Polygamist sect children to face culture shock?

updated 8:43 p.m. ET April 23, 2008

SAN ANGELO, Texas - Many of the children have seen little or no television. They have been essentially home-schooled all their lives. Most were raised on garden-grown vegetables and twice-daily prayers with family. They frolic in long dresses and buttoned-up shirts from another century. They are unfailingly polite.

The 437 children taken from the polygamist compound in West Texas are being scattered to group homes and boys' and girls' ranches across the state, plunged into a culture radically different from the community where they and their families shunned the outside world as a hostile, contaminating influence on their godly way of life.

The state Children's Protective Services agency said it chose homes where the youngsters can be kept apart from other foster children — for now.

"We recognize it's critical that these children not be exposed to mainstream culture too quickly or other things that would hinder their success," agency spokeswoman Shari Tulliam said. "We just want to protect them from abuse and neglect. We're not trying to change them."

The children were swept up in a raid earlier this month on the Yearning for Zion Ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon splinter group that believes in marrying off underage girls to older men. State child-welfare authorities said there was evidence of physical and sexual abuse at the ranch.

The youngsters will be kept in 16 temporary facilities around Texas — some as far away as Houston, 500 miles off — until individual custody hearings can be held.

Those hearings could result in a number of possibilities: Some children could be placed in permanent foster care; some parents who have left the sect may win custody; some youngsters may be allowed to return to the ranch in Eldorado; and some may turn 18 before the case is complete and will be allowed to choose their own fates.

Children raised on the FLDS compound must wear pioneer-style dress and keep their hair pinned up in braids, reflecting their standards of modesty. For the same reason, they have little knowledge of pop culture. They must pray twice a day. They tend vegetable gardens and raise dairy cows, and must eat fresh food. And they are exceedingly polite, always saying "please" and "thank you."

In contrast, many other children in foster care have a certain worldly swagger, and are there because they have used drugs or committed other crimes.

Experts, lawyers: Foster care will change them
"These children who have lived in a very insular culture and are suddenly thrust into mainstream culture. There's going to be problems," said Susan Hays, who represents a toddler in the custody case. "They are a throwback to the 19th century in how they dress and how they behave."

Ken Driggs, an Atlanta lawyer, has long studied and written about the FLDS, said that if kept away from their parents' culture long enough, the children may begin to emulate those around them.

Tulliam said the temporary foster care facilities have been briefed on the children's needs. "We're not going to have them in tank tops and shorts," she said.

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