Fantasy Parents

Foster kids need their real kin

Playwright Edward Albee is an adopted son, a fact that may well be reflected in his scripts. One psychoanalytic critique of Albee's bitter play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? claims that the drama is actually an imagined confrontation between Albee's natural and adoptive parents. Indeed, psychological studies show that adoptees are often obsessed by fantasies about their missing biological parents. Now a new report finds that these fanciful illusions can damage not only adoptees but also even children temporarily placed in foster homes.

Professors of Social Work David Fanshel of Columbia University and Eugene B. Shinn of Manhattan's Hunter College spent five years studying 624 foster children, many of whom had been abused, abandoned or neglected by their natural parents. In their book Children in Foster Care, Fanshel and Shinn report that youngsters who were never visited by their real parents in the foster homes showed greater emotional turmoil than those who were, as well as some declines in their IQ scores. But children who were seen at least occasionally by their real parents seemed far less troubled in their new settings. Conclude the researchers: "It is better for the child to have to cope with real parents who are obviously flawed ... than to reckon with fantasy parents who play an undermining role on the deeper level of the child's subconscious."

Though loving foster parents may seem to make up for the missing biological kin, Fanshel and Shinn explain, "on a deeper level, the abandonment by natural parents can impose a profound sense of loss, and the child's ease with himself can be markedly impaired." The authors concede that children who stay in foster care a long time have difficulty coping with a double set of parents. For this reason, some experts have recommended that foster parents be allowed to bar visits by real parents. But, warn Fanshel and Shinn, a "cavalier readiness" to drum natural parents out of a youngster's life is both unfair to them and dangerous to the child.

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