From Hell to Heaven: How Orphan Care Evolves

Level 1: Hell

June, 2002 - Recently, at a City Council meeting in Minnesota, plans were approved for the building of a privately funded orphanage. The adoption community views this as a giant step backward. The following article explains why.

Paco is in hell. Not because he sinned, but because he was born in a country without a safety net in place for children. No older than 5 or 6, he has no memory of any home other than the section of abandoned sewer pipe he shares with 4 other children. All he knows is fear. Paco is a modern day orphan, also known as an orphan of the living. His mother and father may or may not be alive. Either way he is parentless.

Since Paco is the youngest, the older kids look out for him somewhat, but in this dangerous world, it's every child for himself, or herself. They steal to eat, and many times Paco has almost been caught by the people in the market. He cannot run very fast yet. Since Paco's arrival, several of the children in their group have died of pneumonia and tuberculosis. And two who disappeared were rumored to have been shot by the vigilantes who regularly "thin" their numbers with bullets. In the local language, Paco is part of a population of street orphans referred to as "Brown Dust."

The least evolved system to care for parentless children is no system at all. Call it hell, because if hell is defined as a place where suffering never ends, then being a child without hope is tantamount to hell. This system is what an estimated 20 million children are part of around the world, especially in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia. The lucky children eventually find care in a church-run orphanage, and a few are informally adopted, but these are relatively rare. The street children who survive to adulthood usually make their living as criminals.

Level 2: Purgatory

One step up from hell is purgatory where the conditions are almost as severe but survival rates are better. The dictionary defines purgatory as a temporary place of suffering. Katrina is in purgatory somewhere in the former USSR. The youngest of three children, she was born with asthma and her parents could not afford the medicine she needed to live. They also could not afford to feed her. So they took her to a local overcrowded state-run orphanage.

Katrina has a roof over her head, a bed to sleep on, and she gets one, sometimes two meals a day. When she is ill, there might be some medicine to open her lungs, but medicine comes in sporadically. Katrina has a better chance of survival here than she would if she were living on the streets, but many children still die. Inadequate nutrition makes them more susceptible to diseases and infections. Lack of parental affection and lack of education spells disaster for their emotional and mental development. If Katrina is very fortunate, her parents' financial situation will improve and they will come back for her. Or she might eventually be transferred to a religiously affiliated orphanage in the next town. The children there get better food and more of it. A few babies might be adopted by Westerners. But for now, Katrina waits and hopes and cries.

Purgatory is a society's first organized and tax-supported response to the problem of orphans. Orphanages are a beginning, but far from optimal. In the last 50 years, there has been an explosion of research on child development. We know for a fact that children grow best in families, and orphanages can never replace families.

Level 3: Limbo

The third level of orphan care, permanent foster care, devised by man, can best be described as limbo. There is no overt suffering in limbo, no starvation, but neither is there a great deal of joy. It is mostly a place of waiting, insecurity and anticipation. In Christian history, Limbo is where the unbaptized innocents await Judgement Day so they can enter heaven. The worst part about it is being so close to heaven but having to endure the absence of the presence of God.

In the case of David and Darlene, limbo is the absence of a real mom and dad and a secure homelife. They move from foster home to foster home, sometimes because David's behavioral problems are too much, and sometimes for reasons completely outside their control. They are so close to having a real family, but they are not there yet.

Where they live, Australia, adoption is not an accepted way to build a family. Several generations before them, the government created a scandal by abducting thousands of children from indigenous tribes and educating them in boarding schools. (The USA has a tragic history of this practice, as well.) As a backlash to this policy, adoption is officially discouraged to this day as politically incorrect. Politicians rarely discuss it. Parental rights are almost never terminated even when it is clear the child cannot return home. Children who can't go home or whose parents have died, grow up in foster care. Ironically, however, international adoption is a popular option among the citizens.

David and Darlene have stuffed their belongings into plastic trash bags and moved too many times. David deals with this loss by acting out violently at school. His behavior terrifies his sister because she does not want the state to separate them and put David into a residential institution. She's lost everything and everyone that ever meant everything to her- except her brother.

A state-paid foster care system, especially one where foster parents are adequately trained and given the support they need to keep children long-term, is a far cry from the two levels before it. With this kind of system, children have that crucial family-type atmosphere, which they can model and re-create when they are grown and building their own families. But a foster home still isn't permanency, at least not in most cases. It lacks the absolutely crucial elements of providing the child with unconditional commitment and a strong sense of security, acceptance, and belonging.

Level 4: Heaven's Gate

America did not always have a system that can only be likened to Heaven's Gate. Formal legalized adoption came about slowly, colony by colony, and then state by state. There was a great deal of prejudice surrounding adoption, based largely on fear of the "bad seed" and a religious and cultural reluctance to take in a child born to unmarried parents. There was a time in this country when the birth certificates of children born outside wedlock were stamped with the word, "Bastard." And trans-racial adoption, even in the land of multi-racial immigrants, was unheard of.

Orphanages were the rule well into the twentieth century. My own mother spent time in a US orphanage in the Southwest as a little girl in the 1930's because there were no foster homes available. Her parents were separated. Her father lived far away and was doing all he could to raise her brothers during the Great Depression, with unemployment at an all time high. When my grandmother could not earn enough money to feed her daughter, she took her to an orphanage. My mother was desperately lonely and months passed like decades, but eventually, her mother returned for her.¹

Foster care, as a more humane means of caring for children, really blossomed after World War II. In the sixties, the belief that adoption should always be in the child's "best interests," a U.S.-born idea, took legal root and is commonplace in many countries now. More progressive states instituted the idea of family-like care for all children, and other states slowly followed suit as the federal government subsidized costs. Adoptions grew in number, and experiments in the seventies with subsidized adoptions were a huge success. The federal government discovered that many foster parents could and did adopt their foster children when the foster care board payment and medical insurance followed the child into adoption. This minimal financial assistance was extended to more children with special needs and adoption rates started to climb.

Starting with President Carter in the seventies, each US president has strongly encouraged the adoption of children in foster care who need adoptive homes. President Clinton and the current Congress have worked especially hard and the results are impressive. When the government actively promotes special needs adoption, and funds programs that make it affordable for the average citizen, people respond. Records are being set every year now for the number of children leaving foster care for forever families.

George is a beneficiary of the current US system. Born with Fetal Alcohol Exposure (FAE) and removed from an abusive environment in infancy, he spent two years in a foster home while the state and the courts decided the best course of action for his future.

Once parental rights were terminated, he was quickly adopted by a family his foster mother found for him - her own next-door neighbors - who had already grown to know and love him. An adoption assistance contract addressed George's expensive medical and educational needs. Today, with his adoption finalized, George lives with his new parents but runs next door whenever he smells something good cooking. George has what is the birthright of every human child: a loving permanent home.

¹ - The culture of the orphanage has faded slowly, at least here in the Midwest. Until recently, my adoption support group received at least one phone call every December from elderly citizens asking for the name and phone number of the closest orphanage. They were hoping to revive their family traditions of "taking an orphan home for Christmas Day.

Level 5: Heaven

So advanced is our nation's orphan care system, there is only one step higher, and that's heaven itself. At this highest evolved level of orphan care, children needing permanency barely wait any amount of time at all. There are always more citizens ready and wanting to adopt than there are waiting children who need to be adopted. The government and society as a whole are familiar with adoption, accepting of it, and enthusiastically supportive of families that adopt children with special needs.

Heaven may sound like it is out of reach but, throughout history and into the present day, many cultures and societies have achieved this level of child-centeredness. Tribes in isolated areas of Africa and South America, to this day, cherish each and every child as a priceless resource. An orphaned child is immediately taken in by another family because all adults are seen as parents to all children. Early white explorers in America left behind written accounts of Native American tribes with the same attitude toward orphans. These explorers wrote with amazement about this attitude that every child is special. They asked how Indian families could readily take in Caucasian children captured in raids, and raise them with so little prejudice that some of the children actually achieved chieftain status within their tribes. (Indian children captured in white raids, on the other hand, were not raised within society, but sent to boarding schools.) This type of societal attitude is not just heavenly, it is the ultimate in adoption support. Every child a wanted child. And is not an unreachable goal.