Neglected solutions.

Family preservation policies have proved to be a disaster. It's time to reconsider orphanages.

When Newt Gingrich set off a short-lived controversy in late 1994 with his off-the-cuff remarks about orphanages, Hillary Rodham Clinton denounced proposals to bring them back as ''unbelievable and absurd.'' That seemed to be the prevailing reaction. But the tens of thousands of Americans who grew up in orphanages, like me, know better.

We realize, of course, that our orphanages were imperfect. They often lacked some amenities, not least the daily hugs taken for granted by children who grow up in loving families. Orphanages didn't always have the sorts of caring and responsible surrogate parents who would play with the children in the evenings or who ''dressed up in sheets and told ghost stories,'' as Mrs. Clinton recalls about the parents in her neighborhood.

But we also know that the orphanages provided a better environment than the deplorable family circumstances from which so many of the children had come, and to which so many children today are condemned for the duration of their childhoods. Children in orphanages did not always get affection -- though they get more of it than outsiders think -- but at least they got supervision. In fact, orphanages resemble nothing so much as the ''villages'' that Mrs. Clinton has said are ''visible extensions'' of families and indispensable to the raising of children.

Many orphanages, such as one where I lived, were like villages, first of all, in their partial isolation. We called our orphanage ''The Home'' with capital letters to indicate that it was, in some ways, self-contained, set apart from the world. The Home was located in rural North Carolina, five miles from the nearest town. Seen from the highway that runs through it, it could easily have been mistaken for a small college. More than 250 boys and girls, ages two to eighteen, resided at Barium Springs Home for Children when I went there at the age of ten in the early 1950s.

Like so many orphanages portrayed in films, ours had several large, turn-of-the-century cottages, each housing twenty to thirty young children, many of whom went to bed on unheated sleeping porches. Unlike the orphanages in Annie, Oliver Twist, or Boys Town, however, we also had cottages of boarding-school quality for older children, with two kids to a room and sixteen to a cottage. These cottages each had a living room and a television room (as well as a small apartment for the housemother). Meals were served in the main dining hall, which was the center of the village both geographically and socially.

The Home's 1,500 acres included a vast tract of unspoiled woods where we spent much of our free time exploring, building forts, damming streams, and taming pets. But there were also many acres of pasture for the sixty milking cows, two hundred beef cattle, hundred sheep, hundred hogs, and five hundred laying hens we tended. There were hundreds of acres of hay fields, vegetable gardens, and orchards. Along with hired hands, the children of The Home worked extensively -- for up to fifty unpaid hours a week during the summers and twenty during the school year.

At The Home, we were constantly made aware that work was important, not only to put food on the table and to keep the cost of our care in line, but also because work is good for the soul. The work we have done since our days at The Home has, for most of us, seemed easy by comparison.

Like so many villages of the 1950s and before, we had our own slaughtering plant, print shop, cannery, carpenter and plumbing shops, and chicken coops. For most of the 1950s, we had our own on-campus elementary and high schools (which were better than the schools in the surrounding county). Our varsity teams played against city schools that had twenty times the number of students, but we won more often than not. We had our own swimming pool, tennis courts, football field, and horseshoe pits. We even had our own village church and gymnasium, the latter being used for basketball games, roller-skating, and dances.

Our campus was a place set apart, and some of us had problems adjusting to the ''real world'' on our departure. But our difficulties probably were much like those faced by other kids from isolated farms and communities when they moved to large cities.

The critics of orphanages have always exaggerated our isolation. Many of us, especially the boys, went to the nearby towns on weekends. Children from the surrounding communities came to our school, and to sporting events and dances. We became more integrated into the surrounding communities when we started going to public schools in the late 1950s. We dated girls and boys from other communities. They visited us on the campus, and we went to their homes.

Clearly, The Home could not provide the individualized nurturing that loving and responsible families can provide -- after all, there were 12 kids per staff person. There also were some workers at The Home during my time there who didn't live up to their duties, and one or two who were downright mean. Still, many of the kids at The Home found worthy mentors among staff members who considered their work more a mission than a profession (most were highly religious, and few had formal training in child care). Mr. J. B. Johnson, like Father Flanigan in Boys Town, knew the name of every child during his tenure as head of The Home and was renowned for taking groups of children for nature walks on Sunday afternoons. And there is not a child who went through The Home from the 1930s through the 1970s who doesn't fondly remember Miss Rebecca Carpenter, the case worker, who always had a bright smile and a word of encouragement. She never married, but she mothered hundreds.

My last housemother at The Home sent me a birthday card every year after I left until her death in the late 1980s -- for nearly thirty years! Critics of orphanages couldn't possibly appreciate what it meant to me when at Christmas two years ago I received a two-foot-by-three-foot set of framed original verses on what it means to be successful, written and needlepointed by my seventh-grade teacher. She wanted to remind me, one more time, that ''success'' ultimately is not defined by money and position but by what is in the heart and soul.

My experience has not been all that unusual. I know that from the reaction to my previous writings on orphanages, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and my book The Home. I have been stunned by the depth of emotion the column and the book have unloosed, mainly from ''successful orphans'' around the country. Most of them confessed to having had a great life as children in orphanages, and an amazing number called their home ''The Home,'' just as we did. These orphans attest to the importance their upbringing had in their later success.

Academic historians are increasingly corroborating our impressions. No doubt, there were some pretty bad orphanages in days gone by. Abuse in several forms did occur, just as in other villages. But my survey of 1,600 grown-up orphans from nine homes in the South and Midwest (available in full in the April 1997 Child and Youth Care Forum) suggests that, by and large, the orphanages did right by their charges. The alumni I surveyed are white, now 45 or older, and stayed in orphanages for an average of nine years. They have a 17 per cent higher rate of high-school graduation than their counterparts in the general white population and a 39 per cent higher rate of college graduation. They also have 20 per cent more master's degrees, 250 per cent more professional degrees, and 17 per cent more doctorates.

And while they have a higher divorce rate (44 per cent versus 30 per cent for their age group), they report being far happier and have far fewer emotional problems than other Americans. At the time of my survey, only 29 per cent of Americans polled by the National Opinion Research Center said they were ''very happy.'' More than twice that percentage of orphans said they were ''very happy.'' And while 12 per cent of all Americans said they were ''not too happy,'' less than half that percentage of the orphans felt the same way.

The median household incomes of the middle-aged and older orphans were 10 to 61 per cent higher (depending on age group) than the median for their counterparts in the general white population. Moreover, the orphans' rates of unemployment, poverty, incarceration, and dependence on public assistance were minor fractions of the rates for other white Americans.

Conventional wisdom has it that orphans are always pining to be adopted. Few orphans in my survey reported ever wanting to be adopted while at their orphanages, and upwards of 90 per cent preferred their orphanage care to foster care. Close to 90 per cent of the orphans assessed their homes favorably, and only 2 per cent have ''unfavorable'' or ''very unfavorable'' assessments.

The survey has limitations. The more successful and happier orphans may have been more inclined to respond. However, all the respondents had spent a substantial amount of time in an orphanage and had gone to their orphanages from bad family circumstances. If the concept of orphanages were truly ''unbelievable and absurd,'' the alumni should not have done as well as they have.

Still, why have the orphans done so well? The most obvious answer: these orphanages did not live down to the dreadful stereotypes. Almost all were a functioning part of larger religious or charitable communities that had a stake in the children's success. When asked what they believe to be the advantages of their homes, the orphans point to specific factors either ignored or cited unfavorably by critics: the sense of responsibility, discipline, work ethic, and religious and moral values instilled in them by those institutions.

If the nation had few problems with its current child-welfare system, no one would reconsider bringing back orphanages. But the country's child-care problems are grave and getting worse. Our child-care system is today guided by the ideology of ''family preservation.'' Before taking children from unfit parents, we wait until they have been gravely and repeatedly neglected and abused. Then, after a short respite during which we seem to expect magical reforms, we return the children to be neglected and abused once again.

Far too many disadvantaged children today endure dozens of different foster-care placements before reaching high school. While many foster parents are generous people devoting their lives to the care of disadvantaged children, some treat their foster children as second-class family members and then discard them with the advent of the slightest behavioral problem -- or no problem at all. The children of The Home, and a multitude of other homes, knew it was there and would always be there, so long as we needed it. Without that sense of permanence, should we wonder why so many disadvantaged children today wind up in some mental or emotional rehabilitation program or incarcerated as a ''child predator''?

Most private homes have closed their doors or shifted their mission to caring only for severely troubled youngsters. But a few homes remain. The Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania and the Connie Maxwell Home in South Carolina are shining examples of what can still be accomplished for disadvantaged children.

And there are signs that private homes for children are coming back. Consider the introduction of SOS Children's Villages in Florida and Ohio. However, the expansion will be slowed by the considerable annual cost of childcare in homes -- which can exceed by a wide margin the cost of a year at Harvard University -- and the professional and policy biases against the reintroduction of improved forms of institutional care. Costs can be cut only if the child-care industry is drastically deregulated and the energies of charitable groups freed. (In the early 1950s the average cost of orphanage care with schooling included was about $7,000 a year -- in 1998 dollars!)

Changing attitudes will be tougher. We need to recognize that many children would be better off in a permanent care environment than in foster care, and that the safety and well-being of children must trump the goal of ''family preservation.'' Beyond that, we need to rethink laws that now prevent homes for children from asking their charges to mow the grass, much less do more responsible work, and we need to rethink legal predispositions that discourage substitute caregivers from even hugging the children in their care.

So I hope the First Lady will reconsider. Sometimes, it takes an orphanage to raise a child.

Mr. McKenzie is the Walter B. Gerken Professor of Enterprise and Society in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the author of The Home: A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage (Basic Books).