My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  For me a house without children cannot be a home. I do not know why the people who love children are so often prevented by accident from having them, but, God be thanked, there are many who have children and leave them, for one reason or another, and then others can take them for love’s sake. My friend, Margaret Sanger, has served humanity well in beginning the great work of birth control, but for honesty I have always made it clear that my devotion is to her as a woman and not to her cause, and this is not that I do not believe her right, for of course she is when it comes to populations. In my case, however, it would be hypocritical to speak for the cause of birth control when other women, without such restraint, have given me wonderful children.

  When the house, then, was finished in its first stage, the rose garden planted, a small swimming pool dug under the shade of the big black walnut tree, we approached our one adopted child, then eleven years old, and asked her what she thought of our adopting two little boys as soon as possible, and then a year or so later, a girl and a boy. She reflected for some weeks and then months, and we gave her plenty of time, and when she felt adjusted to her new home, she decided that it would be “nice” to have babies. The three of us then proceeded to an excellent adoptive agency and made ourselves known and began the process necessary to prove ourselves good parents and a “nice” family. It did not take too long in those days, the process was courteous and civilized, and in due course the big third-floor bedroom became a nursery, but without a nurse, for we wanted to take care of the two lively babies ourselves. A year and a half later they were joined by a small but equally lively boy and girl, each a few weeks old.

  That was eighteen years ago. The four of them are now in late adolescence and are all but over the last even of that. In the rich years between the day they came home and today I have kept myself abreast of developing adoptive practices as well as a layman can, and have taken an active part as a member on the boards of three adoptive agencies. My interest in this subject is far more than personal. I doubt I am a good mother in the old-fashioned “mom” sense. I love children from the moment they are born until they die of old age on their way to a hundred. The newborn child is to me first a human being and only second a baby. I am not a peasant mother—that is, not an instinctive one. I do not wish to mother the world. I am not infinitely maternal. But I have enjoyed being a mother to my children.

  Aside from this, my deep belief is that all human creatures deserve a happy childhood as a right and as a prerequisite to normal adulthood, and that the first essential to happiness is love. I have observed that if a child does not have a wholehearted love from and for someone before he is five years old he is emotionally stunted perhaps for the rest of his life. That is, he is unable to love anyone wholeheartedly and is to that extent deprived of a full life. This loving and beloved person is hopefully father or mother or both, but lacking these, a kindhearted maid or nurse or grandmother will do, but it should be someone who has the physical care of him, so that through the daily washing and dressing and feeding and play he feels the pervading and continuing presence of love. It has to be real love. The professional coddling that a trained nurse or attendant gives a baby in a foundling home or hospital does not fool even the baby. It takes more than a clock-watching employee to make a child feel secure. It is amazing how discerning a baby can be. A child in the care of a good but unloving foster mother soon sinks into impassivity and begins to fade. Love is the sunshine of his growing soul, and when there is no sun, the soul stops and body and mind begin to lag. That is why children in orphanages and boarding homes look dull and are either too silent or too noisy. Babies used to be kept in hordes in orphanages until it was discovered how quickly they died of nothing at all, apparently. Of course they died for lack of true love.

  I hardly know where to begin with the many things I want to say about American children. In the first place, I feel that they are the least happy children in the world, outside the war-torn countries, and the unhappiness concentrates in the homeless children, those born outside wedlock and those orphaned and deserted. Next to the segregations and degradation of the Negro in our society I was shocked to discover the way in which our homeless children are cared for, the heartlessness of our methods, the callousness of those to whom the children may be entrusted. I want to say even before this how cruel it is that there are so many homeless children. In the China in which I grew up there were no children born out of wedlock. Perhaps there were a very few but I never saw them or heard of them. If a man wanted a woman and a child was to be born she came into his house as a secondary wife and the child had a family and a surname, and his position was legitimate. At least the child was not punished for the passions of his parents. Children were valued above all else and love was poured out on them however they were born. They were humored and played with and they went everywhere with the family. If parents died, the larger family treasured the child and took the place of the parents, and thus no child was orphaned.

  True, there were horrible abuses. Children were sometimes sold into slavery, though, as I have said elsewhere, usually to save their lives in famine time. True, there were individuals who were wicked enough to pander to the white slave trade; true, girl babies were killed at birth sometimes because the head of the family did not want them, or could not care for the extra mouth.

  Yet the Chinese are always as shocked as I was, when they find that living newborn children in our country can be abandoned to strangers. Oh, the countless little American children who are left with agencies and in institutions, sometimes for adoption, sometimes just left and visited once or twice a year, or never visited and yet never relinquished! Where are the grandparents, if the parents have disappeared, and where are the aunts and the uncles and the cousins? The child belongs to them, too, and in China they would have kept the child with them. Here, alas, we have no longer the large family feeling that shares responsibility for all its members. It is the child in our society who bears the brunt of the fragmentation of our family life. I was talking the other day with Madame Pandit of India, and I begged her to see to it, as far as she could, that the family system of Asia is not lost as her country modernizes itself. She replied that her people are beginning to recognize the value of their ancient system. And how much it saves the people in taxes! There need be no orphanages, no old people’s homes, no institutions for the blind, the insane and the mentally retarded. Yes, my Chinese friends felt it cruel also to put such helpless persons in the care of strangers, and I agree with them. I have visited many institutions and I have seen good employees and bad, but most of them are neither good nor bad. They are unloving, and that is the most cruel of all.

  We need therefore to reconsider the whole basis of family life. Since it is obvious that we cannot change our system to one like the Asian, where the generations live together, not usually under one roof, but in small separate houses connected by courtyards, and where each generation is responsible in turn for all the others, we ought nevertheless to make it impossible for the child to be deserted for any reason whatsoever. Certainly the child should not be forced to bear the entire burden of the illegitimate action of the parents. An American man has no responsibility for his child born out of wedlock, unless forced to pay something for its maintenance if paternity is proved. He has none of the blame, he has none of the emotional burden. The mother bears all that. She can retire to a secret place for a while, unknown to her friends, give birth and leave the newborn child to an adoptive agency, and return again to her former position. But the child is the one whose whole life is changed by the fact of his birth. The child is the one who has to find a new place, new parents, a new home among strangers. Sometimes he is carelessly placed by a doctor or a friend or by some relative. The chances are as much against him as for him. Sometimes he grows up in an orphanage where the vested interests of employees, churches and welfare organizations keep him a prisoner without chance of adoption. A well-run orphanage where the children grow up clean and obedient is a wonderful
show place. I cannot bear to go into an orphanage. What I see is not the clean faces, the good clothing, no uniforms any more—we have advanced so far—I see only the children’s eyes, their wistful looks, the strange still patience, or the belligerence that hides a breaking childish heart.

  What about the adoption agencies? Their function is to get children adopted. Alas, they are too often so involved in their professional standards, their lists of questions, their self-interest, that sometimes I fear more children are prevented from finding homes than are ever placed by them. I find a long delay in the boarding homes, far too long. Children ought to go as quickly as possible from birth mother to adoptive parents. Let us say that sometimes this speed would mean a mistake. Even so, I believe, the damage would not amount in total to that which the long delay now causes. There is a fearful lag in the average adoption agency. Workers put in their eight hours a day faithfully enough, I daresay, but far too much of it is spent at paper work and filing and red tape, and this is made necessary to some extent, I know, by the differing and even exclusive laws of the individual states. A child is often limited to one state or one area in chances for adoption, each agency serving only an area without possibility of interchange between areas, and again the child bears the brunt of his sad condition. He continues to wait upon laws and professionalism and bureaucracy. And the prospective adoptive parents wait, eating their hearts out, anxious lest the delay is because they do not measure up to some perfectionist demand of the social worker, that the “matching” in religion or race is not perfect, that the house is not quite big enough, that one bathroom is insufficient, that the father is not a college graduate, or that he is a college graduate, that their marriage is not perfect in its adjustment and security, that they themselves are not perfect but only ordinary human beings.

  And the boarding home where the baby waits? There he is probably one of several, all waiting for adoption or else a mixture of the family’s own children and the boarding children. Let us bear in mind the significant fact that boarding mothers make money by caring for homeless children. It is true that nearly always they are kind good women, but they are also nearly always ignorant women, not at all suitable for adoptive mothers, and the social worker would not consider them so. Yet the social worker leaves the child there for an indefinite period, seeming to think that because the boarding home is an approved and licensed one, the child is doing well. Meanwhile, during the first months of a child’s life, the all-important months, he is without a real mother. For no boarding mother can take the place of the adoptive mother any more than she takes the place of the natural mother. Moreover, I have often found that while an agency may be an excellent one, its supervisor enlightened and well meaning, the social workers all graduates of the best schools, the pediatrician skilled, yet none of this guarantees the child anything. The child has to live in the boarding home alone without any of these officials present. The boarding mother receives from the doctor, for example, a diet list and instructions. More likely than not, being ignorant, and often the mother of many children dead and living, she puts the list in a drawer, saying that she reckons she knows how to take care of a kid, after all she has raised—or lost—so many. And the child is fed noodles and macaroni instead of meat and vegetables and fresh fruits. It is only human nature to save money if possible. And starch fattens a baby and makes a nice show, does it not? And the marvel to me is that many professional social workers know so little about children. They seem not able to see the difference between firm healthy muscular flesh and flabby fat. But too many social workers have never married and have no children of their own to teach them. To my thinking one who works with babies or little children should not be without experience in the daily care of a baby. Even being married is not always enough. There has to be the loving heart.

  Yet it seems that the loving heart is the one possession which the social worker is taught to avoid as the disqualifying possession for a professional. Social workers must be “detached.” And this is the basic stupidity, for how can one have the right to care for children and place their destinies if one is “detached?” I understand very well what is meant by the term. Emotional clinging to a child is, we are told, the great sin. The social worker must act like God, who pours down rain upon the just and the unjust with equal indifference. A child must therefore simply be a case, “a referral,” if you please, and it is very important to have just the right terminology, if you are a social worker, so that other social workers will know that you belong to the gang. The profession is becoming a hiding place for small people, too timid to break petty rules and come out for the great principles of child life. And the greatest of these and the first commandment is love. Everybody who comes near a child or who influences the life of a child in any way, must be capable of love, a love so generous that every child is dear, and every child is a valuable treasure. I have known social workers by the score, and once in a while I do meet one who is right, a warmhearted, generous, loving woman—always a woman, so far—and always one who has known great personal love, given and returned. When I find this one, I sit down and we talk, and she tells me what she thinks and I tell her what I think, and what we think is the same. It is my considered opinion that the whole profession of social workers needs cleaning out, and a new start made. And as I write these words my conscience smites me, for I know a social worker who is sent from heaven in mercy to lost children, and I have the joy of working with her in Welcome House. She is no longer young, and though she has been to schools of social work and knows the rules and laws and jargon, she has forgotten all except the understanding of a little child and what sort of parents he needs, and she has a heart of love and a mind of wisdom, and with these sacred lamps, she searches and finds the parents for the child, and the child for the parents. She is the blessed exception to every rule, and because of her I know there must be many like her, working quietly and doggedly and devotedly in far more places than I know.

  I do not say that social workers as a profession are insincere or wilfully cruel or even selfish—not that at all. On the contrary, they are for the most part too conscientious, too careful, too critical—and too self-conscious. They are perfectionists in a far from perfect situation. They complain because doctors and friends and relatives place children for adoption, they give instances, true, I am sure, of misplacements, but they ignore the damage their own failure to solve the problem does to the waiting child, or the “unadoptable” child. I believe there is no unadoptable child. There are always parents to be found for every child. People need education to help them to accept the so-called “unadoptable” child, but there are always people to be educated, although not all people can be educated, but as it is now, again the child is the one punished for parental unreadiness. Sometimes I have even found in professional social workers a strange hostility toward the adoptive parents. I doubt they know it, but some of them do have it, and the adoptive parents feel it, even when they are approved. It may be the unconscious jealousy of a lonely woman who can never have a child. I have also seen the same strange jealousy in men social workers who are homosexual. Certainly they would deny it, the more hotly if they have it, and will not recognize it.

  The social worker has, indeed, a power over human lives which demands a largeness seldom found. She—or he—sits in judgment upon two people, weighing them, examining them, peering into their private lives, and it is this social worker who decides whether or not they shall have a baby. Even God has not such power. Any man and woman who come together, whether they are fit parents or not, may bring a child to life. The child comes according to the law of nature, and if detachment is wanted, here it is. No questions asked, but if healthy people copulate, they have children. But the couple, denied children and wanting a baby more than all else, who submit to the perfectionist’s process, are frightened to offend the almighty lest they be refused the joy they long for and to which they are usually entitled.

  It will be seen by now that I am angry. I acknowledge it.
I have seen too much. I have gone too deep. And I find that it is harder to adopt a child nowadays, thanks to the development of the profession of social work, than it was twenty-eight years ago, when I found my little daughter, or eighteen years ago when our blessed Big Four came home. And I doubt that my husband and I would have passed at all nowadays, as adoptive parents, and certainly we would not have been given more than one child. Yes, the professional gods actually parcel out the children, saying that it is not “fair” for one family to have two children when others have none. What validity the argument might have is destroyed when one visits the orphanages. One such orphanage I know has exactly three hundred children.

  “Why exactly three hundred?” I inquired of my guide.

  “We are required to have a minimum of three hundred in order to receive our full quota of funds,” she replied honestly but without understanding the frightful import of her words.

  And I remember the day when a little timid woman, herself a social worker, stole into my office in New York City. She had come from another state to tell me that something had to be done for the children there, because twenty-seven children in an institution or in boarding homes constituted a job and salary for a social worker, and therefore too many of these workers did not want to free the children for adoption, since it meant finding other children to replace the ones adopted.

  “I keep seeing their little faces,” she said. “Please, can’t you do something?”