Word: fostering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...