I remember around 1990 after we won the Cold War and the Iron Curtain parted for westerners who saw the orphanages of Romania, and family apologists showed the “horror” and crowed about how this proved children needed families.
Really, this was a selection effect in that children disabled beyond home care were disproportionately given up to orphanages. A lot of those kids who, a-gasp, failed to meet observers’ gaze or even rocked back and forth grunting and shouting unintelligibly and hitting themselves were simply autistic, and even if modern professional treatment might have improved things some they would have been mostly the same even raised by Romanian families of the time at home.
The rest of the kids basically grew up as functional as anyone else, if they weren’t very talkative at the time it’s cause there was no demand, family acculturation, or reason to babble, but they were capable of acculturating to the grown-up world on an equal plane.
Presumably some kids were abused, by or not stopped by communist public worker jobsworths, but it’s in no way obvious that this was more than the rate in orphanages run by Catholic nuns, or homes run by parents for that matter.
Which is to say, it was all family propagandist slander, basically like a combination of “crack baby” and “refrigerator mother” myths
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