Orphan Family Values

Gwen J. Broude from the May 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

By the 1920s and 1930s, the Asylum began to view itself as a substitute home for children, and youngsters began staying at the Asylum for years. Managers, directed by the professionals, were now willing to take legal custody of children whose parents they judged psychologically unfit.

Thus, Cmiel describes the case of a father who brought his three children to the Asylum some months after the death of his wife. The case worker reported that the father "feels now it is too hard for him after working all day to come home and do the washing, ironing, and cooking in the evening." The children languished in the Asylum for 10 years, the daughter begging and pleading to be taken home and the boys turning into delinquents.

As Progressive reformers worked to separate children from "bad" parents, writes Cmiel, they also "argued that [normal] children should be kept at home." At orphanages like the Asylum, renamed Chapin Hall in the 1930s, the idea was no longer to provide the child with a "family" environment. Orphanages became places for "emotionally disturbed" children and the focus was on therapy.

By the 1950s, the children at Chapin Hall had more serious problems, and the emphasis now shifted toward psychiatric--and especially psychoanalytic--care. The staff encouraged the children to view themselves as "sick," although some of the youngsters resisted the label. Consistent with the "professional ethos" of the time, caretakers were no longer willing to be viewed as surrogate parents. By the 1960s, the director reinvented Chapin Hall as a state-of-the-art, full-service, state-supported psychiatric group home for emotionally disturbed children.

In the 1970s, however, the psychiatric residential institution fell from grace, in part because no empirical research had ever shown that residential treatment did any good. The experts now favored deinstitutionalization. Chapin Hall closed its doors in 19 84 as a home for children and re-opened as a research center affiliated with the University of Chicago. In a sort of Twilight Zone turnabout, Chapin Hall is now a privately and publicly funded monitoring agency of just the sort with which the Asylum and other orphanages had sparred over the years.

During the Progressive Era, recounts Cmiel, the "cottage system" was the favorite alternative choice for housing children when foster care was not an option. The idea was to locate children out in the country in bungalows that tried as much as possible to be like conventional homes. This is the kind of institution to which Richard McKenzie, now a business professor at University of California at Irvine, was sent. If Cmiel's book is a cautionary tale about what can happen to child-care systems when they get into the wrong hands , McKenzie's story helps address the question of whether certain kinds of institutional care are sometimes preferable to living at home when home is intolerable.

Echoing Gingrich's response to his critics, McKenzie wants us to understand that "The Home was a vast improvement on the lives we had known before arriving there." He walks us through his experiences at an orphanage very much like the asylums of the 1950s described by Cmiel, so the books complement each other in satisfying ways. The Home gives us a good sense of the kinds of children who found themselves at places like The Home, the kinds of lives they lived there, and the kinds of people they turned out to be.

McKenzie's Home housed some 200 children at any one time, few of whom were true orphans. Many came from homes disrupted by divorce, abuse, and neglect, and many, by the time they got to The Home, were serious troublemakers. McKenzie describes himself as "the child teachers didn't want in their classrooms: bratty, recalcitrant, prone to fights . I had become a child of the streets."

The average age of the children at The Home from the 1930s to the 1950s was 7 or 8 years and the average stay was 10 years. Children lived in individual houses but ate in a common dining room. The Home was a large an d functioning farm in North Carolina, and everyone was expected to work when not in school. The annual cost of care per child, including education, came to less than $5,000 in 1995 dollars.

Over and over, McKenzie compares The Home with what life was like for him and the other children back with their families, and it is this comparison that convinces McKenzie--and the reader--that, given the alternative, The Home was not such a bad place. "The Home provided a setting, albeit an institutional one, that allo wed us to come in contact with places, things, and people in varying combinations, most of which helped us to redefine, to one degree or another, our direction," writes McKenzie. This was critical for children with family backgrounds like his: "Those of us who grew up [at The Home] have all had to fight at one time or another the conclusion that we weren't worth much. The people who were important to us neglected us, abused us, dumped us."

McKenzie and his brother found themselves being carted off to an ins titution by two aunts who assured the boys that "we meant so much to them" and explained that they were sending their nephews to The Home because "they had to." For McKenzie, this was a betrayal. "I knew I was being committed, put away, dumped." By contrast, at The Home, "The message everywhere...was: 'You are worth something. You can do things. You need not let choices made by others hold you back.'" That message was reinforced by what McKenzie calls the "great triad--work, sports, and religion--without which The Home would have been a far different, and less influential, place to grow up."

"For most of us," writes McKenzie, "The Home was a place to change course. It offered a set of experiences that were life-focusing. It gave us constraints, direction, purpose, and inspiration." At The Home, says McKenzie, "I found people...I wanted to make proud."

McKenzie's evaluation of orphanages rings true in part because he also tells you what The Home did not provide. In numerous vignettes threaded throughout the book, we glimpse children who mainly need to feel that they belong to someone. Thus, McKenzie recollects, "When I graduated, I received the 'most athletic' trophy. I was grateful for any award, mostly in the hope that my aunts would come to see me receive it. They never did."

The most touching of these memories focus on what it is like to grow up without a mother. "If there is one thing we missed at The Home, it was having access to the type of person our mothers could have been," writes McKenzie. "If there is anything I would have loved to have had, it is the type of retreat a mother could provide." Musing about religion, McKenzie admits that he hopes God exists and that he has just "missed the evidence. I hope that if He does exist, I will be found good e nough when the balance is taken. I say that because I would like very much to be able to see my mother again, to tell her some things, and to find out whether she has been watching."

Such wistful, moving reflections underscore the real dilemma that there are children in America who are living in sub-adequate families. What can we do, what shall we do with them and for them? Psychologists provide some clues regarding the environments that tend to produce self-reliant, self-controlled, confident, persistent, moral, ambitious, friendly, cooperative, generally happy children. Children of this sort tend to come from backgrounds in which caretakers are available, affectionate, and sensitive to their signals. Parents of such children tend to set high standards, def ine limits, but take the opinions of their children into account. They emphasize rationality. And they are consistent.