I visited one of the cottages, which reminded me of the houses where some of my childhood friends from St. Francis Xavier elementary school in the Chicago suburbs lived. My friends were from big families, 7 or 10 kids. Everything in their home lives seemed industrial-sized to me, organized to ladle out life and love in well-managed, huge portions. The living space in the Palmer Home cottages was similarly expansive, and stretched out along a long hallway with double bedrooms, decorated as individually as new college freshmen do, and bathrooms connecting pairs of bedrooms. The laundry room had double sets of washers and dryers; in this house, the kids who were old enough to manage each had a day to wash her own clothes.

I saw some of the 7 girls living in the house I visited, along with their small but very strong-looking housemom, who had a new baby of her own, and a husband. Houseparents in each cottage live 3 weeks on and one week off; often R&R is taken in a separate small cottage on campus. One unusual feature of Palmer Home is that many sibling-groups arrive, and sometimes, if logistics work, siblings even live together in the same cottage.

The remarkable aspects of a place like the Palmer Home probably aren't news to anyone who has had experience with children’s residential caregiving in the US. But to me, the bucolic, healthy images there were as far away in my mind from anything related to “orphanage” that I could drum up.

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Which brings us to the terminology: Orphan, double orphan, social orphan, children waiting, foster child, foster care, orphanage, group home, houseparents, caregivers, residential care, out of home care. Which words to choose? The nuances of meaning have shifted with the social contexts of the times. Yesterday’s orphan is not today’s orphan.

An orphan, technically, has no living biological parents. A double orphan is another way of saying this. Social orphans may have a biological parent, but that parent is not able to care for them. Foster children are in the legal care of someone besides a biological parent. A child waiting is legally able to be adopted. And on and on.

Drake Bassett, who came from a completely different corporate world to be the President and CEO of the Palmer Home about 2 years ago, described his early-on puzzlement at how he should refer to the children at Palmer Home. “Are they orphans or not?” he asked a colleague. They talked over the many possible terms and finally decided, “They are children. Let’s call them children.” This felt right and freed them to attach whatever descriptive phrases they needed to suit the situation.

A little bit on the lay of the land: There are about 120,000 children in the US with no living biological parents, about 900 of whom live in Mississippi. There are about 400,000 children in the US who are living in some kind of foster care, also called out-of-home care. There are about 55,000 grandparents in Mississippi who are primary caretakers for their grandchildren. Here are some recent data points on adoptions and foster care from the Department of Health and Human Services.