NATIONAL FACTS AND FIGURES ABOUT

CHILDREN WITHOUT FAMILIES

Helen L. Witmer

The major purpose of my brief remarks is to present some nationalfigures on the subject of the discussion today, children without fam­ilies. Since we are making plans about what to do for these children,it seems a good idea to know how many of them there are and whatsorts of services they are already receiving.

A count of children without families or, more accurately, withoutparents should start with those who are most deprived, those whohave lost both parents by death. In the United States today (that is,in 1961), there are very few full orphans, only about 55,000 out of65,500,000 children under eighteen years of age. This is less than onein a thousand. In this respect a remarkable improvement over thepast forty years has taken place. In 1920, this 55,000 figure was750,000, and even in 1940 there were 290,000 children who were fullorphans, and, of course, the total number of children in the popula­tion was then considerably smaller than now.

As to children who have lost one parent by death, that number,too , has declined greatly. Nevertheless, there are nearly 3,000,000children who are now in that situation. This compares with close to6,000,000 in 1920-16 per cent of the child population in that year incontrast to 4.3 per cent in 1961.

In both of these counts I have been talking about children undereighteen years old. When we speak of children under four (the ones

H elen Witmer is Director of R esearch, Children 's Bu reau, U.S. Department of Health,Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C.

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250 Helen L. Witmer

we were discussing this morning), the number who have lost oneparent by death drops down to about 200,000, and the number of fullorphans is so small that the report marks it by an asterisk, meaning thatit is less than 500.

To return to children under eighteen, we can say that roughly3,000,000 of them have lost one or both parents. There are two orthree times as many children without fathers as without mothers.Moreover, the decline in maternal deaths has been ever so muchmore rapid than the decline in paternal deaths. In 1961 only a thirdas many children as in 1920 had lost a mother by death. But the num­ber whose father had died was two thirds that of 1920, while as com­pared with 1940 the decline was small indeed.

Large as the figure is, 3,000,000 out of 65,500,000 is not a startling­ly high proportion, less than 5 per cent. To these children who havelost a parent by death, however, must be added another 3,000,000boys and girls who were born out of wedlock. Moreover, close toanother 4,000,000, on any particular day, are living with only oneparent because of divorce, desertion, or separation. In total, then,at least 10,000,000 children have had the experience of lacking atleast one parent, 15 per cent of all the children in the country.

To call attention to this large figure is not to say that everyone ofthese children is in need of psychiatric or social service. I am sure allof us know many children who live under one or another of these con­ditions without obviously harmful effects. Nevertheless, it seemsworth while to inquire how many of these children are at present get­ting service of one or another kind. Really adequate figures on thispoint are not available, but the following figures give some idea ofwhat was being done around 1960.

First, about half of those whose fathers had died were receivingsocial security payments: this is an impressive testimony to the valueof old age and survivors insurance.

Second, about 500,000 of those whose fathers had deserted werereceiving Aid to Families of Dependent Children. And another500,000 of those born out of wedlock received this sort of financialsupport. In other words, about 1,000,000 children out of the 7,000,000who never had a legal father or whose father had deserted or whoseparents were separated or divorced were recipients of AF.D.C.

Something like a fourth of the children who were born out of wed-

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lock had been adopted by nonrel atives. An unknown number of othershad been adopted by their stepfathers. Adoption by nonrelatives islargely confined to white children. About 70 per cent of the white,illegitimate children born each year are adopted, and only about 5per cent of the Negroes. Since nearly two thirds of the illegitimatebirths are Negro children, you can see that adoption is not taking careof this problem at all well.

As to other services to children without families, we may note thatof the 4,500 children in residential treatment cen ters at any one timea certain proportion were parcntless, Of the 80,000 in institutionsfor dependent children and the 163,000 in foster homes, the propor­tion of children lacking a parent was high. In fact, nearly threefourths of the nearly 400 ,000 children receiving service from childwelfare agencies were lacking one or both parents. The proportionwas higher among Negro than among white children, being 83 percent as compared with 69. Moreover, the proportion of parentlessc hildren in creased by ten percentage points between 1945 and 1961.

Stated in this way , these figures show how frequent is the loss of aparent in the case loads of these agencies. They imply how much needthese agencies have for the sort of information we have been talkingabout today. Looked at from the angle of how many children wholack a parent are receiving aid from such agencies at an yone time,the figures tell quite a different story. Of the 10,000,000 child ren per­haps in need of service (and how many of them actually are in needis, of course, unknown), not more than about 300 ,000 are receivinghelp from child welfare agencies at anyone time and something less(per haps a lot less) than 5,000 are in re sidential treatment.

In addition to citing figures, I would like to make a few commen tsabout the kinds of doubts and worries about the care of children out­side their homes that I hear talked of in the Children's Bureau.

One of the serious concerns is with what are regarded as the poorresults secured by long-time foster family care. Maas and Engler (1959)made a study of that subject several years ago. Their report confirmswhat I suspect many social workers at the grass roots already knew andfeared . So n ow there is much talk about what can be done to improvematters.

If one thing does not work, the tendency is then to shift to the op­posite. So now we hear that long-time foster family care should per-

252 Helen L. Witmer

haps be abandoned; perhaps institutional care can be made to do thejob foster family care was designed for.

It is beginning to be said, too, that perhaps even infants can bewell cared for in institutions. Perhaps the decision to give up congre­gate care of these children was premature; perhaps it was just the waythe institutions were run and the kind of care they provided that wasnot so good. I mention these concerns to emphasize that the subjectmatter of our conference today is very timely and very important.What was said here should be told to a larger audience quickly andfirmly, for its bearing both on research and practice.

Then we in the Children's Bureau hear a great deal about adop­tions. Here I think a few of our psychiatrist friends may have donesome damage by writing articles that may lead laymen to think thata large proportion of adopted children have to have psychiatric treat­ment. All of this is the parents' fault, a writer in Good Housekeepingrecently asserted. Consider what such an idea implies to adoptiveparents, and to social workers who seek to find adoptive homes forchildren!

From a study of our own, published by Russell Sage Foundation(Witmer et al., 1963), we had very different findings. This was a fol­low-up study of 500 independent adoptions in Florida and how theywere turning out ten years later. We had a control group of the chil­dren's classmates of the same sex and with homes of the same occupa­tional level. \Ve found very little difference between the adoptedchildren and the controls in terms of social and emotional adjustment;hence we are quite skeptical of the reports about the relatively highincidence of poor mental health among adopted children.

Our study also showed what psychiatrists have long since held:that most of the children who were having a great deal of emotionaldifficulty were in adoptive homes that are the kind you would thinkchildren would have trouble in. How to keep children out of that sortof home is another subject the Children's Bureau is doing a lot ofthinking about.

One final topic we are greatly interested in is day care. We arewondering whether day care centers can become a means for a kindof cooperative child rearing: not a substitute for homes but a supple­ment to homes, especially homes in the lowest economic sector of oursociety. As things are now, many children from such homes cannot

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benefit from the kind of schooling most communities provide. If some­thing is not done quickly to help these children become betterequipped for benefiting from school, I foresee a third of the popula­tion not only ill-fed and ill-clothed but also, in these automated times,unemployed. Since many of these children are without parents, aswell as being otherwise handicapped, their plight is not as far re­moved from the subject matter of this conference as might seem.

In summary, then, children without parents are still numerous inour society; probably many more of them need social and psychiatricservice than are now receiving it; those who render the needed servicewould doubtless find the ideas discussed in today's meeting of greatvalue in their work.

REFERENCES

MAAS, H. & ENGLER, R. (1959), Children in Need of Parents. New York: Columbia Univer­sity Press.

WITMER, H., HERZOG, E., SULLIVAN, M., & WEINSTEIN, E. (1963), Independent Adoptions.New York: Russell Sage Foundation.