Lost & Found

Americans are often accused of being painfully self-conscious about their society and its failings. But Americans are curiously oblivious to some of their society's achievements. It took foreign visitors to point out how remarkable it was that in the U.S. automobile workers drive to work in their own cars. Similarly unnoticed is another achievement of U.S. culture. The orphanage, that bleak institution that has outraged human sensibilities from the time of Oliver Twist to Little Annie Roomy, has all but vanished.

The reasons are manifold, and the process has been gradual, a function of both the U.S.'s long social conscience and its incredibly productive economy. Thanks to better medical care, there are fewer orphans today. Few mothers die in childbirth; fathers live longer. Even if the father dies, social security payments enable a mother to keep her children with her. Furthermore, almost any average childless couple that wants a child can afford one. Result: more couples clamoring for babies than there are babies to adopt--and the highest rate of adoption of any nation in the world.

Still, a new kind of problem child has replaced the vanishing orphan in the U.S.'s conscience. He is the child who is homeless as a result of divorce, illegitimacy, parental abuse or mental illness--orphaned in spirit if not in fact. There are 283,000 of these children. About 96,000--the emotionally disturbed, the mentally retarded, the medically ill--are cared for in special institutions. The rest are the beneficiaries of that phenomenal revolution in society, the foster home.

Vagrant Packs. Scarcely 50 years ago, civilized Americans thought of children as belonging to one of two classes: those with families and those without. The neglected and orphaned were hauled off to Dickensian institutions to live in lockstepped desperation; and when the orphanages were filled, the rest were left to roam the cities in vagrant packs or were rounded up and shipped to agricultural communities to be palmed off on farmers in need of kitchen and field help.

Urged on by such reformers as Novelist Theodore Dreiser, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 called the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. That meeting established the seemingly simple principle that a child was better off with a family, even if it was not his own, than he was in the cold and impersonal atmosphere of an institution. As Roosevelt said, "Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons."

The principle was one thing, but practical action was another. A federal Children's Bureau was formed, and within a few years the better voluntary and public agencies had begun to correct the notorious conditions in the nation's orphanages. But not until the mid-30s did the idea of foster care gain universal acceptance. Major factor was the recognition that, with the best good will in the world, few families could afford to take in a homeless waif unless they were paid at least enough to cover its food and lodging. Assured of this subsidy from the foster agencies, more and more families opened their doors to the homeless. Today some agencies even advertise for foster parents, offer to pay not only a fixed monthly fee for the child's board (as high as $200, for difficult emotional cases, in Seattle) but also medical and clothing allowances.

Generally, placement agencies have no trouble finding homes for orphans and other children who may be legally adoptable./- The new problem is finding foster parents for the child who cannot be adopted because one or both parents are still living and refuse to surrender their legal rights. Among these is the illegitimate child whose mother cannot care for him but who clings to the hope that some day she may get married and be able to reclaim him. Others are children with a parent who is a narcotics addict, alcoholic, convict, mental patient or a divorcee who neglects the child. But the vast majority are victims of less dramatic situations: parents who may not have gone off the deep end but who are so embroiled in personal and marital problems that they feel incapable of bringing up a child.

Love & Marriage. Ideal foster parents are mature people who are not necessarily well off but who have a good marriage and who love and understand children. Placement investigators check prospective foster homes for an atmosphere of warmth and emotional stability, try to choose families with average faults and virtues, and a little extra fortitude thrown in. The foster parents have to accept the fact that the child is in their care for only a brief time (an average of 4.1 years) until he becomes self-supporting or until his natural parents can take him back. The real parents of some children sometimes forsake them altogether, although they do not relinquish their legal rights to the children. In such cases, the foster parents become in effect the only parents. In other cases, social workers try to prepare the real parents for the time when they may again take back their child by encouraging them to visit the child in its foster home. Through all this, the foster parents have to stifle the temptation to divide the child's loyalty, especially when the natural parent is obviously unfit. One Long Island woman recently went through weeks of torment because her foster child's real mother bombarded the home every midnight with hysterically threatening telephone calls.

Among the most dedicated foster parents in the nation are Joe and Nola Treacy, who in the past 20 years have cared for more than 300 children of just about every nationality, color and faith. A Yonkers, N.Y., fireman, Joe Treacy was stopped one day by a neighbor who saw him wheeling two Negro babies down the street. "Where'd you get them?" asked the neighbor. Said Treacy: "They're my wife's by a previous marriage."

Martin and Muriel Cantor, who live in The Bronx, N.Y., have three children of their own; in past years they have had a total of five foster children, including three who live with them now. Says Mrs. Cantor of the twins whom they reared for 13 months: "They had come in diapers with clouded minds. They walked out like prince and princess. Our losing them was my great sorrow, but their return to their parents was my great victory."

Imperfect Science. The foster home program has its own problems. In general, social workers are overworked and chronically underpaid. In Long Beach, Calif., the case load (one visit per month to the foster home) is 65 per social worker; in Miami it is 40. In some instances, foster parents turn out to be no better than some parents for whom they substitute. Only two months ago the Los Angeles foster parents of a five-year-old girl "punished" her by tying her to the bathroom shower fixtures with a length of TV antenna wire; she was dead of strangulation a few hours later.

Social workers carry imperfect science to absurd heights. Says A. J. Montanari, who runs a private home for rejected children in Hialeah, Fla.: "To avoid the risk of failure, social workers set up so many standards that most people can't qualify, and we have thousands of children who stay in institutions because no one is allowed to take them." In a famed case last year, New Jersey state welfare workers tried unsuccessfully to take a four-year-old girl from her foster parents so that another couple could adopt her. The official reason: the foster parents were not "intellectual" enough.

15-c- a Year. Notwithstanding the attempt of the Child Welfare League of America to set up a system of agreed standards of child care throughout the nation, many states go their own way--and often an inadequate way it is. Per capita expenditures for children range from $8 a year in New York to 15-c- in Idaho. There are thousands of children all over the country who, if obsolescent statutes did not forbid, could be adopted and be given good homes.

The U.S. has come a long way since the days when unnumbered thousands of tattered ragamuffins spilled their small lives away in orphanages and gutters. But there are still some like the little girl in Chicago, who when asked by a welfare official. "And whose little girl are you?" replied: "I'm nobody's nothin'."

/- Notable exceptions: older children (most couples want babies), the physically and mentally handicapped, and Negroes and other non-whites (who are hard to place because of a serious shortage of eligible families).

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