Tina Rosenberg, a former editorial writer for the New York Times, has sought to convince “volunteer tourists” from wealthy countries that when they work in orphanages in low-income African and Latin American countries, they are “perpetuat[ing] a harmful system” and inadvertently leaving the affected children with “lasting pain.” She says that all orphanages in the United States and elsewhere—“even the best” ones—have “damaged” the children in their care, and that they should be shuttered because of it.
Ms. Rosenberg writes that she drew upon “decades of research” to make her argument. The findings that she cites generalize orphanages and are global in scope, saying that “[r]ich countries closed their orphanages long ago,” but poor countries have not caught up—and in fact are seeing an expansion of orphanages.
But that’s not a bad thing. While I cannot speak to the particulars of orphanages in countries outside the United States, I beg to differ about the life-long “pain” she says they cause. (After all, her claim is that the orphanage, as an institution, is demonstratively negative.) I grew up in a Presbyterian orphanage in the 1950s, and I have researched the life outcomes of thousands of alumni from a number of American orphanages. My findings, and those of other researchers—whom Ms. Rosenberg has overlooked—reveal that an overwhelming majority of alumni from run-of-the-mill orphanages in the 1960s and before have done well (often very well) in life.
Real Family Life
Ms. Rosenberg insists that children are always best off reared in loving and responsible families. My reaction? Well, duh! Clearly, families are the bedrock of all societies. The basic problem in child welfare is that many parents, biological and foster, are far from loving and responsible. Indeed, many are derelict in their duties.
When reminded of how orphanage critics idealize “families,” Phyllis Crain, the late head of The Crossnore School, bristled, “By ‘family,’ do you mean parents who run meth labs in their homes or go out to bars, leaving their young children alone? By ‘family,’ do you mean parents who beat their children in drunken stupors and then tell them how much they love them? Most families are wonderful, but let’s get real here. Many are not.”
In 2016, 3.5 million American children were “referred” to child protective services for investigation for having been abused and neglected by their families, according to a report. Of those referrals, 676,000 children were found to have suffered abuse and neglect; 1,750 children died because of maltreatment. There were 437,465 children living in “out-of-home care,” mainly foster care, and tens of thousands of whom will age out of the foster-care system at 18, poorly prepared for life. Foster-care alumni are over represented in the country’s prison and homeless populations.
Ms. Rosenberg advocates adoption (which can cost $40,000) as a remedy, and indeed it often is. In 2014, 110,000 children were adopted in the United States (a third by their families), as reported. But that leaves tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of abused and neglected children without so-called “forever families.”
Orphanage critics should keep in mind two consequential adoption issues. First, adoptions fail. Exactly how often is unclear. A University of Minnesota survey estimated failed (or “disrupted”) adoptions accounted for 6 to 11 percent of adoptions. For children older than three, the failure rate is between 10 and 16 percent (representing thousands of adoptions). For teens, the failure rate can be one in four. Adoptions can fail for many reasons, not the least of which is that adopted children sometimes come with embedded problems the adopting parents can’t handle.
Second, many children—including me—detached from their parents don’t want to be adopted. When my 10-year-old buddies and I learned a couple would be scouting our campus for adoptable children, we headed for the woods, and our resistance to adoption was understandable: Children extracted from dysfunctional families don’t always predict any new family will be better.
Besides, we had a good home, albeit an orphanage—but with benefits. We had to work a lot, ingraining a work ethic. We also had our own pool, gymnasium, and sports teams, not to mention readily available buddies for pick-up games. We had better-than-average schools, and we knew in seventh grade that if admitted to a college, our way would be paid.
Critics don’t understand that we orphans became “family,” with “lasting gains.” As Hillary Clinton insisted, “It takes a village” to rear children. My orphanage was a largely self-sufficient “village.”
Moreover, I had a living father. He was derelict, but he was my father, nonetheless. I had no interest in burdening him with another life failure, that of losing a son to adopting parents.
When I lived on the Crossnore campus in late 2011, I talked at length with a shy, soft-spoken 14-year-old girl, Faith (not her name). She had been adopted in the late-1990s as an infant from a Ukrainian orphanage by a single mother. She and her “mommy” had a wonderful life on a farm, until at age 10 her mother lost her cancer battle. Faith was then shifted first to a church family and then to her guardians, who had adopted another Romanian daughter who was Faith’s age. The two girls fought, and Faith became progressively destructive and withdrawn until, at age 12, her guardians placed her at Crossnore.
At Crossnore, Faith began to come out of her shell, but within the year after our talk, Faith was taken in by another family interested in adopting her. That adoption also failed, with her returning to Crossnore (for reasons I never learned).
I tell you Faith’s story to force the question: What do you do with a child who was given up at birth, shipped to a foreign country, lost her first adopted mother, was tossed around other placements, taken in by a children’s home, only to be adopted again and given up again? Do you try another adoption? Send her through several more foster-care placements? Or do you let her try to renew her life in a children’s home where she had support and had once begun to recover?
Many children’s lives are complicated, and not all fit Ms. Rosenberg’s proposed one-size-fits-all form of care. The country needs a menu of care options. In addition, the stark fact remains: Hundreds of thousands of children given up by or taken away from their families will never be adopted, and good foster parents have long been in short supply. Those inconvenient truths cannot be washed away by talk about “forever families.”
The Foster-Care Shuffle
While demonizing orphanages everywhere, Ms. Rosenberg has minimized foster-care problems by noting that foster “failures” involve “a small percentage” of children in the system. Quoting approvingly a foster-care advocate, Ms. Rosenberg insists that children fare worse in “low-nurture institutions” than in “high-quality foster programs.” Again, my reaction is “Duh!” Orphanage care can be nurturing care and foster-care is often far from high-quality childcare, and all-too-often in short supply.
Granted, many foster parents do amazing work. But Ms. Rosenberg failed to uncover in her research a dreadful problem: that of the “foster-care shuffle” or the “plastic-bag brigade” (phrases coined by judges), which refer to system children who, after being removed from their parents, are forced to move through three, six, and even 20 (or more) placements, carrying their few belongings in black plastic bags, before aging out of the system, often troubled by their multiple cycles of placements and reunification stints with their ill-suited parents.
By the mid-1990s, San Diego Chief Family Court Judge James Milliken had tired of seeing his “plastic-bag brigade” come through his courtroom, so much so that he spearheaded a drive to create a modern-day orphanage that would allow foster-care teenagers, with multiple placements, to choose to be admitted. The judge enlisted broad community support for the development of a beautiful residential facility, the San Pasqual Academy, located near the San Diego Wildlife Park, and foster-care teenagers jumped at the new opportunity.At the Academy’s 2001 grand opening, with a thousand attendees, the most powerful speaker was not a politician or a minister. She was a twenty-something foster-care alumnus who stunned the audience with her opening line: “I am here today to welcome the opening of the San Pasqual Academy for a personal reason: The children who will live here will not experience what I did. When a high-school freshman, I was forced to move through eight—yes, eight—high schools before the end of October! Because of that shuttle, I am fortunate that I am here today.”
Just consider the trauma you might inflict on your children by moving them only once during their high-school years. The many luminaries in the audience gave her a standing ovation not accorded others, deservedly so.
Ms. Rosenberg could check out the Academy’s web page; better yet, go there and listen to the kids talk about their rescues from bad families and the system, and consider the facilities and opportunities they have and would have missed had San Pasqual not existed.
The Homecoming Film
I’ve also guided the production of a documentary on orphanages, Homecoming: The Forgotten World of America’s Orphanages (available on YouTube). This 2005 film screened in four film festivals to overflow crowds and won “Best Documentary” at the Sedona International Film Festival. It aired on more than 220 PBS stations in 2006—with all accolades going to the film’s director George Cawood and his Burbank-based production team who worked pro bono on the film for two years. After watching it, ask yourself if the alumni interviewed on camera look and sound like “pained” and “damaged” human goods.
When in the throes of filming at four homecomings, each attended by hundreds of alumni (a surprise for critics), a cameraman wondered at the end of a filming day, “Richard, I’m not believing what I’ve been hearing all day. I never considered that the alumni would love their homes. Why aren’t there more homes like this one today?”
When filming ended, the director lamented, “Richard, we need more ‘bad stuff.’ We need alumni who had sordid experiences and achieve ‘dramatic tension’ to make the film credible.” I reminded him we didn’t have the funding, and he would have to work with the 85 hours of film he had, which means he and film editor Sheila Moreland included just about every bad thing any alumni uttered, which I understood distorted the film somewhat. However, I agreed the film needed to be believable by orphanage skeptics trapped by long-held Dickensian images.
Most telling about alumni’s allegiance is our planned shoot at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York City’s reunion, scheduled for September 13, 2001. Because of 9/11, we couldn’t fly into the city, and the alumni couldn’t meet. In fact, the alumni couldn’t meet for eight weeks, and our team still couldn’t fly in.
We hired local cameramen to shoot B-roll, and our producers interviewed HOA alumni in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, 300 HOA alumni still gathered for their delayed reunion—although their home had closed its doors forever in 1941! The alumni interviewed on film relate their life “gains” from their “home,” which bely any notion of their being “damaged” or suffering from “attachment” horrors that Ms. Rosenberg insists were inflicted on all alumni.
Indeed, many alumni from HOA and other homes today consider themselves “privileged” for having the “opportunity” to grow up as they did (those words being ones used by orphans in the film and in survey responses). So many critics judge orphanages by what the children didn’t have. We alumni have an improved perspective: We judge our orphanage days by how our lives and futures were improved from what they would have been.
My Orphanage Odyssey
In addition to my work as an economics professor, I have spent the last 20-plus years researching, with academic intent, the life outcomes of more than 3,000 alumni who grew up in 15 orphanages before the 1970s. These orphanages had shortcomings, which some children felt, but hardly lived down to Ms. Rosenberg’s characterizations, as revealed by my survey findings—especially when compared to foster care.
In one of my edited volumes, John McCall, a professor of research methods, has laid bare the substantial flaws in outdated orphanage studies on which Ms. Rosenberg and other critics have long relied. She also missed the extensive, in-depth, and ongoing contemporary child welfare research undertaken by Kathryn Whetten and her research team at Duke University, a key finding of which is that in five low-income countries in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia, children in orphanages experienced superior care than children in foster care and encountered less physical and sexual abuse.
As is the case of so many child-welfare workers, Ms. Rosenberg seems to have been captured by orphanage images in the movie Oliver, which represent staff members as being brutal, hardly representative of the staff many alumni remember. Yes, there were occasional bad eggs on staffs of my own and other orphanages I’ve surveyed (as revealed in my surveys and the film), but they were probably rarer than those found in many biological and foster-care families.
Critics in the main rely on research findings from immediate and short-term assessments of the emotional and behavioral impact of “institutions” (including mental wards and detention centers), which can be distorted by their recent family horror stories. If evaluated shortly after my admission, I would likely have been judged a basket case, given that I had recently found my single alcoholic mother’s body on the morning after she committed suicide the night before and given that her family didn’t want my brother and me.
But what about other alumni’s own long-term assessments?
Life Outcomes of Orphanage Alumni
In late 1994, Newt Gingrich was elevated to Speaker of the House and almost immediately made an off-hand comment on how many children in welfare-dependent families would be better off in orphanages. Childcare professionals, with the support of media pundits, went ballistic. Major news magazines went to press with covers of poor orphan waifs with outstretched hands, pleading for “some more” gruel.
I took note of the comment of a dean of social welfare at an elite university who told reporters, without equivocation, “Orphanages damaged the children in their care, emotionally, behaviorally, intellectually.” I had to wonder, “Had I been damaged by my orphanage years?” I was doing well as a university professor. “Had my cohort been damaged in ways I had not noticed?” It was not obvious how they had been damaged when we rejoiced over our childhoods at annual reunions.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, I started surveying orphanage alumni from as many orphanages as I could find. I assumed initially that orphanage critics were likely right: “Orphanages were generally bad, but my orphanage was special”—or so I thought. After receiving more than 2,500 responses, I learned that my home was ordinary. An overwhelming majority (85 percent) of the surveyed alumni look back “favorably” or “very favorably” on their orphanage salad days. Only 2.3 percent of the alumni had hostile assessments.
Moreover, the alumni reported that they had done better than the general population on almost all measures, including education, income, attitude toward life, criminal records, psychological problems, unemployment, dependence on welfare, and happiness. For example, the alumni reported that they had an overall college graduation rate 39 percent higher than the general population in their age group (and the respondents, who lived an average of eight-plus years in their orphanages, were 56 to 97 years old, with a mean age of 68). They also reported 10 to 60 percent higher median incomes than those in their age cohort. (My survey details were published in peer-reviewed journals, here and here).
When in a 2016 survey I asked almost 500 orphanage alumni about their achievement of the “American Dream,” 82 percent agreed they had achieved the Dream, exactly twice the percentage in the general population. Of the 20 percent of the alumni who had experienced both foster care and orphanage care, all favored their orphanage care.
My findings are understandable for us alumni. To have children flourish, much of what the orphanages did was to hold at bay dreadful family forces: for example, serious alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, and parental fighting. Then, they offered children underappreciated powerful life values, such as a sense of “home,” which includes a sense of stability and permanence, moral guidance from mentors, and attention to education.
Children in such circumstances can do quite well, as orphanage alumni have proven. Take away those care qualities, and you can have a mess on your hands.
I am convinced that (updated) variants of orphanages can work today—because they are working. Critics should walk the grounds of The Crossnore School, the Connie Maxwell Children’s Home, and the San Pasqual Academy, and be prepared to be amazed at the good they are accomplishing with disadvantaged children in some distress. And listen for the children’s laughter.
