The least of these:
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERA MINDS Abigal McCarthy THE LEAST OF THESE MAKING ROOM IN THE INN As Christmas approaches, the knowledge that so many children are homeless grows more painful. The temptation to look...
...The administration can influence the Health and Human Services Department and state agencies to enforce it...
...She tells of a child she saw at a youth center: "While waiting for my son to finish basketball practice I saw a little four-year-old boy, wiry and slight of build, struggling to carry an infant girl on his hip...
...At worst they are put in the hands of case-hardened adults in foster care for the money...
...They may be arbitrarily returned to the abusive or disorderly family from which they came...
...At best they receive consistent care for a few years from well-intentioned adults who are, nevertheless, not likely to form emotional attachments to children assigned to them for an uncertain block of time...
...Four- and five-year-olds play in the street...
...Agencies have a backlog of more than 700 cases of child neglect...
...to change its filthy diaper, he beat on the door (of the bathroom...
...The welfare system in most cities and states still addresses the problem of neglected and abandoned children on the basis of an outworn and probably never realistic thesis that the problem of each child must be worked out according to a permanent plan which will result either in reunification with the biological family or adoption...
...Yet there are 900,000 out-of- wedlock children born each year and only 51,000 adopted, he reminds us...
...I cannot forget the poignant incident related by Joyce Ladner, professor of social work, in a recent article in the Washington Post...
...It is estimated that some 300,000 quasi-orphans are cycling through foster homes...
...ten-year-olds deal drugs...
...When a woman knows that such needs as food, lodging (to avoid peer pressure), medical care, schooling, and career counseling can be met and if she knows her child will have a secure and loving home, chances for a relinquishment decision improve...
...As good as adoption may be as a solution, it depends on the altruism of couples wishing to be parents...
...There are no real biological families or homes to which they may return...
...When a group of little girls six to eight years old grabbed the baby from his arms...
...Only a heroic few will be led to take difficult "unadoptable" children...
...some were true homes...
...He argues that unwed mothers-to-be are not now presented with adoption as a good option and urges that federal monies be made more readily available to women in the late months of pregnancy...
...Add to the children in foster care the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of neglected children left every day at playgrounds without food or money or put out to roam the streets by ignorant, unfit, and/or drug-addicted parents usually mothers too young to be parents...
...We should look at them again and build on their achievements...
...Race will remain an obstacle...
...All over Washington, D.C., little children are trying to hold together families torn asunder by their parents' use of drugs...
...And these are the lucky ones...
...As possessive as any parent to a newborn, he clung to her as he played with his friends, chasing across the gymnasium floor...
...He rejected my offer to hold the baby for, he explained, she was entrusted to his care alone...
...Joyce Ladner suggests that for the high-risk children of whom she writes we should bring back the orphanage "not the huge impersonated warehouses of old but small-scale caring institutions that can offer children, and their siblings, a place they can count on to nurture them...
...It breaks the cycle of family instability and replaces expensive and impersonal government social programs with the devoted love and resources of permanent parents...
...Attorney General Thornburgh recently urged all employees in the Justice Department to give an example by considering adoption and especially the adoption of children who are, because of disabilities, age, or race, not sought as adoptees...
...Nevertheless, adoption is at least part of the solution...
...Adoption," says Chapman, "does work...
...They are taken in and out of schools, receive little if any health care, are often shifted from home to home because of age requirements: one home is not licensed for teen-agers, another can take only preschool children, for example...
...There is a law which requires foster care agencies to place children for adoption who are unlikely to return safely to their birth parents...
...The reality is that most of these children from the inner city are the offspring of the second and third generation of teen-age mothers isolated from any extended family and living in extreme poverty...
...Bruce Chapman, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was an assistant to the president in the Reagan administration, has called attention to the report of the 1987 White House Task Force on Adoption a report, he says, "largely painted over by the White House issues artists of the time...
...What of adoption...
...In the cities where our super-rich live we know that families with several children are crammed into single rooms in "hotel" shelters...
...Not all the orphanages of old were warehouses...
...The temptation to look aside is almost overwhelming because the problem looks intractable...
...Mama's going to change her when she gets home tonight!' he cried frantically, 'give her back now!'" According to Professor Ladner, this was not an isolated incident...
...In the face of it the seasonal appeals for gifts of toys, clothing, and food, and charity-sponsored Christmas parties seem a mockery...
...The administration is encouraging it more as an alternative to abortion than as a solution to homeless-ness...
...Some of these are of toddlers locked alone in apartments for days...
...It is a good suggestion, one we should act on...
...The only practical help offered by the administration, however, is a $3,000 one-time tax break for those who adopt children with handicaps or "special needs...
...But that is the subject for another column...
...These children do not go to school regularly, often go hungry and dirty, and have little knowledge of daily living in a civilized society...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 21
