Word: children
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Adoption agencies choose parents with great care, usually prefer couples around 30 years of age who are in good health, have secure incomes and sunny dispositions and homes. Although there is no rule against giving children to well-settled single persons, the demand for children far exceeds the supply and childless couples have first choice. Greatest difficulty agencies have is discouraging people over 50, who insist on adopting infants. Average age of foster parents, however, is around 40, since most persons wait for adoption until they are convinced that they can have no children of their own. Great- est favorites...
...children are given thorough physical and mental tests before they are sent to homes for trial periods before legal adoption. Few children are ever returned to agencies. Religious ties are respected, and often children of mixed blood are supplied upon request. Four-year-old Al Jolson Jr. is half-Irish, half-Jewish, to match his foster mother and father...
Fewer are adoptions of "illegitimate"*children today, for social workers try to persuade unmarried mothers not to give up their babies...
...psychologist's amazement, the intelligence quotients of twelve of the orphans rose sharply, in some cases as much as 40 points, and they appeared superior in intelligence to their playmates in the asylum. Later, seven of them were adopted. During the same period, twelve of the normal children who remained in the crowded asylum, and received no affection, slowly drifted into feeblemindedness...
Psychologist Skeel's conclusion: more than anything else, for mental growth children need "adult affection and stimulation," no matter from whom it comes...