They may also remain unaccustomed to taking responsibility when times get tough. At such times it's perfectly acceptable to hand off a child to a state institution — or so believe a huge number of Czechs who grew up before 1989.

The Czech Republic, an elite among former Eastern bloc nations with a highly educated population and a robust economy and a promising new member of the European Union, has a dark secret or two behind the glitz.

Here's one of the darkest: Some 10,000 Czech children live in state-run institutions.

That's a far higher number per capita than the West European average, but that's not what's most shocking and disheartening. Only 600 of these children are eligible for adoption. That's because thousands of parents are willing to let the state raise, house and feed their children, but they are not willing to sign papers releasing them to adoptees.

They're still our children, they seem to think, and we could never approve them going off to live with strangers but life in a state dorm is acceptable. Perhaps we'll even visit them once in a while. A birthday or saint's day, maybe.

Meanwhile, loving, responsible couples, both here and abroad, are queued up, undergoing batteries of psychological tests, waiting for neighbors and colleagues to be interviewed about them as these children grow older in institutions staffed by surly civil servants. If would-be adoptees are willing to hold out for four or five years and can pass each test, they may just have such a child released into their care.

If they happen to be foreigners, they'll now have to meet raised standards, demonstrating their suitability to state officials beyond a reasonable doubt.

There's no arguing that everything that can be done to ensure that children are put into good, safe hands should be done before they are handed over, of course. But for the process to take this long when the too-short childhood of a human being is flying by is absurd and needlessly cruel. Some who deal with the system every day, like Marie Vodičková, head of the Children in Need Foundation, say the staff of state institutions delay the process as long as possible because they are more interested in preserving their jobs than in settling kids into happy homes.

Others point out that, like many critical areas of Czech social care, there's no one agency responsible for oversight, creating needless confusion, redundancy and a diffusion of responsibility: Regional government offices operate state children's homes (sometimes on their own, sometimes by farming out the work to nonprofits or private sector agencies), the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry runs the adoption system and the Justice Ministry must sign off on any couples before they can adopt.

The system is such a tangled mess that enterprising couples, as chronicled in the Czech weekly Týden, sometimes get around it by finding pregnant teenage girls who have no one willing to sign a birth certificate as father. The male half of a couple wanting to adopt signs, making himself the legal father. Then it only remains for his spouse to adopt the child, an event made much easier by her partner's fully legal (if fraudulent) paternity.

After all, once he's recorded as father on the birth certificate, he's the father for now and forever in the eyes of the state, whether or not he's the biological one.

When people have to resort to measures like this to rescue children from self-serving bureaucrats and state dorms that smell of antiseptic, it might just be time for Czechs to truly reconsider the notion that the state, when it's convenient, makes a viable parent.