Word: youngsters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blue suit with short pants, his long-sleeved shirt and long white socks, nine-year-old Enrico Tomasso looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy. When he picks up his trumpet, the youngster from Leeds, England, sounds like Louis Armstrong. What he plays is mostly Louis: When It's Sleepy Time Down South, When the Saints Go Marching In. And at the Manhattan nightclub where he has been appearing, customers respond with rare enthusiasm to his strong, clean horn tones. Just in case anyone misses the point, Enrico rolls his eyes occasionally like Satchmo and even pulls out a white handkerchief...
Under such circumstances, psychiatrists fear, a mother may be so troubled emotionally that she cannot give her youngster the love he needs. Worse yet, practical problems may force her to give him up at the age of two or three-which is almost sure to be more harmful than putting him up for adoption at birth. Says Social Worker Charles Bates of the Boston Children's Service, the city's largest adoption agency: "If a mother wants her child, I'd go along. But the first two years are critical, and if they are damaging years-well...
...unable to learn anything about his condition. Harried doctors and nurses were too busy to concern themselves with a frightened kid. Then the boy met Mahon Washington. The avuncular black man ducked into the treatment room to learn the patient's prognosis, returned to assure the youngster that his father would live...
Though parents may try to ignore a child's blackness, the child himself cannot. Establishing a sense of identity, hard for many adopted children, is even harder for the T.R.A. youngster. One black Montreal teenager, brought up by whites, refers to Negroes as "them" and to whites as "us." Similarly, Bill Kirk, who was adopted at age three by Ontario Sociologist H. David Kirk and is now 17, reports that "I think like a white man, and when I get out into the world, that is maybe going to hang...
Besides the special problems of mixed adoptions, interracial families must face all the other dilemmas common to conventional adoption. How and when should they tell a child about his origins? How can a youngster learn to master what psychiatrists say is a common fear -that his natural parents abandoned him because there was something wrong with him? How should adoptive parents respond to a youngster's curiosity about his biological family...