Searching for a Forever Home

By Richard Stengel

Television programs help "Thursday's children" get adopted

"Eat it! Eat it!" said Barry, 9, holding out a potato chip to a furry blue creature named Grover. The creature gulped the chip, then gave the delighted boy a hug. Barry was meeting the stars of Sesame Street before their live show at Nassau Coliseum. Born retarded, he had lived in a residential treatment center since he was six, following the death of both parents. Until he shone on Thursday's Child, a weekly news feature conducted by Anchorwoman Michele Marsh on New York's WCBS-TV, he seemed destined to stay there. But five months after his appearance, he had been taken in by an adoptive family.

Like Barry, they are nearly all Thursday's children: neither fair of face nor full of grace, they always have far to go. They are "hard-to-place" children, candidates for adoption who have mental or physical handicaps, are siblings who do not wish to be separated, belong to minority groups or are simply older than six and no longer cuddly. But Thursday's children are on television virtually every day of the week. With the cooperation of adoption agencies, an estimated 50 stations throughout the U.S. carry regular features on them, usually as part of local newscasts. The TV appeals have proved to be one of the most effective means yet of finding such children what they want and need: as one TV producer puts it, "a forever home."

The formats are similar from one city to the next. During a two- to four-minute vignette, the child usually appears with one of the news show's anchors in some comfortable setting, often of the child's choice: a zoo, fishpond or skating rink; milking cows or taking a helicopter ride. "The key is to focus on the child and not be the center of attention yourself," explains Jack Bowen of Wednesday's Child on KOCO in Oklahoma City. "I make the child's handicaps very clear but highlight the positive features." In Washington, a ten-year-old boy was riding his bicycle for the cameras of WRC's The Forgotten Children when he fell, cutting his lip and chipping a tooth. The boy's social worker started to run to him, but Reporter-Producer Kelly Burke waved her off and conducted an interview beside the fallen bike. "He never cried and he stayed calm," says Burke. "It showed the strength of this child and his willingness to challenge life."

Stations receive anywhere from a handful to more than 200 calls about each child. Many of the callers prove to be unqualified or fail to follow through. Even when the interest is serious, the adoption process can be exacting and lengthy (generally six to twelve months). Nevertheless, an impressive number of the children find an adoptive home. Oklahoma City's KOCO, for example, has helped to place 92 of the 119 it has profiled. New York's WCBS, 21 out of 35; and Atlanta's WXIA, with Wednesday's Child conducted by Ellen Bryan, 79 out of 177 since precise record keeping began. Geraldine Jackson, head of Georgia's adoption exchange program, describes this as "an enviable record." Says she: "These are children who have been unsuccessfully exposed to other efforts of recruitment. TV is their last hope."

At least one institution has bypassed such programs and made its own appeal directly on TV. The Little Flower Children's Services, a Long Island center for abused and abandoned children, produced 30 commercials about eight hard-to-place minority children, all of whom have found adoptive homes.

Some television executives criticize CBS the Thursday's children features as fluff and are uneasy about their inclusion in newscasts, contending that they are a form of advocacy. Says the news director of one of WXIA's rival stations in Atlanta: "They are a special service for a special group, and I could list 200 others that don't get that kind of play. But they can make a station seem to have a big heart."

Adoption officials, too, remain wary about exploitation of the children in the necessarily selective and heightened vignettes. It took a year for San Francisco's KRON to win the blessing of the California department of social services for its The Waiting Child feature. "There were a lot of questions about sensitivity and commitment," says News Director Pat Stevens. Since the feature began appearing seven months ago, however, the concern and involvement of News Anchor Rita Channon have been amply evident; on several segments she has dabbed at her eyes while talking to a child. Says Joe Pecora, a suburban San Francisco social worker who placed a nine-year-old boy four months after he appeared on The Waiting Child: "Without that series, we could not have found a home for him. He'd be back in foster care." --By Richard Stengel. Reported by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York and Roger Witherspoon/Atlanta

With reporting by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York, Roger Witherspoon/Atlanta This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.