LIVING, Page 91Nobody's ChildrenIn the world of adoption, where healthy white infants arehotly pursued, a burgeoning group of "special-needs" kids isleft behindBy 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
