78 and 79 respectively at baseline to 99 and 104 respectively 1 year later. Both increases were statistically significant. (A score of 100 is considered average, and every 16 points below 100 represents one standard deviation from the mean.)
The Vineland scores demonstrated significant improvement over 12 months in all domains, including communication skills, daily living skills, socialization skills, and motor skills.
The meeting was sponsored by the American Pediatric Society, Society for Pediatric Research, Ambulatory Pediatric Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics.