The Impact of Orphanages on the Alumni’s Lives and Assessments of Their Childhoods
Author(s)
McKenzie, Richard B.
Abstract
The private and public orphanages that dotted the child welfare landscape three or more decades ago have been widely condemned, often without qualification, by child welfare researchers and practitioners for “harming” children in multiple ways, emotionally, behaviorally, and intellectually. This paper reports the findings of a second extensive survey of over 800 alumni from five private and state orphanages in the South and Midwest who left their orphanages in the late 1960s and before. According to their own reports, the orphanage alumni have outpaced their age counterparts in the general population on a substantial majority of the social and economic outcome measures covered in the study. Also, the alumni overwhelmingly report favorable assessments of their orphanage experiences. Nine out of ten respondents indicate that they would prefer to have grown up in their orphanages than in foster care. The findings of this survey are compared with the even more favorable findings of a survey of nearly 1,600 alumni of nine orphanages undertaken in 1995.
