TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.025

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 15.0 KB | 290 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 91

Nobody's Children


In the world of adoption, where healthy white infants are hotly
pursued, a burgeoning group of "special-needs" kids is left
behind

By Richard Lacayo


    Mickey is 19 months old but weighs less than 14 lbs. Born
infected with the AIDS virus, he was abandoned by his addict
mother at birth. His huge, watchful eyes seem to fill half his
face; his legs dangle like matchsticks. For ten months after he
was born, Mickey languished at a New York City hospital. He
never had a visitor.

    All you need is love, John Lennon promised. Sometimes
that's true. Then again, there are the children like Mickey who
need more. They may need hospital care because their mothers
used crack during pregnancy. They may need psychiatric treatment
to deal with the effects of sexual abuse. They may need
wheelchairs, costly medication, special classes. And without a
doubt, they will need a home.

    For all his frailty, Mickey is in some ways fortunate --
he's in the process of being adopted. That makes him an
exception among "special-needs" children, to use the innocuous
term for kids who don't find permanent homes easily -- and most
often don't find them at all. They include blacks and other
minorities, the physically or mentally handicapped, and any
group of siblings who must be adopted together. The term also
applies to children who are simply too old for a market that
favors infants. In the beauty contest that is adoption, it is
never wise to turn five.

    By some estimates, these special-needs children account for
about 60% of all those available for adoption. They make up the
large majority of the youngsters now handled by the public
adoption agencies of most states. Yet while there may be dozens
of couples bidding for every healthy white infant, only about
one-third of the approximately 36,000 available special-needs
kids will be taken in any given year. Some of the rest can be
found in hospitals as "boarder babies" -- left behind at birth
by addicted or otherwise incapable mothers. Others are crammed
into group facilities.

    By far the largest number spend years carting their
toothbrush and T-shirts from one foster home to the next, at
each stop growing less hopeful, less open to the exchange of
affection and trust that comes naturally to most children. "If
you've got a kid who is 16 and has been in ten foster homes, you
can't imagine the devastation," says Catherine Tracy, chief
deputy of children's services for Los Angeles County.

    In recent years the number of special-needs cases has been
exploding. As reported instances of physical and sexual abuse
of children have risen, so has the willingness of judges to
remove the victims from parents who beat and molest them. Now
such children constitute nearly 60% of the foster-care caseload.
And by 1991 the number of newborns infected with the virus that
causes AIDS is expected to rise to 20,000.

    But nothing has been so devastating as crack. By one count
there are 365,000 American babies who were exposed to drugs in
the womb, two-thirds of them the victims of crack. Unlike
earlier street drugs, crack has lured at least as many women as
men, with corrosive effects on family life. "I used to have
heroin mothers in court who could hold a family together," says
Penny Ferrer, director of New York City's office of adoption
services. "But crack mothers cannot." And even as new cases
cascade into the child-welfare system, the number of foster
parents has been declining. With more women working, fewer are
home to take in children. Some adoption officials foresee an
eventual return to the system of warehousing children in
orphanages.

    Though one major study shows that most older adoptees --
even those ten and above -- flourish within their new families,
for special-needs children suffering the effects of mistreatment
or prenatal drug use, the future may depend crucially upon how
quickly they can be brought into a stable, attentive home.

    A home made all the difference for Michael Mazzafro, now
17. The son of an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, he spent six
years shuttling back and forth between foster care and his
mother's home. At last he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple,
but his behavior soon proved too much for them. While they made
arrangements to terminate the adoption, he was stashed in a
hospital for more than a year. That's where he was when Joe
Mazzafro, a Philadelphia bachelor now 39, took him in.

    When he first arrived a little more than four years ago,
Michael refused to bathe, disappeared from school for weeks at
a time and filched money with Mazzafro's cash-machine card. "I
was used to people taking me, then leaving me," the boy recalls.
"I guess I was testing Dad all the time to see what he would
do."

    What Mazzafro did was offer Michael large doses of love and
patience. That formula had already worked wonders with Tuan,
now 14, a Vietnamese refugee who had come to Mazzafro four
months earlier, speaking no English and still toting the
cardboard box that had been his bed at a relocation center in
Malaysia. Now he's an honors student at the local junior high,
while Michael has become a computer whiz with his sights set on
Princeton. Meanwhile, Joe Mazzafro is applying his methods to
Brandon, 9, his third adopted son, who tumbled through nine
foster homes in his first eight years. When he joined the family
last year, he was so anxious to please that he was constantly
hopping up to get things for his prospective father -- a drink
of water, a napkin, anything. "Finally I told him that he wasn't
going anywhere but here," says Mazzafro. "He was here because
we love him, and we want him to stay."

    Faced with a shortage of couples for the growing numbers of
special-needs children, adoption officials have been forced to
discard orthodox notions of what constitutes a family. Two
years ago a White House task force recommended that states
eliminate barriers to adoption by singles like Mazzafro, working
couples, older people and the physically handicapped. "We've had
situations where married veterans have been encouraged to adopt
special-needs children, but when they show up in a wheelchair,
they are shown the door," says Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the
group. "We had to change the system."

    While the task force opposed adoption by homosexuals,
growing numbers of gay men and women -- who are generally
spurned by ordinary adoption agencies -- have sought
special-needs kids. Says a New York social worker involved in
placing the city's 300 homeless AIDS babies: "We have recruited
single men because many of them are not afraid of AIDS. We also
find men very nurturing parents."

    Frank and Dante, a gay Long Island couple, have not only
taken in the fragile 19-month-old Mickey; they are also
preparing to adopt two-year-old Jonathan, who has weathered two
bouts of AIDS-related pneumonia and, under their care, blossomed
from an emaciated infant into a chubby, cheerful toddler. A
private adoption agency, Leake & Watts, provides the men with
$1,200 for each child a month in city, state and federal funds
instead of the $437 subsidy for a healthy child.

    On their mantel, Frank and Dante keep a silver-framed
picture of their adopted son Alex, who was ten months old when
he died of AIDS-related pneumonia last year. If Mickey too
succumbs, they will consider adopting another child with AIDS.
"I think we were called to take care of them," says Frank, a
former Franciscan brother. "We know what it is like to go
through the loss of a child, but we also know there is another
baby out there."

    Early stability may be especially important to the
prospects of drug children, especially crack babies. "George,"
just ten months old, has already endured surgery on his throat
and intestines. When he arrived at the Children's Institute
International in Los Angeles six months ago, he weighed only 5
lbs. "He looked like a child assigned a set of skin three times
too big," recalls Sheila Anderson, director of the infant's
shelter at C.I.I. Crack babies frequently have trouble keeping
down their food. Given to spasms, trembling and muscular
rigidity, they resist cuddling by arching their backs, an early
sign of what some studies suggest may be lasting neurological
and emotional disorders. In pediatric intensive-care units
around the country, they fill the night air with their
inconsolable "cat cries," a distinctive high-pitched whine that
conveys who knows what inexpressible misery.

    So Jimmy Hibbard is lucky. Though his mother freely
consumed prescription and street drugs during pregnancy, her
drug abuse probably did not extend to crack. Even so, when Rick
and Mary Hibbard brought him into their home in Long Beach,
Calif., he was a nine-month-old veteran of pneumonia, bronchitis
and asthma, so white from anemia he was "almost iridescent,"
recalls Rick.  Now eight, Jimmy still has trouble with some
motor skills. But he has demonstrated above-average reading
ability.

    For five-year-old Noel, whom the Hibbards are in the
process of adopting, the future is likely to hold greater
challenges. A Pueblo Indian, she suffers from fetal alcohol
syndrome as well as prenatal exposure to angel dust and probably
cocaine. For a long time she was so sensitive to tactile
stimulation that it made her hysterical to walk on carpeting,
grass or sand. She has been diagnosed as mildly retarded. With
a good mother's militant optimism, Mary says the Hibbard house
will make the difference. "All kids need structure," she
explains. "But special-needs kids need it more."

    The Federal Government has taken a few steps to make
special-needs adoption more attractive. In 1980 Congress passed
a sweeping reform of adoption and child-welfare laws that,
among other things, offered for the first time a federal stipend
-- $200 to $300 a month -- to some adoptive parents of
special-needs children. Just last month President Bush proposed
legislation to make them eligible for a $3,000 tax break.

    But even when adoptive parents come forward, the
foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children
tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term
arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to
a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of
indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children
return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by
parents who make little effort to regain their children but
refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates
that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan for his
or her future within 18 months should be made available for
adoption, an absentee parent can thwart such attempts by just
minimal contact during those 18 months. Result: of the
estimated 276,000 children in foster care in 1986, the last year
for which statistics are available, perhaps just 13% were
immediately available for adoption.

    A partial remedy is being tried in New York City. The
city's new adoption-counseling unit works with drug-addicted
birth mothers at the hospital to explain the  possibility of
giving up parental rights and freeing their children for quick
adoption. Earlier this year the city instituted a plan
encouraging would-be adoptive parents to serve as foster parents
for children who haven't yet been freed for adoption, and then
adopt them as soon as legally possible. "Parents don't have to
go to Korea or South America if they want to adopt an infant,"
says adoption-services director Ferrer. "Get a home study done,
which takes six weeks, register with an agency as a pre-adoptive
foster parent, and you will get a child a few weeks later."

    Agencies are rethinking their opposition to placing black
children with white parents. In 1972 the National Association
of Black Social Workers charged that "transracial adoption" was
a kind of cultural genocide that deprived black children of
their racial heritage. At least 35 states imposed regulations
requiring social workers to make every attempt to place children
with parents of the same race. Transracial adoptions of all
kinds dropped from a high of 2,540 in 1971 to less than half
that number in recent years.

    A consequence of this policy has been that black children,
who make up about 40% of the foster-child population, tend to
spend much longer waiting for adoption than whites. Recently
agencies have been quietly permitting more black children to go
to white adoptive homes. They have also been mobilizing to
recruit more potential black parents.

    In California a statewide television campaign urges blacks
and Hispanics to consider adoption. In the Brownsville section
of Brooklyn, a nonprofit agency called the Miracle Makers has
placed 671 children in 473 black foster homes during the past
two years by recruiting prospective parents at churches, civic
centers and homes. In January the agency sent them all letters
asking if they would be interested in adopting. "We received 125
affirmative answers," boasts agency director Willy Wren.

    Parents who adopt special-needs children speak of the
rewards as often as the difficulties. Says Sam Borodin of
Philadelphia, who with his wife has adopted three girls with
Down syndrome: "They have given us joy and love back tenfold."
But there are times when caring for a child with special needs
can be too hard a test. In Texas a group of seven couples has
brought a lawsuit against the state adoption agency, charging
that they should have been told that their adopted children had
been abused. As the children approached adolescence, they began
to behave in a bizarre and sometimes violent fashion, hacking
up furniture, setting fires, assaulting family members. All
eventually required psychiatric care, costing up to $20,000 a
month. Though the parents' case -- in which they are asking the
state for further information about their children and
assistance in caring for them -- has not yet gone to trial, the
state has already enacted a law requiring agencies to provide
full records to would-be adoptive parents.

    The child-rearing problems encountered by the Texas couples
are not typical, but no one denies that parents who take on
special-needs kids must enter the relationship with their eyes
open. The minimum requirements are a level head and a spacious
heart. Susan Edelstein, a clinical social worker at the
University of California, Los Angeles, who is supervising a
study of children exposed to drugs, has a list of the mental and
spiritual resources that the parents of such children should
have. It could apply to anyone who takes on a special-needs kid.
"You've got to be optimistic without denying what is happening,"
she says. "You've got to focus on strengths, keep perspective,
set reasonable goals and get help when you need it. You have to
be able to tolerate the unknown. You have to be able to say, `I
will love this child forever.'"


-- Mary Cronin/New York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles