London: Depriving young children of cuddles and attention subtly changes the way their brains develop, and in later life this can leave them anxious and poor at forming relationships, according to a study published on Tuesday. Love and affection from parents and carers are vital to developing brain pathways associated with handling stress and forming social bonds, the researchers found.

Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues compared the progress of children being raised by their biological parents in America with children who had come from crowded orphanages in Russia and Romania and had been adopted by American parents. "When these [orphanage] children were babies there were so few adults around that there was rarely one available to respond to their needs," said Dr. Pollak.

The children in the groups had an average age of 4.5 years. The orphans had been settled with their foster parents for two years and 10 months on average.

Eighteen of 39 children studied were from orphanages. They were observed at home playing interactive games and sitting on their mother's lap. Before and after this physical contact, the children provided a urine sample to measure levels of two hormones: vasopressin, thought to help us recognise familiar individuals and live in social groups; and oxytocin, the release of which makes us feel secure and protected, and lowers our stress level.

Children from orphanages had lower baseline levels of vasopressin and, unlike children raised by their biological parents, their levels of oxytocin did not rise with cuddling. The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers suspect that if deprived of close adult contact soon after birth, children will never fully develop the pathways. "It suggests we need to pay a lot more attention to children growing up in deprived environments," said Dr. Pollak. He speculates that giving children plenty of cuddles at birth leads to an addiction to close relationships in later life. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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