Neglected solutions

National Review, Sept 28, 1998 by Richard B. McKenzie

Family preservation policies have proved to be a disaster. It's time to reconsider orphanages.

When Newt Gingrich set off a short-lived controversy in late 1994 with his off-the-cuff remarks about orphanages, Hillary Rodham Clinton denounced proposals to bring them back as ''unbelievable and absurd.'' That seemed to be the prevailing reaction. But the tens of thousands of Americans who grew up in orphanages, like me, know better.

We realize, of course, that our orphanages were imperfect. They often lacked some amenities, not least the daily hugs taken for granted by children who grow up in loving families. Orphanages didn't always have the sorts of caring and responsible surrogate parents who would play with the children in the evenings or who ''dressed up in sheets and told ghost stories,'' as Mrs. Clinton recalls about the parents in her neighborhood.

But we also know that the orphanages provided a better environment than the deplorable family circumstances from which so many of the children had come, and to which so many children today are condemned for the duration of their childhoods. Children in orphanages did not always get affection -- though they get more of it than outsiders think -- but at least they got supervision. In fact, orphanages resemble nothing so much as the ''villages'' that Mrs. Clinton has said are ''visible extensions'' of families and indispensable to the raising of children.

Many orphanages, such as one where I lived, were like villages, first of all, in their partial isolation. We called our orphanage ''The Home'' with capital letters to indicate that it was, in some ways, self-contained, set apart from the world. The Home was located in rural North Carolina, five miles from the nearest town. Seen from the highway that runs through it, it could easily have been mistaken for a small college. More than 250 boys and girls, ages two to eighteen, resided at Barium Springs Home for Children when I went there at the age of ten in the early 1950s.

Like so many orphanages portrayed in films, ours had several large, turn-of-the-century cottages, each housing twenty to thirty young children, many of whom went to bed on unheated sleeping porches. Unlike the orphanages in Annie, Oliver Twist, or Boys Town, however, we also had cottages of boarding-school quality for older children, with two kids to a room and sixteen to a cottage. These cottages each had a living room and a television room (as well as a small apartment for the housemother). Meals were served in the main dining hall, which was the center of the village both geographically and socially.

The Home's 1,500 acres included a vast tract of unspoiled woods where we spent much of our free time exploring, building forts, damming streams, and taming pets. But there were also many acres of pasture for the sixty milking cows, two hundred beef cattle, hundred sheep, hundred hogs, and five hundred laying hens we tended. There were hundreds of acres of hay fields, vegetable gardens, and orchards. Along with hired hands, the children of The Home worked extensively -- for up to fifty unpaid hours a week during the summers and twenty during the school year.

At The Home, we were constantly made aware that work was important, not only to put food on the table and to keep the cost of our care in line, but also because work is good for the soul. The work we have done since our days at The Home has, for most of us, seemed easy by comparison.

Like so many villages of the 1950s and before, we had our own slaughtering plant, print shop, cannery, carpenter and plumbing shops, and chicken coops. For most of the 1950s, we had our own on-campus elementary and high schools (which were better than the schools in the surrounding county). Our varsity teams played against city schools that had twenty times the number of students, but we won more often than not. We had our own swimming pool, tennis courts, football field, and horseshoe pits. We even had our own village church and gymnasium, the latter being used for basketball games, roller-skating, and dances.

Our campus was a place set apart, and some of us had problems adjusting to the ''real world'' on our departure. But our difficulties probably were much like those faced by other kids from isolated farms and communities when they moved to large cities.

The critics of orphanages have always exaggerated our isolation. Many of us, especially the boys, went to the nearby towns on weekends. Children from the surrounding communities came to our school, and to sporting events and dances. We became more integrated into the surrounding communities when we started going to public schools in the late 1950s. We dated girls and boys from other communities. They visited us on the campus, and we went to their homes.

Clearly, The Home could not provide the individualized nurturing that loving and responsible families can provide -- after all, there were 12 kids per staff person. There also were some workers at The Home during my time there who didn't live up to their duties, and one or two who were downright mean. Still, many of the kids at The Home found worthy mentors among staff members who considered their work more a mission than a profession (most were highly religious, and few had formal training in child care). Mr. J. B. Johnson, like Father Flanigan in Boys Town, knew the name of every child during his tenure as head of The Home and was renowned for taking groups of children for nature walks on Sunday afternoons. And there is not a child who went through The Home from the 1930s through the 1970s who doesn't fondly remember Miss Rebecca Carpenter, the case worker, who always had a bright smile and a word of encouragement. She never married, but she mothered hundreds.