Can children recover from growing up in an orphanage?

Yes. Children who have grown up in orphanages can and do recover but recovery requires family, not more time in orphanages.

Children raised in orphanages are not defined by that experience. Their dignity, agency and potential remain intact. The brain is not fixed it responds to relationships, and it can recover.

Research shows significant improvements in cognitive development, emotional wellbeing and social functioning once children leave orphanages and are placed in family care.

The Bucharest Early Intervention Project found that children moved into family care showed IQ scores averaging nine points above peers who remained in orphanages, sustained across more than twenty years of follow-up. That is approximately three years of grade-equivalent cognitive recovery, produced by a single change: a family (King et al., American Journal of Psychiatry, 2023).

Our Rwanda programme provides some of the most compelling evidence of this recovery in action. Fifty-five children under six were assessed at the point of transition from one of Rwanda’s largest orphanages, then reassessed at 6, 12 and 18 months in family care.

At baseline, these children showed developmental deficits across every domain measured: motor skills, cognition, language, self-help and socialisation. By 18 months, all five domains had reached scores approaching or at levels typical for their age. The same pattern has been documented in our programmes in South Africa and Moldova.

Survivors of orphanages consistently say the same thing. What they needed was not charity. They needed connection, identity and belonging.

“I grew up believing I had no family and no place in the world. When I finally left the orphanage, I discovered I had relatives who had never stopped looking for me. What changed my life wasn’t a building. It was people who believed I belonged somewhere.”

— Young adult, experience of growing up in an orphanage [identity protected]

With the right support, children who have grown up in orphanages rebuild their lives, relationships and futures. Their stories are of resilience, dignity and recovery.