The Child Who Never Grew

Introduction by Martha M. Jablow¹

THE CHILD WHO NEVER Grew was published first as an article in the Ladies Home Journal in May, 1950, and a year later in hardcover by The John Day Company.

Why would anyone care to read a four-decade old book about a mentally retarded child who was born in 1920? Why would a publisher reissue such a book? Even with a Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author, a foreword by James Michener, and an attractive new cover, surely a book written more than forty years ago must be outdated.

“Outdated” and “Pearl Buck” do not belong in the same sentence. Pearl Buck was a woman well ahead of her time — on issues of civil rights, feminism, mental retardation, and children’s rights. Yet it is true that some parts of The Child Who Never Grew are no longer appropriate or accurate. Since 1950, advances in medicine, education, and law have improved opportunities for people with mental retardation. But the end of this short book addresses the pros and cons of public and private custodial institutions. Many of those huge state institutions which have “an immense advantage in that they are permanent, and once a child enters he is secure for life,” as Ms. Buck wrote then, are now closed or closing. The children who were placed there decades ago are adults today living in small group homes scattered throughout their communities. Many of them are holding jobs, voting, and paying taxes.

The few outdated references in this book are far overshadowed by Pearl Buck’s moving portrayal of parents’ conflicting emotions as they come to terms with a child’s limitations. When she writes from her heart about her personal pain and struggle with her daughter Carol’s condition, her voice is universal. She speaks to all parents who have traveled the same road — or who are just embarking on that journey as they discover that their child has some form of developmental delay.

Woodbine House’s decision to reissue The Child Who Never Grew is based on the book’s double value: it is not only supportive to parents in a heartfelt way, but it is also a landmark in the literature about disabilities (a field in which Woodbine House has published several dozen books).

When she wrote The Child Who Never Grew in 1950, Pearl Buck was the first prominent person to acknowledge publicly a child with mental retardation. Until then, many families “put the child away” in a caretaking institution, told friends and neighbors that the child had died, and tried to forget that the child existed. Other families quietly kept the child at home, indoors for most of the day, with only limited and chaperoned contact with the outside world.

Because its causes were not well understood at the time, mental retardation also carried a shameful stigma — a disgrace that was usually shrouded in secrecy, shame, and taboo. Part of the stigma was an erroneous belief that the cause was somehow the family’s fault. But by the mid-point of the twentieth century, medical science could shed a glimmer of light to correct some of the misunderstanding. As Ms. Buck wrote, “…the majority are retarded from non-inherited causes. The old stigma of ‘something in the family’ is all too often unjust.”

For families whose lives were haunted by the sad mystery of mental retardation, all the scientific explanations in the world would not have as much impact as a famous, respected person disclosing publicly, “I speak as one who knows.” In the 1990s’ tell-all atmosphere of celebrities baring their most private scars, it may be difficult to appreciate how much courage it took for Pearl Buck to speak out in 1950. But it was a painfully courageous act at that time.

Pearl Buck is the only American woman to receive both the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes. (The Pulitzer in 1932 for The Good Earth and the Nobel prize for literature in 1938.) When a woman of such prestige and achievement “went public” about having a mentally retarded child, the floodgates burst open. She received mailbags of letters from readers whose lives, like hers, had been affected by mental retardation. Some readers even showed up on her doorstep to meet her personally, and she patiently took time to talk with them.

Pearl Buck’s lifting the curtain about Carol certainly did not erase entirely the stigma of mental retardation, but it was a watershed. And for that reason, it needs to be placed in historical perspective.

Mental retardation has always been with us. In prehistoric times, people believed that a mental disability was caused by evil spirits — to be driven out by magical rites or potions. The ancient Greeks interpreted it as a punishment from the gods. In some cases, prayer and sacrifices were offered as attempted cure. In other instances, mentally retarded persons were killed or abandoned to die. The Romans regarded them as fools. By the Middle Ages, when belief in witchcraft was rampant in Europe, retarded people were thought to be witches and were tortured, burned, killed, or imprisoned. Some were treated as clowns or jesters, useful only for a hearty laugh.

The Age of Reason (1600s and 1700s) began, to sow some seeds of enlightenment about how children learn, which would eventually lead to an understanding of how disabled children also can learn. The groundwork was laid by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who proposed that children’s senses could be used as concrete tools to teach skills. In 1800, a young Parisian physician named Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard studied Victor, “the wild boy of Aveyron.” Thought to be about twelve years old when he was discovered naked and living alone in the woods, Victor had no spoken language. He had apparently been left to die in infancy, his throat partly cut. Itard, who was to become known as the father of child psychology, poked, prodded, and challenged Victor in an attempt to jolt him from his savage state into civilization. Using a metal alphabet, Itard taught Victor to spell the French word for milk, as he drank a glass of lait. Victor never learned to speak, but he learned both to recognize and spell certain words. If Itard showed him a flashcard with the word chaussure, Victor could find a particular shoe. Victor also learned to read and write verbs and adjectives to communicate in brief sentences. Itard’s great achievement was showing that a “defective” child could indeed concentrate and learn. He had potential. He was not an idiot. But Itard’s work with Victor was clearly an exception in his time. For the most part, European society placed people who were mentally retarded, deaf, insane, or epileptic with criminals in asylums.

Edouard Seguin, a student of Itard, took the investigation of Victor and human communication a bit further. Seguin contended that mental deficiency was a pedagogical rather then a medical problem. He developed a series of exercises to help a retarded child’s motor development. And only a few decades after Victor was discovered, kindergartens sprang up in Germany, based on Friedrich Froebel’s belief that very young children could blossom like flowers if schools offered educational toys as intellectual stimulation. While Seguin and Froebel’s advances did not pertain specifically to children with mental delays, their insights eventually would prove applicable.

By the 1860s, medical science was taking a harder look at people with signs of mental retardation. Dr. J. Langdon Down, an English physician, first systematically described in 1866 the condition known today as Down syndrome (formerly and unfortunately known as mongolism), the most common type of mental retardation.

The twentieth century brought further understanding. Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy’s first female physician, began a demonstration program in 1900 with twenty-two children who were believed to be incapable of learning. Adapting Itard and Sequin’s sensory teaching materials, Dr. Montessori showed that these “deficients,” as they were called, could indeed learn. In fact, they could pass exams on a level with normal children. Based on that experience, Dr. Montessori opened a school for normal children in the slums of Rome in 1907 and subsequently established schools around the world for children of all abilities.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Western society also toyed with social Darwinism — the theory that the most fit should not only survive but lead. If groups or nations were to become stronger by promoting the most talented individuals, what place could be left for the weaker members of society, like the mentally retarded? Only recently it has come to light in Britain that Winston Churchill used social Darwinism to suggest that the “mentally degenerate” should be forcibly sterilized. As British Home Secretary in 1910–1911, Churchill proposed that this solution would be more humane than concentrating them in institutions. In other words, prevent the degenerates from reproducing and the British empire could eliminate its feebleminded population. Churchill’s idea never took hold in Great Britain, but it ironically foreshadowed actions of his nation’s enemy, Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, the pioneering discoveries of Itard, Seguin, Froebel, Montessori, and a few physicians like Down would languish for decades before being applied to a broad population of children and adults with mental retardation. In the first half of the twentieth century, most were isolated at home, cared for as best a family could, treated as perpetual children and rarely challenged educationally, vocationally, or socially. Or they were sent to large institutions where they were warehoused, often with patients who were mentally ill or criminally insane. Institutions established early in this century carried pejorative names like “institutions for the feeble-minded.”

Into this world climate, Caroline Grace Buck was born on March 4, 1920. She would be known within the family as Carol, but she would be a secret from the world for thirty years. Even then, her mother would refer to Carol in her writing as “the child” or “my child,” never by name.

Carol was Pearl and John Lossing Buck’s first child, born in China where he taught agricultural science and she taught English under the auspices of an American Missionary board. At seven pounds, eight ounces, Carol was a healthy baby with “…lots of dark hair, pretty and very alert…so alert, looking around,” wrote a family friend at the time. During the first three years of Carol’s life, Pearl Buck had no hint of a problem.

In August of 1921, as Pearl Buck was mothering seventeen-month-old Carol in China, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was taking a dip in the frigid Bay of Fundy, on the other side of the globe. He soon fell ill with a chill and fever. Within a few days he could not walk or move his legs. After three years of agonizing effort, FDR’s struggle with paralysis culminated at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. In his first public appearance since being stricken by polio, FDR walked erect to the podium. Wearing heavy steel braces and supported on one side by a crutch and on the other by his son’s arm, FDR reached the podium to thunderous cheers. After a speech nominating Al Smith, FDR was cheered for an hour and thirteen minutes.

Whether Pearl Buck learned of FDR’s triumph at the time, through newspaper accounts or letters from friends in America, is merely speculative. But FDR’s example of confronting a handicap directly, and in public, would have an eventual impact on her.

Back in China…Carol was physically strong and vigorous and showed remarkable musical ability. But as she played and smiled through her first five or six years, it gradually became apparent that her mental development was slower than other children’s. After frustrating consultations with doctors in China, Pearl brought Carol to the United States for evaluation. The American doctors’ diagnosis was severe mental retardation.

Whenever parents are told that their child has a developmental disability, they wonder why and what—Why my child? Why our family? What caused it? What could I have done to prevent it? In The Child Who Never Grew, Ms. Buck wrote eloquently of these wrenching questions. But in the 1920s and for two more decades, she could take no consolation from a clear reason for Carol’s retardation, for there was no explanation. All a doctor could tell her at the time was “I don’t know. Somewhere along the way, before birth or after, growth stopped.”

Without any explanation or treatment for Carol, Pearl Buck struggled to accept her daughter’s condition. As the child of missionaries, Pearl Buck spent most of life in China, steeped in Chinese language and culture. From the Chinese she absorbed two important attitudes: “love of children for their own sakes and beyond” and acceptance of “any human infirmity for what it is,” she later wrote. Growing up in China, Ms. Buck saw blind, lame, deformed people coming and going in their communities. No shame, no blame. They were openly “accepted for themselves” because the Chinese believed that any affliction was part of one’s fate, ordained by heaven, to be respected as such, and therefore not the fault of the individual or the family.

While this side of Chinese philosophy helped her somewhat to accept Carol’s limitations, Pearl Buck fought another Chinese custom: the practice of abandoning female babies. A year before Carol’s birth, she had written home about “how much infanticide goes on this city. It is very prevalent over all China.…”

By the late 1920s, China was torn by political turmoil — a dangerous and frightening fact which complicated the Bucks’ dilemma about Carol and her future. How would they raise this child whose mind seemed to stop growing? What would happen to her if anything happened to them? Who would care for Carol? After much agonizing and searching, Ms. Buck decided to place Carol at age nine in a residential institution, the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey.

While Carol remained safely at Vineland, the world rolled along. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler sent mentally retarded people off to camps and ovens. In the same decades, Pearl Buck became a world renowned author. Her most widely read book, The Good Earth, is the story of Wang Lung, a peasant who founded a powerful dynasty. The vast majority of readers never suspected that Wang Lung’s sorrow “that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age.…” was drawn from the author’s life.

With the huge success of The Good Earth, the public wanted to know more about Pearl Buck — just who was this American woman living in China? At her publisher’s request, she penned a brief biographical sketch, “but I could not mention Carol,” she wrote to her closest friend, Emma Edmunds White. And she asked Ms. White not to discuss Carol publicly: “It is not shame at all but something private and sacred, as sorrow must be. I am sore to the touch there and I cannot endure even the touch of sympathy. Silence is best and far the easiest for me. I suppose this is because I am not resigned and never can be. I endure it because I must, but I am not resigned. So make no mention of her and so spare me.”

Carol’s existence was clouded not only in obscurity but also in error of gender. In 1935, when Pearl Buck married Richard Walsh, her publisher, after divorcing Lossing Buck, The New York Times’ report of the marriage referred to her as “the mother of a son, 15, and a daughter, 10, by her first marriage.” (The ten-year-old daughter was Janice Buck, now Janice C. Walsh, who wrote the Afterword for this revised edition.)

Pearl Buck also wrote a highly autobiographical novel, The Time Is Noon, in the mid-1930s, but it was considered too personal to publish. It would have revealed much about the author’s life — including “an inadequate first marriage,” as she called it, and the retarded child whose existence she worked so hard to conceal from her public. The Time Is Noon was not published until 1967.

As Carol adjusted to life at Vineland and her mother wrote prolifically, other developments were occurring that would affect later generations of mentally retarded children. For example, between 1921 and 1932, the Iowa PreSchool Laboratory studied children who entered preschool at an average age of forty-two months. The study found that they had a mean gain of sixteen IQ points over an eighteen-month stay in preschool. Later tests demonstrated that their IQ gains could be maintained for an average of twelve years if they stayed in school.

Another study that would provide further evidence of the benefits of early childhood education was published in 1930 by researchers H. M. Skeele and H. B. Dye. For their small but significant study, presented to the American Association on Mental Deficiency, Skeele and Dye selected thirteen orphans under age three with an average IQ of 64. The children were moved from their orphanage to an institution for the mentally retarded where older patients and attendants offered them social and mental stimulation. Another group of twelve children, with an average IQ of 87.6, composed a control group and remained in the non-stimulating environment of the orphanage.

After eighteen months of living in the more stimulating atmosphere with adults, the first group gained 27.5 IQ points. After thirty months of languishing in the orphanage, the second group’s average IQ dropped an average of 26.2 IQ points.

Skeele and Dye kept track of these children and twenty-one years later, did a follow-up study. All thirteen in the first group had become self-supporting, all had moved out of institutions for the retarded, and their average level of schooling was twelfth grade. Of the twelve in the second, unstimulated group, five still remained in institutions (though one had died), and the group’s average school level was third grade.

It would be another generation before Skeele and Dye’s research findings would be applied to wider practice. By demonstrating that early stimulation can accelerate a child’s cognitive growth and a lack of stimulation hinders it, their work foreshadowed Head Start programs for impoverished preschoolers and early intervention programs for children with developmental delays.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, FDR was sending the world a message: a physical handicap need not be a stigma. Roosevelt’s example has been cited as a motivating force behind Pearl Buck’s ultimate decision to tell the world about Carol. What FDR did for people with physical handicaps, she hoped to do for those with mental handicaps. Her decision to write The Child Who Never Grew was not motivated by confessional soul-baring. She had a greater goal: she wanted Carol’s story to help others. Ms. Buck believed that Carol’s life could be “of use in her generation,” that her story “must be of use to human beings…her life must count.”

In the 1950s, some medical and social advances were made to enhance the lives of people with mental retardation. For example, the etiology of phenylketonuria (PKU), a congenital disease resulting in metal retardation, was found to be the inability to metabolize an essential amino acid. Once PKU’s cause was discovered, testing and dietary treatment became available soon after birth. In 1959, three French scientists discovered the cause of Down syndrome: a genetic mishap near the time of conception caused an extra chromosome in every cell of the body. Such scientific information helped parents to understand that they were not at fault. Nature is imperfect. Prior to these medical discoveries, many parents typically believed that they could have prevented their child’s mental retardation. A former teacher of mine, for example, thought that a minor automobile accident when she was pregnant had caused her son to be born with Down syndrome. We know today that many forms of mental retardation result from genetic accidents or other unforeseen causes, but also that others do have environmental causes such as substance abuse during pregnancy.

While the 1950s and 1960s brought certain advances, it was often a dance of three steps forward and two steps backward. Across the country, many state institutions sprung up or expanded, warehousing thousands of mentally retarded persons in huge facilities. Had Ms. Buck’s writing career not been so successful and she had been unable to afford a private institution for her daughter, Carol might have resided at a mammoth public institution called Pennhurst in eastern Pennsylvania, not far from where Pearl Buck moved after leaving China permanently. In 1950, Pennhurst housed 2,600 persons. Established in 1908 for 500 residents, Pennhurst at its most crowded was home to 3,200 people. After a thirteen-year landmark lawsuit, it was closed in 1987 and its residents were moved to small group homes.

Although institutions thrived through the 1950s and 1960s, a greater public acceptance of people with mental retardation slowly began to grow. The National Association for Retardation Children was founded in 1950 to lobby legislators and improve public awareness. (The organization later changed its name to the Association for Retarded Citizens and again in 1991 to “The ARC” because it maintains that the word “retarded” carries a stigma.) In 1954, a “Creed for Exceptional Children” was proclaimed at a U.S. Office of Education Conference on Qualification and Preparation of Teachers. The driving force behind these efforts were parents, parents like Ms. Buck who wanted a better life for their children and those who would be born with similar problems in the future.

Pearl Buck was a strong supporter of parents. She wrote many letters of encouragement, including one in 1952 to a mother who was organizing other parents on behalf of their children: “…The primary problem of parents such as we are is to awaken the public to the rights that retarded children have. It is a strange thing that in our great friendly democracy these little retarded children…receive no attention and little help of any kind from state or community. Yet many of the children could be aided to became useful citizens if they had special training and could work in a protected environment.…I am deeply interested in such groups as yours, for it is the parents of retarded children who must awaken our people.…The parents must stir up the community not only to give these children every opportunity for life, but also to treat them as human beings.”

Another milestone for people with mental retardation was the Kennedy family’s revelation that they had a sister who was mentally retarded. Rosemary Kennedy was born two years before Carol Buck. Like Pearl Buck, the Kennedys struggled for years with Rosemary’s delayed development. Denial gradually gave way to acknowledgment. Family friend and presidential speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen has written that President John F. Kennedy was very sensitive to press stories about Rosemary “until the whole family decided that a more matter-of-fact attitude better served the fight against mental retardation.”

JFK then threw the power and leadership of the Presidency behind the budding movement to improve the lives of mentally retarded people when he declared in 1963, “Although retarded children may be the victim of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.” Another sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, established Special Olympics in 1968, which has become an international program of athletic competition and physical fitness for children and adults who are retarded. The family also set up the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which sponsors other programs.

As U.S. Attorney General in 1963, Robert F. Kennedy told a Congressional committee: “We visited a state hospital for the mentally retarded on a bright April day when you would have expected all the children to be playing outside. The children were inside, standing in a room which was bare but for a few benches. The floor was covered with urine. Severely retarded patients were left naked in cubicles, which suggested kennels.…Patients were washed by a device resembling a car wash.…The only toilets for the approximately seventy patients in a large ward were located in the middle of the room, permitting no privacy. The hospital’s hard-working but inadequate staff could provide at best only custodial care.”

Not all residential institutions were so inhumane, but institutionalization was the order of the day in the 1960s. Buildings were expanding to meet demand — each institution for the retarded averaged 340 people waiting for admission, as Ms. Buck wrote in her 1965 book, The Gifts They Bring (written with Gweneth Zarfoss about the positive potential of people with mental retardation).

For those who remained at home with their families, public schools provided little more than babysitting service. The “special ed kids” were isolated in classrooms of their own, or even in separate school buildings, away from their brothers, sisters, and neighbors. Many public schools refused to enroll children who were mentally retarded when they reached the usual age for kindergarten or first grade because they were considered “not ready” for school until they were older. After school age, some communities offered sheltered workshops where retarded adults worked alongside other retarded adults, assembly-line fashion, routinely sorting silverware, stuffing envelopes, or packing boxes of widgets.

The 1970s heralded a public outcry about inhumane conditions at large institutions like the one visited by Robert Kennedy. The demand for better treatment reached a crescendo and drove the “demstitutionalization” movement. Institutions like New York’s Willowbrook received such media attention that scandalous living conditions could no longer be ignored. By the end of the decade, fewer than four percent of Americans with mental retardation lived in institutions.

At the same time, parents of young children with mental retardation began to look around at institutions, public schools, and sheltered workshops. “Our children should not be doomed to a lifetime in an institution,” parents protested. “They deserve better than that!..And why do they have to stay home from public school until they are nine or ten when we’re paying taxes for all our other children to begin school at age five?…Can’t they do more than sort silverware in a workshop all day?”

Just as the 1960s and 1970s launched the expansion of rights for minorities and women, the rights of people with mental retardation would become recognized and secured in the law. But unlike minorities and women, most people with retardation needed advocates to speak on their behalf. Innovative educational programs resulted from parents banding together and confronting legislatures and service providers. Early intervention (or infant stimulation) programs for developmentally delayed babies began in the early 1970s largely because parents demanded that their children receive a head start on their education. Few had heard of Skeele and Dye’s earlier work, but most knew that if federal Head Start programs were helping economically deprived children, the same early start could benefit then-preschoolers as well.

Historic legislation was passed in 1973 and 1975 to correct past injustices. The first was Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited discrimination against handicapped persons in federally funded programs and protected rights to education and to participate fully in community life. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-142) guaranteed a free, appropriate education to every American child, regardless of handicap, an education “designed to meet their unique needs.” The goal of this law was to provide children who have special needs with individualized educational plans, created jointly by parents and professionals. Children with disabilities were to be educated in the least restrictive environment — meaning that they were no longer to be segregated away from other children. The law also applied the right of due process (the constitutional right to a fair hearing by an impartial person) to all decisions about special education. Until this legislation, due process in schools had been ignored as children routinely were deprived of educational services, expelled from school without explanation, or labelled “ineducable.”

Richard Nixon declared a national goal of reducing by half the incidence of mental retardation by the end of the twentieth century. But setting goals and passing laws mean little unless they are backed up by a commitment of funds and will, as parents quickly learned. Without adequate funding, improved educational opportunities guaranteed by PL 94-142 were empty promises. As the 1970s became the 1980s, parents again had to become a driving force — writing to legislators, speaking before school boards, occasionally marching peacefully with their children in tow — to see that educational programs for the mentally retarded were funded.

Four months after the 1981 inauguration, the Reagan administration announced its intention to repeal PL 94-142. That misguided effort failed, but the administration attempted in 1982 to weaken the law by issuing restrictive regulations (to allow states and local school systems to set their own schedules for implementing “free and appropriate education”; to diminish parental participation in educational planning; to remove handicapped children from classroom on the basis of their being “disruptive”; and to reduce health-related special services).

After fighting so long and hard for the enactment of PL 94-142, parents and educators were not about to sit back and let it be gutted. Washington received thousands of letters and phone calls from angry parents and professionals. This outpouring of protest forced Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrel H. Bell, to withdraw most of the proposed changes. But throughout the rest of the 1980s, the Federal government footed only a small portion of the total special education bill, leaving individual states and localities to respond in patchwork fashion. The irony was that, by the 1980s, educational researchers had clearly demonstrated the value of mainstreaming students. The Educational Testing Service of Princeton, for example, conducted a three-year study which showed that both handicapped and non-handicapped students benefit from integrated school settings.

Another piece of landmark legislation was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Like its predecessors, its net effect will depend on commitment and dollars. The law is not backed by Federal money, but private businesses must make a good faith effort to bring down barriers and make workplaces more accessible to disabled individuals. Some business leaders initially cried that following the letter of the law would be prohibitively expensive for them, but most are finding that not to be true. And many business people have come to realize that workers with physical and mental disabilities are often more reliable employees who cause less turnover than others.

Since the mid-1980s, the concept of “supported employment” has begun to grow. Adults with mental retardation are assigned “job coaches” who help them find a job and learn the precise skills to hold it. Once the worker learns the ropes, the job coach steps back and moves on, leaving the worker responsible to the employer. A number of major businesses (Marriott, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Boeing, United Airlines, and IBM, to name a few) have hired thousands of mentally retarded employees through supported employment program. In one instance, Pizza Hut hired 1,012 disabled workers (73 percent of whom were mentally retarded) and found that they stayed four to five times longer in the job than non-disabled workers. This lower turnover saved Pizza Hut over $2.2 million in recruiting, hiring, and training new employees.

Much progress has been made in recent years: Causes of mental retardation are better understood and, in some instances, preventable. Improved medical care insures a healthier, longer life. Babies and toddlers are receiving early intervention to enhance their cognitive and physical abilities. School-age children are enrolled in classes alongside non-disabled students, with special support services provided when necessary. Teenagers and young adults are learning job-related skills and participating in scout troops, swim teams, and other recreational activities. Adults are living in group homes and apartments, shopping, bowling, going to the movies, riding public transportation, working in their communities, and paying taxes.

Public understanding of mental retardation has also grown, thanks in large part to enlightened leaders in the media. An early breakthrough occurred in the late 1970s when Sesame Street included mentally retarded and physically disabled children in a regular weekly segment. One of those children, Jason Kingsley, went on to act in an episode of The Fall Guy, a television series starring Lee Majors. And a made-for-TV movie was filmed about Jason’s life. More recently, the ABC network series, Life Goes On, features as one of its stars Christopher Burke, a young man who has Down syndrome. Other television programs — including L.A. Law and Kate and Allie—have used non-disabled actors to portray adult characters with mental retardation. Children with obvious handicaps are now beginning to appear as models in advertisements for children’s clothing and toys.

How might Pearl Buck look upon these developments? As both the parent and humanitarian she was, Ms. Buck would undoubtedly be heartened by the overall progress in wider acceptance and opportunity. Although Carol lived all but nine years of her life in an institution, Pearl Buck was not an apologist for institutionalization. She knew that retarded children had great gifts to offer, including the “intangible quality of love,” as she wrote in The Gifts They Bring. She believed that those gifts should be spread around. In The Gifts They Bring, she foresaw the future when she described a community as an “enlarged family” enfolding not only the strong and able but “the weakest and most helpless” as well. She wrote, “And by providing the atmosphere in which he (the retarded child) can grow, we provide the atmosphere for all to grow. We do not believe in segregating the retarded child from other children. Let the normal child understand that all are not as fortunate as he. Let the normal child learn to be grateful that by chance it is he who is strong, and let him learn to use his strength for the less fortunate.”

Pearl Buck lived long enough (until 1973) to witness the earliest dawn of integrated classes and deinstutionalization. Had Carol been born two generations later, Pearl Buck would surely have been on the front lines with parents who enrolled their preschoolers in early programs, pushed for mainstreaming in regular classrooms, demanded job training for their adolescents, and full citizenship for their young adults.

Individuals with mental retardation, their families, friends, and advocates, owe a great debt to Pearl Buck for her brave disclosure about Carol in 1950. Perhaps the biggest strides in human advancement are taken in small steps — one person to another. Perhaps racism is broken down in small steps, as three Asian, Afro-American, and white neighbors talk together on one’s front porch. Perhaps homophobia is diminished a bit whenever one gay worker and one straight colleague become friends outside the office. Perhaps men understand women better when a father listens to his daughter describe her experience with sexual harassment. More than all the statistics, charts, and research data, personal stories that tell “the real truth,” as my six-year-old niece says, can move mountains and change lives.

Personal stories. Telling and listening. Pearl Buck excelled in the telling. For those who listen, her story pushes the experience of mental retardation farther along — into a realm of better understanding, compassion, and dedication than had previously existed. And, if I may end on a personal note: I first read The Child Who Never Grew in 1974, shortly after my first child was born with Down syndrome. Although the book was then twenty-four years old and I recognized that some of it was a bit dated, I took great comfort in Pearl Buck’s story. She knew my pain and I knew hers. She also gave me support and hope, as her words will continue to do for other families now and in the future.

¹Martha Moraghan Jablow is the author of, Cara, Growing With a Retarded Child (Temple University Press, 1982) and three other non-fiction books.

The Child Who Never Grew