Full of Woe
The Wednesday’s Child up for adoption on TV may be the answer to your prayers. Then again, the darling you take home may be a ticking time bomb, a former ward of the state so abused and so volatile that your family will never know what hit it.
On a Wednesday in late May the sweet cherub-cheeked face of Barbara appears on the Channel 8 evening news in Dallas. Here is twelve-year-old Barbara out for a pleasant afternoon at the Forth Worth Zoo, petting the baby deer and rabbits. She is dressed in pink shorts, a pink-and-white shirt, and white straw sandals, looking wholesome enough to star in a Blue Bell ice cream commercial.
Barbara is on television because she is a Wednesday’s Child, one of about eight hundred children in Texas who on any given day are waiting for someone to adopt them. Most Wednesday’s Children are wards of the state; a few are in the custody of private agencies. They were either abandoned by their biological parents or so abused that the Texas Department of Human Services took custody of them to save their lives. Their faces are familiar to us; each week an estimated 80 percent of the population of Texas sees Wednesday’s Children on the local news. They appear on our TV screens and from there, presumably, are taken into the arms of safe, loving families. It is the perfect made-for-television story; everyone seems to live happily ever after.
WFAA anchorman John Criswell tells viewers that up until now Barbara’s life has been one of terror. “Barbara was severely victimized, and it will always affect her life,” says Criswell as he strolls with her through the zoo. “Caseworkers describe Barbara as twelve going on thirty-five.”
Before she became a Wednesday’s Child, Barbara had another identity. She was a prostitute known on the streets of Dallas as Raspberry. Her first experience with sex occurred when her mother—a schizophrenic who was married to an alcoholic—allowed her boyfriends to sleep with Barbara. Barbara later turned to prostitution. Last summer she ran away from her pimp and turned herself in to the Dallas police. The night she fled to the police, Barbara was wearing a black miniskirt and hooker-style makeup, and her brownish-blond hair was spiked. She told the police and her social workers that her pimp’s name was Star Child. Lately she has been living in a state-licensed group home and is taking prescribed medicine for depression and anxiety.
The two-minute television segment about Barbara does not reveal the dark details of her life. Criswell ends by telling viewers Barbara is a good student and wants to be a veterinarian. “Barbara is a survivor,” he says. “Now she needs parents to help her thrive.” On the screen flashes a telephone number for viewers who want to make Barbara their daughter.
“Monday’s child is fair of face,” goes the old Mother Goose nursery rhyme. “Tuesday’s child is full of grace/Wednesday’s child is full of woe.” The rhyme is perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about these children. Barbara is a typical Wednesday’s Child. By the time the social service system found Barbara and decided to market her on TV, she had suffered years of brutalization. It’s difficult to reconcile the television image of Barbara enjoying a trip to the zoo with the reality of her past and the riskiness of her future. The heartbreaking truth is that whoever adopts Barbara is adopting Raspberry as well.
Marketing Kids
There are no orphanages in Texas anymore. The Department of Human Services declared them nonexistent in the mid-seventies. In the late sixties changing social attitudes made the idea of rearing children in orphanages repugnant to child-welfare experts. Soon support for deinstitutionalization spread to the public. At the same time, the DHS gave abandoned and unwanted children a new name. In 1975 they became “special-needs children,” a phrase that fit neatly with the belief that they would be better off in families than in orphanages.
Today there is a shockingly high number of victimized children, innocents whose parents have subjected them to horrendous physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. In 1986 Texas had more than 61,000 confirmed victims of child abuse, double the number of reported cases in 1976. Of 8,911 confirmed cases of sexual abuse, slightly more than half of the victims were under ten years old.
Often parents who are abusing their children don’t want to give them up, and their reluctance is matched by DHS’s. The primary goal of the courts and social service agencies is to keep children with their biological parents. Sometimes, though, meeting that goal puts a child’s life at risk. By the time the state moves in to take children from their parents permanently, the odds are overwhelming that such children have been irreparably damaged. As infants, they learned that their fundamental survival needs would not be met. When they were hungry, no one fed them; when they cried out for comfort, they were beaten or sexually molested. The consensus among psychologists who specialize in abused children is that if they receive treatment before the age of seven, they have a decent chance of becoming attached to a new set of parents. After the age of eleven, the chances of ever truly bonding are poor. The average age of a Wednesday’s Child at the time of adoption is eight. Yet many, like Barbara, are adolescents.
The first step for children who have been removed from their parents is to be placed in a foster home. Eventually, however, children who become wards of the state are cleared for adoption. Although only a few appear on the local news, all of these children are known as Wednesday’s Children.
The practice of marketing the children evolved from the pet-of-the-week stories in newspapers. The idea was that if sad stories helped dogs and cats find homes, the same system could work with children. So in the mid-seventies the DHS began recruiting adoptive parents through the newspapers. The department gave reporters general information about its hardest-to-place children, and the feature stories appeared under the “Wednesday’s Child” label.
In 1980 John Criswell became the first broadcast journalist in Texas to put these children on the air. Now most Texas markets have at least one television station that carries “Wednesday’s Child” spots. The spots are a strange mixture of journalism and social work. The reporters are not investigating whether the system is functioning; the point is to sell the child to prospective parents. If the TV stations sold soap the way they sell Wednesday’s Children, the Federal Trade Commission would order them to pull the spots for misrepresentation.
The whitewash originates with the DHS. Television reporters are given fact sheets about the children, which don’t contain the horrifying details of their lives. Neither the DHS nor the TV reporters explain what effect such abuse has on the children’s ability to function in a family setting. After all, the DHS has a vested interest in placing the children, not in frightening off potential parents. It’s easy to sympathize with caseworkers, whose desks are stacked with the files of children who have been starved, beaten, or raped. The caseworkers’ impulse is a natural one: to unload children as quickly as possible in new homes.
The dreadful odyssey of these children does not always end with adoption. Some new families find themselves utterly unprepared to care for such damaged children. When they turn back to the DHS for help, they are told that the children are their problem now. Finally, a group of adoptive parents is crying out for help in the only way they know how—by filing a class-action lawsuit.
The same week that Barbara’s episode aired in Dallas, seven adoptive couples sued the DHS on behalf of all Wednesday’s Children for what amounts to deceptive trade practices. The parents say the DHS glossed over or withheld information about their children, much the same way TV stations do each week in their efforts to market children.
“In effect, DHS placed children in the homes of these parents without telling them who the children were, and then when these human time bombs exploded, DHS had no help to offer,” says Neil Cogan, the associate dean of the law school at Southern Methodist University, who filed the class-action lawsuit in Dallas and Austin.
DHS officials deny the general charges in the lawsuit but refuse the comment on specific cases. “Our policy is to tell the parents everything we know, but often we just don’t know everything,” says Susan Klickman, an adoption-program specialist who works at the department’s headquarters in Austin.
Currently the DHS provides a written summary of the child’s record to the parents. But the parents who filed the lawsuit want more than a sanitized version of the records; they want access to all of the information the department has compiled, except the names and whereabouts of the biological parents. They also want better training programs for prospective parents and more state-supported counseling services for their children. Without such help, the parents say, there is only more woe for everyone concerned.
Prognosis: Poor
Diane and M.L. Richards, one of the seven plaintiff couples in the lawsuit, became interested in adoption through reading feature stories about Wednesday’s Children in the Austin American-Statesman and later seeing them on television. They became foster parents through the DHS and, as time passed, decided to adopt a child, since Diane had been told as a young woman that she was infertile. On Valentine’s Day, 1982, the DHS placed a handsome Mexican American boy named Mark in their home. Mark was almost seven years old when the Richardses first laid eyes on him. In a photograph taken on their first day together, Mark has a toothless grin on his face and is peering at the camera with eager brown eyes. The photo seems to promise a new and happy life.
Mark’s social worker told the Richardses that Mark suffered from learning disabilities because of environmental deprivation. In the summary of his records that the Richardses were given, the caseworker noted that Mark had been abused by his biological parents. Mark had a problem with bed-wetting and a history of expressing “negative feelings toward his caretakers.” In the very next sentence, the Richardses read the following reassuring words: “It is believed, however, that with the proper limit-setting, consistent love, and nurturing, this behavior can be corrected.”
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