Children adopted from abroad often have difficulties adjusting to their new families and to life in the United States, exhibiting poor social skills, problems bonding with new family members and reticence in dealing with strangers.
Those difficulties are generally traced back to emotional deprivation in large orphanages, where infants often outnumber staff by 40 to 1, and caregivers do little more than feed and change the infants.
Wisconsin researchers have found that such deprivation can produce relatively permanent changes in a child’s brain chemistry, impairing production of hormones, such as oxytocin, that are crucial to bonding and social interaction.