When Parents Aren't Enough

Residential Care Offers Children Stability And Hope

July 07, 1994|By Patrick Murphy. and Patrick Murphy is Cook County public guardian.

Almost 80 years ago, my grandmother's first husband disappeared into the alcoholic underworld leaving her with five kids and no money. There being no welfare in those days, my dad and three of his siblings went to live at an orphanage in Des Plaines which today is called Maryville. My grandmother took in laundry at a buck a day and raised the infant. Three years later, Murphy came along, married my grandmother, adopted her children and together they had several more.

Maryville saved my father and his family. Orphanages, usually run by religious charities, nurtured thousands of children and saved many families. Most orphanages did a bang-up job given their resources. Of course, in a few of them, underpaid, often untrained and overworked staff treated kids more like convicts than waifs. For infants in need of constant warmth, affection, and security, an orphanage could be a ticket to a life of emotional turmoil.

But the welfare system of the 1930s and more reasoned family planning soon diminished the number of real orphans. Orphanages became part of the substitute-care system for abused and neglected children, particularly if foster care did not work out.

Beginning in the 1970s, child welfare reformers argued that orphanages were obsolete. Or, as a federal judge, recently put it in referring to the federal decree under which the Department of Children and Family Services operates, "(T)he decree does not provide for orphanages or large group homes. Rather, it is directed toward reuniting children with their families or, if that proves inappropriate, adoption or foster placements in family type settings."

This is wonderful rhetoric, but experience over the past 20 years demonstrates that many children will never be reunited with parents who have sexually abused them, horribly physically abused them or who disappear into the drug or alcoholic subcultures. Thousands of these children are older or have been badly abused or neglected and as a result have baggage that makes them unadoptable.

Moreover, the same child welfare system that has shuttered most orphanages has also vigorously opposed transracial adoptions, making it even more difficult to place African-American youngsters.

With the growth and ossification of the underclass, the export of factory-type jobs to Asia and the drug epidemic, abused and neglected children are pouring into the system. Between 1983 and 1986, the number of abused and neglected children in DCFS custody in Cook County averaged about 8,200. In 1986, the numbers actually diminished from 8,300 to 8,000. However, between 1986 and the present, the number of children in DCFS custody in Cook County has increased from 8,000 to more than 29,000. These numbers reflect a national trend. In 1986, 262,000 children were in foster and substitute care nationally. Today, there are approximately a half a million.

At the same time, societal changes have reduced the number of adequate foster homes. Most often today, both parents work. It is trying enough to come home after a hard day's labor and care for your own well-behaved child. To deal with, and attempt to fill the needs of, a very damaged foster child is exhausting and draining. (Relatives acting as foster parents have filled some of this gap.)

Thousands of children in the DCFS system bounce from foster home to foster home, to DCFS shelters, back to foster homes, back to the shelter, to psychiatric hospitals, to the streets, to shelters, back to the streets, to foster care, and back to the streets. Every move further diminishes the child's self-esteem, which because of parental abuse and neglect is already in the basement. The more the child becomes damaged the more the child acts out to test unprepared foster parents and the more he tests the foster parents and the more they reject him, the more he acts out to test the next foster parent.

Shoving these kids into additional foster homes or back to their own homes destroys them. They hit the streets at early adolescence. Many turn to male and female prostitution and to drug abuse. Many DCFS wards have kids and drop out of high school.

Residential care can be life saving for pre-adolescent and adolescent kids. Most of the dedicated men and women laboring in these institutions view their job as a vocation. They provide consistent and professional care, providing security for insecure and unwanted children. They goad the children to live up to their potential.

Too often, DCFS treats its wards as if they were part of a giant shell game, moving them from placement to placement without attempting to motivate them to reach into their psyches to touch their immortality, to bring forth their potential greatness. Most DCFS wards enter adulthood unprepared for life.