Arms Open Up After Numbers Get Faces

The news reports began in mid-November. A newborn boy, placed in a brown paper bag, was found near a dumpster behind an Anaheim liquor store. Two weeks later, another newborn was abandoned in a rough neighborhood in Santa Ana. Then two weeks before Christmas, a third newborn was left in a cardboard box in a San Clemente street gutter.

Never before in a single year had Orange County seen so many abandoned babies--four, counting one left on the grounds of a Mission Viejo hospital next to a bag of diapers and a $20 bill.

The forsaken babies, it turned out, were part of another disturbing trend. The county’s home for abandoned, abused and neglected infants, the Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, was caring for so many that officials were forced to expand its nursery.

An article in The Times Orange County Edition highlighted the problem and discussed the critical need for foster parents who could take in children who had been removed by the courts from the custody of their natural parents. The report mentioned children like Amber, a blond, blue-eyed, 17-month-old victim of child abuse. And Simone, just 7 months old and addicted to drugs.

And with the story ran individual photographs of every baby in the nursery.

“It brought a face to the problem,” said Orangewood Director Bob Theemling. “It’s easy for all of us to distance ourselves from any social problems when you cannot attach a person to it. But when you see real people, real problems, real circumstances and real faces, the problem is no longer academic. Suddenly, the pictures stare at you right there in your house.”

County officials are convinced that the year-end publicity has since accounted for a dramatic increase in the number of volunteers applying to become foster parents.

Skip Block, manager of the county’s foster care program, said social workers were taken by surprise in January when the first new volunteers showed up at an orientation session in Orange. A record 73 families attended, compared to about 40 in 1989.

“They were having to stand up, and they were spilling out the doors,” Block said.

Block and other county officials are quick to point out that the encouraging reaction does not solve the perennial shortage of foster families needed by the agency.

Theemling said that at any given time, up to half of the 166 children housed at Orangewood need foster care.

The county now draws from a pool of about 600 foster homes. But some families are choosy about the kind of children they accept, officials said.

“There are some who only want the well-behaved, pretty little girl with blond hair and blue eyes,” explained Barbara J. Labitzke, the county’s foster home development coordinator. “That is why the new volunteers are only a drop in the bucket. We need about 80 more volunteers to come forward each month so we can find homes for these children.”

But there are also foster parents like Dick Smith, a Yorba Linda accountant. Smith takes in those children who are least in demand--babies born addicted to drugs because their mothers were users. The infants suffer seizures and crying frenzies that can emotionally drain many parents.

“It is more demanding,” said Smith, who, along with his wife, has cared for 24 children since volunteering six years ago. “But on the positive side, you can see these babies smiling, growing, laughing, cooing at you. . . . And when they leave, you would have seen them develop. . . . You know that you made a difference. That is the benefit, the joy.”

Carolyn Griffith and her husband have cared for 30 foster children in their Irvine home. They are longtime foster parents who, in 1987, were presented the Great American Family Award from then-First Lady Nancy Reagan.

“We saw an incredible need in Orange County for people to reach out . . .,” Griffith, who now advises new foster parents, said.

She said she attended the orientation sessions where many had “come forward after reading the article with all the little babies’ pictures” and was thrilled to see the higher turnout of volunteers.

“We are looking for people who love children,” Labitzke said. “But they must also love a challenge. And the benefit is the joy of making a difference.”