Fashion Shows--a Family Affair : Children: Hard-to-place youngsters put on a show to try to win hearts of prospective parents.

Milton and Emmie Douglas had seen photographs of children who needed parents. They wanted a closer look, and got it at a special shopping mall fashion show.

A 9-year-old boy who had been left on a doorstep as an infant won their hearts by walking offstage and asking: “Y’all gonna be my mother and father?”

“He just picked us out of the crowd,” Milton Douglas said. “We don’t know what drew him to us. But we’re glad it happened that way.”

“What made me think they were my parents was the way they looked at me,” said Larry, now 11 and the Douglases’ adopted son. Using spring fashion shows as a way to find families for hard-to-place children may be unique to Louisiana.

J.C. Penney puts on the shows, and for the last eight years has invited the state Department of Social Services to bring children who have been ruled free for adoption but don’t have a family waiting for them.

Penney’s supplies clothes for the children to model, and a social worker tells shoppers about the need for foster and adoptive parents and says a sentence or two about each child.

“I’m not familiar with anybody else that does fashion shows. That doesn’t mean it’s not being done,” said Mary Beth Seader, vice president of the National Committee for Adoption.

Some viewers, like Gloria Mitchell, were offended.

“We’re going back in time. This is like slavery,” said Mitchell, who went to a show March 17 to see if an advertisement she’d read was real. “We’re auctioning off these kids.”

But state social workers say it finds families. And officials with other adoption agencies say that as long as the children understand that there is no guarantee they will find parents and are treated with sensitivity, it sounds like a reasonable technique.

“I would love to not have to do this. I would love it if we had more families than children. But that’s not the reality,” said Kerry Ermon, one of two family recruitment workers for the Social Services agency. “Let me tell you, it is a very effective recruitment campaign.”

In the month after this year’s shows, about 80 people called to ask about fostering or adoption as a direct result of seeing the shows or news reports about them, according to Ermon.

Larry was one of hundreds of thousands of children around the country who were in state custody because they were orphaned, abandoned, abused or neglected, because their parents couldn’t control them, or for some other reason.

Most eventually are returned to their parents or raised by relatives, but more than 15% eventually are released for adoption, according to the National Committee for Adoption, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

In 1985, the last year for which figures are available, an estimated 276,000 children nationwide were in what bureaucrats call substitute care, according to the organization.

Of about 5,000 children in Louisiana’s custody, 800 are eligible for adoption. Half will be adopted by their foster parents, but caseworkers are still trying to find homes for 416, said Bobby Ann Clark of the Department of Social Services.

When Larry sauntered across the stage at a suburban mall, he had been in foster care for two years.

Emmie Douglas said he had been left as an infant on the doorstep of a couple who cared for him for seven years. But after the woman died, state welfare workers decided that the man was too old to take care of the boy, she said.

Larry knew the fashion show didn’t guarantee him parents. He was optimistic when he walked onto the stage, but became nervous when couples walked up afterward.

“I thought they were going to pick either Nina or Jerry, but they came and picked me,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow! I’ll finally be adopted!’ I was happy.”

Representatives of state and local adoption groups said their main concerns about the fashion shows were that all applicants for foster care or adoption be carefully screened, and that children be prepared for the show and treated during it with understanding and sensitivity.

“You don’t want to expose the child to a situation where there may be embarrassment and a big letdown. If the child is prepared in a sensitive manner, I guess it could work very well,” Seader said.