Nobody's Children

By Richard Lacayo

Mickey is 19 months old but weighs less than 14 lbs. Born infected with the AIDS virus, he was abandoned by his addict mother at birth. His huge, watchful eyes seem to fill half his face; his legs dangle like matchsticks. For ten months after he was born, Mickey languished at a New York City hospital. He never had a visitor.

All you need is love, John Lennon promised. Sometimes that's true. Then again, there are the children like Mickey who need more. They may need hospital care because their mothers used crack during pregnancy. They may need psychiatric treatment to deal with the effects of sexual abuse. They may need wheelchairs, costly medication, special classes. And without a doubt, they will need a home.

For all his frailty, Mickey is in some ways fortunate -- he's in the process of being adopted. That makes him an exception among "special-needs" children, to use the innocuous term for kids who don't find permanent homes easily -- and most often don't find them at all. They include blacks and other minorities, the physically or mentally handicapped, and any group of siblings who must be adopted together. The term also applies to children who are simply too old for a market that favors infants. In the beauty contest that is adoption, it is never wise to turn five.

By some estimates, these special-needs children account for about 60% of all those available for adoption. They make up the large majority of the youngsters now handled by the public adoption agencies of most states. Yet while there may be dozens of couples bidding for every healthy white infant, only about one-third of the approximately 36,000 available special-needs kids will be taken in any given year. Some of the rest can be found in hospitals as "boarder babies" -- left behind at birth by addicted or otherwise incapable mothers. Others are crammed into group facilities.

By far the largest number spend years carting their toothbrush and T shirts from one foster home to the next, at each stop growing less hopeful, less open to the exchange of affection and trust that comes naturally to most children. "If you've got a kid who is 16 and has been in ten foster homes, you can't imagine the devastation," says Catherine Tracy, chief deputy of children's services for Los Angeles County.

In recent years the number of special-needs cases has been exploding. As reported instances of physical and sexual abuse of children have risen, so has the willingness of judges to remove the victims from parents who beat and molest them. Now such children constitute nearly 60% of the foster-care caseload. And by 1991 the number of newborns infected with the virus that causes AIDS is expected to rise to 20,000.

But nothing has been so devastating as crack. By one count there are 365,000 American babies who were exposed to drugs in the womb, two-thirds of them the victims of crack. Unlike earlier street drugs, crack has lured at least as many women as men, with corrosive effects on family life. "I used to have heroin mothers in court who could hold a family together," says Penny Ferrer, director of New York City's office of adoption services. "But crack mothers cannot." And even as new cases cascade into the child-welfare system, the number of foster parents has been declining. With more women working, fewer are home to take in children. Some adoption officials foresee an eventual return to the system of warehousing children in orphanages.

Though one major study shows that most older adoptees -- even those ten and above -- flourish within their new families, for special-needs children suffering the effects of mistreatment or prenatal drug use, the future may depend crucially upon how quickly they can be brought into a stable, attentive home.

A home made all the difference for Michael Mazzafro, now 17. The son of an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, he spent six years shuttling back and forth between foster care and his mother's home. At last he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple, but his behavior soon proved too much for them. While they made arrangements to terminate the adoption, he was stashed in a hospital for more than a year. That's where he was when Joe Mazzafro, a Philadelphia bachelor now 39, took him in.

When he first arrived a little more than four years ago, Michael refused to bathe, disappeared from school for weeks at a time and filched money with Mazzafro's cash-machine card. "I was used to people taking me, then leaving me," the boy recalls. "I guess I was testing Dad all the time to see what he would do."

What Mazzafro did was offer Michael large doses of love and patience. That formula had already worked wonders with Tuan, now 14, a Vietnamese refugee who had come to Mazzafro four months earlier, speaking no English and still toting the cardboard box that had been his bed at a relocation center in Malaysia. Now he's an honors student at the local junior high, while Michael has become a computer whiz with his sights set on Princeton. Meanwhile, Joe Mazzafro is applying his methods to Brandon, 9, his third adopted son, who tumbled through nine foster homes in his first eight years. When he joined the family last year, he was so anxious to please that he was constantly hopping up to get things for his prospective father -- a drink of water, a napkin, anything. "Finally I told him that he wasn't going anywhere but here," says Mazzafro. "He was here because we love him, and we want him to stay."

Faced with a shortage of couples for the growing numbers of special-needs children, adoption officials have been forced to discard orthodox notions of what constitutes a family. Two years ago a White House task force recommended that states eliminate barriers to adoption by singles like Mazzafro, working couples, older people and the physically handicapped. "We've had situations where married veterans have been encouraged to adopt special-needs children, but when they show up in a wheelchair, they are shown the door," says Mary Sheila Gall, who headed the group. "We had to change the system."

While the task force opposed adoption by homosexuals, growing numbers of gay men and women -- who are generally spurned by ordinary adoption agencies -- have sought special-needs kids. Says a New York social worker involved in placing the city's 300 homeless AIDS babies: "We have recruited single men because many of them are not afraid of AIDS. We also find men very nurturing parents."

Frank and Dante, a gay Long Island couple, have not only taken in the fragile 19-month-old Mickey; they are also preparing to adopt two-year-old Jonathan, who has weathered two bouts of AIDS-related pneumonia and, under their care, blossomed from an emaciated infant into a chubby, cheerful toddler. A private adoption agency, Leake & Watts, provides the men with $1,200 for each child a month in city, state and federal funds instead of the $437 subsidy for a healthy child.

On their mantel, Frank and Dante keep a silver-framed picture of their adopted son Alex, who was ten months old when he died of AIDS-related pneumonia last year. If Mickey too succumbs, they will consider adopting another child with AIDS. "I think we were called to take care of them," says Frank, a former Franciscan brother. "We know what it is like to go through the loss of a child, but we also know there is another baby out there."

Early stability may be especially important to the prospects of drug children, especially crack babies. "George," just ten months old, has already endured surgery on his throat and intestines. When he arrived at the Children's Institute International in Los Angeles six months ago, he weighed only 5 lbs. "He looked like a child assigned a set of skin three times too big," recalls Sheila Anderson, director of the infant's shelter at C.I.I. Crack babies frequently have trouble keeping down their food. Given to spasms, trembling and muscular rigidity, they resist cuddling by arching their backs, an early sign of what some studies suggest may be lasting neurological and emotional disorders. In pediatric intensive-care units around the country, they fill the night air with their inconsolable "cat cries," a distinctive high-pitched whine that conveys who knows what inexpressible misery.

So Jimmy Hibbard is lucky. Though his mother freely consumed prescription and street drugs during pregnancy, her drug abuse probably did not extend to crack. Even so, when Rick and Mary Hibbard brought him into their home in Long Beach, Calif., he was a nine-month-old veteran of pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma, so white from anemia he was "almost iridescent," recalls Rick. Now eight, Jimmy still has trouble with some motor skills. But he has demonstrated above-average reading ability.

For five-year-old Noel, whom the Hibbards are in the process of adopting, the future is likely to hold greater challenges. A Pueblo Indian, she suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome as well as prenatal exposure to angel dust and probably cocaine. For a long time she was so sensitive to tactile stimulation that it made her hysterical to walk on carpeting, grass or sand. She has been diagnosed as mildly retarded. With a good mother's militant optimism, Mary says the Hibbard house will make the difference. "All kids need structure," she explains. "But special-needs kids need it more."

The Federal Government has taken a few steps to make special-needs adoption more attractive. In 1980 Congress passed a sweeping reform of adoption and child-welfare laws that, among other things, offered for the first time a federal stipend -- $200 to $300 a month -- to some adoptive parents of special-needs children. Just last month President Bush proposed legislation to make them eligible for a $3,000 tax break.

But even when adoptive parents come forward, the foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan for his or her future within 18 months should be made available for adoption, an absentee parent can thwart such attempts by just minimal contact during those 18 months. Result: of the estimated 276,000 children in foster care in 1986, the last year for which statistics are available, perhaps just 13% were immediately available for adoption.

A partial remedy is being tried in New York City. The city's new adoption- counseling unit works with drug-addicted birth mothers at the hospital to explain the possibility of giving up parental rights and freeing their children for quick adoption. Earlier this year the city instituted a plan encouraging would-be adoptive parents to serve as foster parents for children who haven't yet been freed for adoption, and then adopt them as soon as legally possible. "Parents don't have to go to Korea or South America if they ! want to adopt an infant," says adoption-services director Ferrer. "Get a home study done, which takes six weeks, register with an agency as a pre- adoptive foster parent, and you will get a child a few weeks later."

Agencies are rethinking their opposition to placing black children with white parents. In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers charged that "transracial adoption" was a kind of cultural genocide that deprived black children of their racial heritage. At least 35 states imposed regulations requiring social workers to make every attempt to place children with parents of the same race. Transracial adoptions of all kinds dropped from a high of 2,540 in 1971 to less than half that number in recent years.

A consequence of this policy has been that black children, who make up about 40% of the foster-child population, tend to spend much longer waiting for adoption than whites. Recently agencies have been quietly permitting more black children to go to white adoptive homes. They have also been mobilizing to recruit more potential black parents.

In California a statewide television campaign urges blacks and Hispanics to consider adoption. In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a nonprofit agency called the Miracle Makers has placed 671 children in 473 black foster homes during the past two years by recruiting prospective parents at churches, civic centers and homes. In January the agency sent them all letters asking if they would be interested in adopting. "We received 125 affirmative answers," boasts agency director Willy Wren.

Parents who adopt special-needs children speak of the rewards as often as the difficulties. Says Sam Borodin of Philadelphia, who with his wife has adopted three girls with Down syndrome: "They have given us joy and love back tenfold." But there are times when caring for a child with special needs can be too hard a test. In Texas a group of seven couples has brought a lawsuit against the state adoption agency, charging that they should have been told that their adopted children had been abused. As the children approached adolescence, they began to behave in a bizarre and sometimes violent fashion, hacking up furniture, setting fires, assaulting family members. All eventually required psychiatric care, costing up to $20,000 a month. Though the parents' case -- in which they are asking the state for further information about their children and assistance in caring for them -- has not yet gone to trial, the ! state has already enacted a law requiring agencies to provide full records to would-be adoptive parents.

The child-rearing problems encountered by the Texas couples are not typical, but no one denies that parents who take on special-needs kids must enter the relationship with their eyes open. The minimum requirements are a level head and a spacious heart. Susan Edelstein, a clinical social worker at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is supervising a study of children exposed to drugs, has a list of the mental and spiritual resources that the parents of such children should have. It could apply to anyone who takes on a special-needs kid. "You've got to be optimistic without denying what is happening," she says. "You've got to focus on strengths, keep perspective, set reasonable goals and get help when you need it. You have to be able to tolerate the unknown. You have to be able to say, 'I will love this child forever.' "

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles