by the Register-Guard Staff
Four Romanians sit at a one-way window watching three Eugene preschoolers at play.
The youngsters paint, chatter amiably, eat snacks and clean up after themselves.
What’s remarkable here, explains foster care caseworker Kin Bronz, is what’s missing.
When these children came to the program last year, they were unmanageable, incapable of sitting still or following instructions. They were more likely to wander around the room smearing food on the walls than to clean up.
“This is a real change,” Bronz said.
The Romanian social workers want to learn more.
The four are spending the week at the Oregon Social Learning Center, a nonprofit psychological research agency specializing in understanding and treating aggressive and anti-social behavior in children. The agency receives about $10 million a year in federal funding and employs more than 100 people.
The possibility of working with the Romanians is enticing, researcher Phil Fisher said. Not only would it allow the agency to tailor its work to a new setting, but it would give the center an opportunity to study a different population.
The Romanians learned about the Eugene program from a University of Oregon psychology graduate, who had worked with Fisher. A year and a half ago, Heidi Ellis had finished her Ph.D. focusing on child neglect and went to Romania because it was ground zero for neglected children.
The former communist nation shocked the world in the late 1980s when details came to light about its tens of thousands of abandoned children living in squalid institutions.
Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies of outlawing abortion and paying poor families to give their babies to the state had appalling repercussions for children who were often malnourished and sick with the virus that causes AIDS.
“I wanted to go and learn for myself” what had happened there, Ellis said. In Cluj County, where she spent three weeks, she found dedicated people trying to improve the lives of children.
“Not a lot of attention has been paid to the tremendous progress. They’ve seen a whole national shift in how children should be cared for,” she said.
Ellis met Romanian social workers affiliated with the county government and with World Vision, a nonprofit agency focusing on the needs of children.
The Romanian government’s Child Protection Department has a mandate to get children out of Institutions, back to their families or into foster care or group homes that feel like families rather than institutions, said Nina Petre, one of the Romanian visitors.
In Cluj County, which has a population of 724,000, there are 800 children still living in institutions, about half the number from just three years ago, Petre said.
The county’s biggest need is for more foster families. About 180 currently care for one to two children, she said.
The easy children have found foster families, she said. Now, case workers need to find help for the tougher kids.
They’ve come to the right place.
Oregon’s Social Learning Center is recognized worldwide for its 25 years of research on troubled youth. More recently, the agency has focused on the plight of younger children in foster care.
Its early intervention program buttresses foster families dealing with 4- and 5 year-olds who have plenty of problems.
Foster parents have daily phone conversations with case managers who are on-call 24 hours a day. They participate in regular parent support groups. The children attend play groups, where adults help them with basic skills, and a child behavior specialist visits regularly with each child. The families also receive counseling.
The families get plenty of pragmatic suggestions for dealing with behavior that ranges from yelling and hitting to failing to say “thank you.” The suggestions are low on confrontation and high on positive feedback.
“What we’re doing is introducing techniques that limit kids’ negative behavior and foster healthy relationships,” said Fisher, the research scientist supervising the 3 year-old program.
It gets high marks from Ellen Williamson, a state Child Welfare worker who specializes in handling children with problems.
“The skill of the foster parents they’ve recruited and the level of staff availability has made huge differences in some of the kids that were completely and totally unmanageable,” Williamson said. “They’re making progress.”
And that is what the Romanians want.
“We are here for dialogue on the possibility to start a pilot project in particular to work with our special needs children,” Petre said.
The Romanians hope funding for such a project will come through a nongovernmental agency such as World Vision, but nothing concrete is set. Despite the damage done to youngsters abandoned by families at an early age, Fisher believes that no children are broken. Given the right support, they can overcome those early disadvantages, he said.
“It’s the promise of a foster home as a truly therapeutic environment,” he said.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2001, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.