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trinityajohnson15
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Reaction Paper: Romanian


Orphans
Trinity Johnson

Georgia Gwinnett College

Psych 2500: Life span developmental psychology

Dr. Jyotsna Kalavar

September 17, 2023


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Nature vs Nurture is a concept that delves into the fascinating question of how our genetic

makeup and environmental factors interact to shape our individual characteristics and behaviors. This

ongoing debate sensors around where there are inherent genetic predispositions or the influences of

our upbringing and experiences have a greater impact on our development. It's a thought-provoking

topic that continues to captivate researchers and scholars. As most of us know both do play a big part in

creating who one is as an individual. To me I believe that nurture carries a heavier load than nature

does. Because nature is your genetic inheritance and other biological factors that you are born with,

there is some level of importance there because it is prewritten into your biological code, so the way

you may perceive some things, and the way you deal with emotional situations, can be affected from the

nature aspect. But that doesn't take away that nature is something that you're exposed to on an

everyday basis how many you are getting an experience of nurture from school from babysitters from

your parents and your grandparents and whoever else you may be around throughout your life. Nature

can only take you so far. A lot of people like to say no one is born good or bad, they are created that

way, by saying this means that nurture produces a good or a bad seed not nature, and if you look at

nurture holding so much power in a way a person acts, I do believe that nurture can be perceived to be

slightly more important than nature.

A huge example of nurture playing such a huge part on children’s development can be shown

with the experiences of Romanian orphans. These children were discovered in the late 1980s and early

1900s. They were children who had been abandoned or placed in state-run institutions during the

oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. These institutions suffered from severe neglect and lack of

resources, leading to the children experiencing significant physical, emotional, and cognitive

developmental issues. This sheds a huge light on the importance of early nurturing and care in a child's

development. These children were raised in a for-seen conditions, such as being fed like hamsters past

the age of solid food tasting and learning to feed yourself. Looking through barred windows, staring at a
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hospital where free children would go with their parents (now, 2020). A lot of these kids were subjected

to seeing an outside world that many would never get the chance to experience. Not only did they

subject this kind of emotional torment but children who were deemed out of control where dose with

adult tranquilizers that were unsterilized, and on top of that the ones that fell ill, likely from those

unsterilized needles where then given blood transfusions with blood that had not been tested so there

was a lot of hepatitis B, HIV, and aids severely impacting these Romanian orphans (Greene, 2020). A lot

of these children were heavily undeveloped for their ages. There were 20-year-olds that were three feet

tall and teens that looked like they were seven or six years old. A lot of the supervisors used violence to

humiliate and control the kids, while also abusing them in the education setting if they were having a

difficult time understanding. One of the survivors Daniel Rucareanu said in an interview “We were wiped

out as human beings, silenced, humiliated,” he explained. “Our personalities were dissolved.” “Those

places were the slaughterhouses of souls,” he added. “How did all those people heal?” (Odobescu,

2015)

I wondered the same question; how did all those people heal? An experience like that not only

left physical marks but also psychological. Coming from a situation like that can be one with the difficulty

of connecting with others, in another interview from one of the survivors he stated the abuse left

psychological scars and that it's hard to even look people in the eye. On top of all that, ones that were

left there for more than six months were more likely to develop ADHD. And a lot of them we're left to

deal with drug abuse, while in that institution at some point they stopped training the children and

brought in tranquilizers, so you can only imagine what being tranquilized almost every day of your life

from the age of four does to a person not only physically but also mentally.
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REFERENCES

FRANCE 24 ENGLISH. (2020). ROMANIA: 30 YEARS AFTER CEAUSESCU, FORMER ORPHANS REMAIN TRAUMATIZED

HTTPS://YOUTU.BE/JS77QOD0MT8?SI=PU-EQ67JIQTQQRZZ

MARIA CHENG. (2017). ADOPTED KIDS SEE LONG-LASTING EFFECTS OF ROMANIAN ORPHANAGES

HTTPS://APNEWS.COM/ADOPTED-KIDS-SEE-LONG-LASTING-EFFECTS-OF-ROMANIAN-ORPHANAGES-

2921E91A579C4D209AF1AC9FA9612B7C

MELISSA FAY GREENE. (2020). 30 YEARS AGO, ROMANIA DEPRIVED THOUSANDS OF BABIES OF HUMAN

CONTACT. HERE’S WHAT’S BECOME OF THEM.

HTTPS://WWW.THEATLANTIC.COM/MAGAZINE/ARCHIVE/2020/07/CAN-AN-UNLOVED-CHILD-LEARN-TO-

LOVE/612253/

VLAD ODOBESCU. (2015) HALF A MILLION KIDS SURVIVED ROMANIA'S 'SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF SOULS.’ NOW THEY

WANT JUSTICE.

HTTPS://THEWORLD.ORG/STORIES/2015-12-28/HALF-MILLION-KIDS-SURVIVED-ROMANIAS-

SLAUGHTERHOUSES-SOULS-NOW-THEY-WANT-JUSTICE
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