Word: homely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though one major study shows that most older adoptees -- even those ten and above -- flourish within their new families, for special-needs children suffering the effects of mistreatment or prenatal drug use, the future may depend crucially upon how quickly they can be brought into a stable, attentive home...
...home made all the difference for Michael Mazzafro, now 17. The son of an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, he spent six years shuttling back and forth between foster care and his mother's home. At last he was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple, but his behavior soon proved too much for them. While they made arrangements to terminate the adoption, he was stashed in a hospital for more than a year. That's where he was when Joe Mazzafro, a Philadelphia bachelor now 39, took...
...Jimmy Hibbard is lucky. Though his mother freely consumed prescription and street drugs during pregnancy, her drug abuse probably did not extend to crack. Even so, when Rick and Mary Hibbard brought him into their home in Long Beach, Calif., he was a nine-month-old veteran of pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma, so white from anemia he was "almost iridescent," recalls Rick. Now eight, Jimmy still has trouble with some motor skills. But he has demonstrated above-average reading ability...
...care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan for his or her future within 18 months should...
...serve as foster parents for children who haven't yet been freed for adoption, and then adopt them as soon as legally possible. "Parents don't have to go to Korea or South America if they ! want to adopt an infant," says adoption-services director Ferrer. "Get a home study done, which takes six weeks, register with an agency as a pre- adoptive foster parent, and you will get a child a few weeks later...