A Vote For Orphanages until …

By Pat O’Brien

            There is a “new” debate going on today about building orphanages.  There is a group up in Minnesota that is even proposing them for younger children.  When asked at a public hearing what ages of children they expect to place in their orphanages they noted “60% of the children will be 8-9 to 15 years olds with the rest being older or younger.”  So we know that at least one group is advocating orphanages for children even younger than eight years old. 

             I have a lot of confidence in the groups advocating against orphanages that they will win the day to not have younger children placed in them.  Hence, in the end, the debate will yet again focus on what’s best for the teens: the stability of an orphanage or the placement in traditionally prepared foster homes. What will generally be left out of the equation is that these very children, the teens, need an absolute unconditionally committed adoptive or permanent family before they are discharged from care or else they run an extraordinarily high risk of becoming homeless.

             When the discussion of this orphanage issue is fine tuned, the debate will narrow down to what is best for the teens: the orphanage or the traditionally prepared foster families.  When the issue comes down to these two choices, I vote for the orphanage.   I will explain why in a moment but first I need to share my opinion about the horror being expressed by the advocates against orphanages. 

 The advocates against orphanages talk as if orphanages don’t already exist.  In every State in the union there are orphanages right now that warehouse children until the day they become homeless.  For some kids that date is their 18^th birthday.  For others it is their 21^st birthday.  For others it will be anytime between their 18^th and 21^st birthdays.  However, there is no horror expressed about these orphanages because the people that set them up were sophisticated enough to call them something else.  Some of today’s orphanages are called “Residential Treatment Centers.”  Other orphanages are called “Group Homes.”  Yet others are called “Correctional Facilities”, while others are simply called “Congregate Care Facilities.” However, when all is said and done we will have close to 20,000 youths discharged in the United States this year after their “treatment” or “long-term foster care” is over. They will be discharged to the ever-popular child welfare permanency-planning goal of “independent living.”  They will be discharged to no one but themselves and they will simply be let loose upon our land to wander, many of whom will become homeless.

 I’m a strong believer in treatment centers for teens that need treatment.  I’m also a strong believer in juvenile correctional facilities for teens that need rehabilitation.  However, when the teen has no family planning for his or her return home the congregate care facilities they currently reside in are defacto orphanages. Some kids go home, others don’t have a home.  For the teen that has no home the facility he or she is residing in is an orphanage.  Plain and simple.  Just because today’s orphanage is sophisticatedly hidden under the cloak of “treatment” or “rehabilitation” doesn’t make them any less of an orphanage for those youths without a family living in one.  So why all the fuss anyway?   What’s the big deal in the end that a group of citizens’ want to call a spade a spade and say they want to build an orphanage?  I for one, appreciate their honesty.

             Now back to the issue of what’s best for teenagers: an orphanage or a traditionally prepared foster family.   The advocates will argue any family is better than an orphanage.  I will argue later that only unconditionally committed adoptive or permanent families are better than orphanages.  However, I do not believe just any family is better than an orphanage and here’s why.

             Consider the innocent man sentenced to death living on death row.  There are two ways to treat this person until he is put to death.  You can treat him in a compassionate way very much like the Tom Hanks character did in the Green Mile until the innocent is put to death.  Or you can treat him with disgust and contempt just like the cruel guard in the Green Mile did until he is put to death.  In the end dead is still dead but at least the quality of life until death for this innocent person was much greater when he had Tom Hanks caring for him rather than the cruel guard.

             Placing teens in just any home is perhaps the cruelest hoax that we can play on a child.  These folks look like parents, they walk like parents, and they even talk like parents.  But a parent is a person who unilaterally unconditionally commits to a child.  These parents do not unconditionally commit to the teenager’s permanency future because no one even asks them to.  Hence, we are constantly setting up the teenager living in foster homes and here’s how.

Across the land we place teenagers in traditionally prepared foster homes that only take them because an intake worker makes “the deal” with them.  “The deal” is what I consider the worst form of legal child abuse that exists in this country today and that “deal” is: “try it and see if it works out.”  You can’t fault the prospective foster parent for “trying.”  The organization that wants to place the child with their family is asking for their help and the foster family truly believes they are being helpful.  However, the teens find themselves living in what I have come to call “eggshell families.”  Don’t shake, rattle or roll this family or you may find your life broken yet again.   Teens get removed from “eggshell” families for just about anything you or I did when we were teenagers.  They are not being removed for fire setting or assaultive behavior.  They are being removed because of nasty attitudes, not showing appreciation, talking back, expressing their opinions, cutting school, smoking, cursing or any of a variety of things that are normal during this stage of development.

             You see, the promise of the orphanage is that a teen would no longer have to suffer the risks of living in eggshell families where they have to move all the time.  I ran an Intake/Home Finding department for a traditional foster care agency for three years in the late 1990’s.  Almost all of the teenagers that I know who were placed in our best foster families were kicked out of these homes for behaviors that displeased these traditionally prepared foster families.  We lead these otherwise terrific people into believing that they were helping us out only to have them request the removal of the child when that child did something that displeased them.  And the kicker was they honored their end of the “deal.”   They “tried” but “it didn’t work out.” 

             So what’s so bad about an orphanage anyway?  It offers a youth stability.  Hopefully it will offer a youth some jobs and skills training.  Hopefully it will offer the youth the stability he or she needs so she can get a High School diploma and perhaps even go on to college.  If my only two choices were the orphanage or the traditionally prepared “eggshell” foster family, the orphanage will get my vote almost every time.  Why?  Well, let’s get back to the death row analogy.

             An orphanage is like the Tom Hanks character in the Green Mile.  It offers compassionate treatment until a teen is discharged to homelessness.  A traditionally prepared eggshell foster parent who does not make an unconditional commitment to the child is more like the cruel guard in the Green Mile.  The teen that has to live in an eggshell home knows that they cannot really be themselves because they run the risk of having child welfare’s equivalent of capital punishment (i.e. losing the bed they slept in last night) imposed on them for simply being their developmental self.  Sometimes nice, sometimes nasty.  Sometimes well behaved, sometimes breaking the rules.  Sometimes adult like, sometimes childish.  But in eggshell homes they get kicked out for being nasty, breaking the rules, and acting like a child.  And the teens that actually stay in these homes are still only there until they are discharged to homelessness because the home is not committed to them beyond their years in care.  

        So, just like in the orphanages, the young person is still homeless when they are out of the care of the traditionally prepared foster parent.  However, the child is perhaps treated with greater compassionate and has a greater feeling of stability while living in the orphanage than they ever felt living in the eggshell home.  But just like on death row where dead is still dead, a youth discharged to no one but himself is still faced with homelessness.  And homeless is still homeless whether you are treated with compassionate and stability during your last years in foster care or whether you suffer from the repression of your feelings in an eggshell home.  But is it still not better to be treated with the compassion rather than the repression during your remaining years in care?  Yes, particularly if you believe those are your only two options.

The reason we place kids in eggshell homes to begin with rather than adoptive or permanent families is because we believe no one would make a permanent commitment to them.  It is this belief system that creates half the homelessness in our culture.  What would you say if I told you it is easier to find permanent homes for teens than eggshell homes anyway?  Would you start looking for them if you knew permanent homes were easier to find?   I hope so.  And it is true.  We can find an unconditionally commitment adoptive or permanent parents for every kid in our care.  But we have to choose to believe the families are out there first.  Once we absolutely know the families are there 75% of the job of finding the family is done.  The other 25%, actually identifying an individual family for the child, becomes the easy part.  And anyone interested in ideas on how to find these families once you believe they are out there can contact this writer directly.

 But until we are all on the same page, I vote for the orphanage over putting any teenager in a traditionally prepared foster family.   However, I only vote for the orphanage until each and every one of us are on the same page about identifying adoptive and permanent homes for every teen in our care before they are discharged from our care. 

 Eggshell families no more!   Yeah for the orphanages until …!

You Gotta Believe! The Older Children Adoption & Permanency Movement, Inc.   1220 Neptune Avenue, Suite #166, Coney Island, N.Y.  11224, 1-800-601-1779.   1-718-372-3033 (Fax), ygbpat@msn.com (E-mail)