by Cris Beam
“I’m like a broken thing; I’m always watching—looking for the hurt, looking for the pain. People want to get close to me, but I can’t. I look for pain, because that’s my escape into isolation. I’m better off alone,” Kecia explained. I saw this in classroom dynamics a lot; when Kecia could ensure that she was the smartest pupil, she was fine. But when somebody like Doreen met Kecia at her level, and challenged her on a point, or simply wanted to connect with her, Kecia was insulted, and retreated.
“Whatever stages you haven’t resolved, they will keep popping up again, and every stage is contingent upon the last one having been resolved,” Kecia said, explaining that this can mean big trouble during adolescence. Adolescents are famous for testing limits, and those with attachment disorders may push even harder. This is why, she theorized, so many kids—including her—enter foster care as teenagers. “If you don’t have the basic trust, the basic confidence that you can make things happen in the world, then when you come into adolescence, you experience identity diffusion.”
Erikson coined the term identity crisis—a natural process wherein teenagers “try on” different identities (hairstyles, musical or religious affiliations, and so on) and use their friends to reflect these characteristics back to them. If they’ve had healthy attachments early on, the theory goes, the crisis resolves into a stable identity. If they haven’t had these attachments, they can develop identity diffusion—or an unstable, threatened sense of self. They don’t have the inner security to hold on to a single identity, or perhaps the faith that loved ones will see them through this second infancy, of sorts.
This may be what Doreen was describing when she said that Shameka was “so easy to be lured” during her teens. Kecia, who hit her own identity crisis at fourteen, was abandoned by her mother and deposited in a group home. Group homes are hard for anyone, but for someone like Kecia, they are a disaster. Said Kecia, who had once planned to be a scientist, “Have you ever heard of failure to thrive? It happens later on, in its own way, with adolescents. They’re not going to die, literally, but they might, psychically.”
Kecia’s mischief was fighting, and isolating herself. Once Kecia had stopped crying for her mother, she said, she “became very well defended.” She didn’t trust anyone around her and she argued with staff, once even landing in a fistfight with a counselor. These fights would yield new group homes, new schools, more strangers, and bigger defenses. Once, Kecia climbed into the back of a truck, riding it all the way into a garage where it parked for the night. It was full of dolls for sale. She tried to steal the dolls and sell them but was caught. Kecia was a minor and slapped with a reprimand, but it marked the beginning of her criminal record.
By seventeen, Kecia had been pulled in and out of schools so much, she no longer had a workable transcript, but she heard of a place in Brooklyn that administered the GED. She hadn’t attended a single school for more than a few consecutive months, but Kecia took the test and passed. Without telling any group home staff, she registered for New York Technical College. Her dream of being a scientist had dissipated, but she figured she could become an electromechanical technician; Kecia was good with numbers. She got a job at McDonald’s but knew it wouldn’t cover tuition; a counselor at the college helped Kecia apply for financial aid, and Kecia faced down her mother to sign the forms.
All of this, Kecia said, was below the radar of the group home. But when they caught wind of the student loan, she said, they told her she had to go. No children at their address could be receiving large sums of money; it was liable to cause problems.
“They called my mother and asked her if she wanted me, and all of a sudden she said yes,” Kecia said. But Kecia was still burning from her mother’s betrayal; she wouldn’t stay there. “The group home put me out, and I’ve been on the streets ever since.”
At first, Kecia said, she tried to make it work by finding a boyfriend and moving in with him. She went to school and to her job, but things quickly deteriorated. “I didn’t know how to live in a house, after moving from place to place to place. It was beautiful, this house with the boyfriend, but I just didn’t feel comfortable in it. I was so detached from everything,” Kecia said, adding, “You have to practice being stable.”
Kecia didn’t have the practice, and she fell into a depression. She stopped going to school, which made her more depressed, and pretty soon she had to find a way to dull the pain. The answer, for a while, was cocaine. She lost the job and the home and the boyfriend, but she was still a quick study; she had lived in enough places to know how to pick locks and dismantle alarms, and she turned to burglary to support her habit. She never robbed people when they were home, and she always worked alone. Only once, she said, a woman came to the door in the middle of a burglary. “I pretended to be a cop,” Kecia said, though the ruse didn’t work. “I didn’t want to scare her.”
Kecia was caught when she was twenty and did a year at Rikers Island. She got out, got sober, fell in love, which lasted for a while, but the breakup sent her back to drugs and crime. The next sentence was two years, followed by more sobriety, then more depression, more drugs, more burglary, and another arrest. Because of her two prior convictions, Kecia was ultimately sentenced to twelve years to life, culminating at Bayview, where we met.
Kecia said this last sentence was different and if she got out, she wouldn’t be going back to jail. “Because I finally got my degree. And I got psychological help,” she said, referring both to all the books she read and the intensive therapy she asked for and received—therapy that often enraged her, but pushed her to the point of accepting her many losses. “I’ve addressed my depression,” she said. But then she paused. We could hear the thrum of the cars racing on the West Side Highway, just beyond the windows of the prison. “The residual effect of it is not gone. I’ll never be able to love in a normal way.”
Even Kecia admits that her theories provide only a scaffolding for the complexity of a single human life; thin lines that suggest, rather than contain, the forms they demarcate. And anyway, the theory and the therapy are what have helped her now; what would have helped her back then, when she was a kid, was more direct.
“You’ve got all these scholars making these big, big proposals about whether to close the group homes; you’re putting a proposal together and you’ve got all these legal teams,” Kecia said. We had been talking about recent studies of New York City group homes and their innumerable failings. “And you’ve got all these professional psychologists. The question to be asking is ‘What do you do in your house? How come your kid finished college?’”
The answer, Kecia said, is you stick by him. “If you have a family, and you have five kids, are you going to throw one out because he fights more than the others? No, you’re going to keep him in the house, and eventually it’s going to get worked out.” For Kecia, it would have been best if her mother kept her at home, but a close second would have been a group home with staff who could have seen through Kecia’s defenses and loved her anyway. Or the next group home, or the next. By Kecia’s fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh group homes, she was already too shut down to find.
Tolightha Smalls was a caseworker at Edwin Gould, where all the Green foster children get their services. (I met with Tolightha in 2007, and sadly, she passed away in 2012.) She fit her name: she was short and small, with tiny hands and a nearly unlined face, although she claimed to be “somewhere close to sixty.” When we met, her current caseload was fifteen kids—all teenagers—and every single one of them had both her office and her cell phone numbers so they could reach her anytime, day or night. She used to work in adoptions, and these kids had her number too, and they still called her, even though they’ve found permanent homes. “They still send me pictures of themselves, now with their parents,” she said proudly. “I worked with thirty-five homes and did thirty-three adoptions.”
Like Kecia, Tolightha believed that foster kids need one solid adult in their lives to stick by them, and as a case manager, she st
epped out of her job description to play that role. But she also believed kids should receive the kind of consistent, personalized therapy Kecia had in jail—without having to commit a crime to get it.
Tolightha and I met in the same Brooklyn conference room where, once before, Bruce and Allyson attended their “emergency preparedness” meeting with the firefighter who never showed up. On a bulletin board outside the room, a sign claimed the city was in “urgent need of foster parents who would take in teenagers”; next to it was a poster advertising the minimum wage in 1997.
Edwin Gould was ranked the top foster care agency in New York in 2004 by ACS’s review process, then called EQUIP, which stood for “Evaluation and Quality Improvement Protocol.” (The review process has since been renamed Scorecard and uses letter grades to evaluate child safety, permanency, well-being, and foster parent recruitment and support. In 2009, Edwin Gould earned three Bs and a C and was still among the higher performers. No agency received straight As.)
At the time Tolightha and I talked, Edwin Gould served two hundred kids—about half of them out of the Brooklyn office. Like Francine Cournos, the Columbia psychiatry professor who spoke with me during the blizzard, Tolightha felt that many of the kids would be better served in therapeutic homes with better-trained foster parents. But despite being a top agency, Edwin Gould didn’t offer such homes. If a child needed a therapeutic placement, he’d have to leave the agency and his caseworker. This was tough on Tolightha.
“A kid’ll say to me, ‘I don’t have parents, I don’t have foster parents; the only person I have and trust is my social worker,’” Tolightha said, pursing her lips for emphasis. The fluorescent lights buzzed audibly. “These kids have been in so many placements that if they have someone they can attach to, like a social worker, you can’t turn your back on them.”
Officially, Tolightha was supposed to make home visits to each of her fifteen teenagers twice a month. Every six months, she had to hold a formal “consent meeting” with each family to reaffirm the living arrangements, as well as go to court with them for their twice-annual permanency hearings. This meant she was in court or an official meeting more than once a week, visiting two homes at least every other day of the week, and filling out extensive paperwork for every encounter she had. Much of her time, though, was spent providing de facto therapy for the kids she’d bonded with.
“You have to start where the client is. I mean just sit back and be a good listener—give them an opportunity to express themselves,” she said, sitting back in her metal folding chair. In her brown turtleneck and creased brown slacks, Tolightha looked like a young grandmother—not the kind who would bake you cookies, but the kind who would take an interest in your appearance, ask you about your schoolwork, remember whom you asked out on a date. “I’ve been told so many times not to get too attached to the kids, because you have to be able to separate yourself, but I get attached to every last one of my clients, and that’s why it works.”
At first, Tolightha said, this devotion took its toll on her marriage—as she started coming home at six, then seven, then eight and nine o’clock at night. But she and her husband had been married for over thirty-five years, and she said he realized that this job was a kind of calling for her. It takes that much time, she said, to really understand what a foster kid needs—and then try to build the services up around him.
“We all know that the kids come into care with different issues—physical or sexual, neglect or abandonment. The mom might or might not have been involved in drugs; the mom might have a mental illness,” Tolightha explained. The mental illness component is a big one: one study of nearly five thousand kids showed that those with moms who had a mental illness were more than twice as likely to be placed in care. And even though it’s not directly within her job outline, “I’m the one that has to make sure that mom gets the services that are needed.” Otherwise, she said, it just might not get done.
Tolightha had a BA in urban studies, which, she explained, helped her to look at child welfare from an economic perspective—but it didn’t provide much assistance with the deep psychological trauma that her clients presented daily. She’d been thinking of going back to school to get a master’s in social work, so she could offer them real therapy. Right now, there simply wasn’t enough to meet the need.
“We have so many kids who come into care who have been physically or sexually abused—but you can’t just make a referral to a psychologist or a psychiatrist that doesn’t work in that area,” she said. “We have a good gynecologist if the child is pregnant, and a good substance abuse therapist—but you can’t send every child to the same person.”
In fact, she said, the entire agency retained only three psychiatrists for all of its children—and most of their work was in medical prescriptions. There were no therapists practicing in the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy for outpatient referral, where about 45 percent of the population lived on some form of public assistance in 2008, so when Tolightha wanted to send a child to a specialist, she had to send him to Schneider Children’s Hospital in Long Island. Since many foster parents in New York don’t drive, that’s just too far away.
Still, she said, most of her clients didn’t want clinical help. “They always say, ‘I don’t need therapy; I’m not crazy,’” she said, smiling at first, then tightening up when she mentioned how many times her kids’ privacy had been violated. They worried that their files were always available for any new stranger to see. “They say, ‘I don’t want my business all over the agency. I’d rather talk to you.’”
A group of therapists in New York City, called the Fostering Connection, offer their time and services to foster kids, and their families, pro bono. Francine Cournos is on their board. The night after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, I went to one of their meetings, where a few psychologists were presenting case studies of their work in a plain gray conference room on West 57th Street, above a Gap.
It was a room full of mostly women, with kinky hair, funky earrings, and canvas bags. It was already stuffy and overheated when I settled in and listened to the opening remarks.
“Much the way lawyers have a mandate to give a portion of their time to pro bono work, we dreamed up the Fostering Connection ten years ago,” one of the cofounders said into a microphone. She claimed the idea was to provide long-term, consistent relationships from the “soothing” comforts of the therapist’s private office—mostly located in Manhattan. I prickled at the presumption: one person’s comfort may be another’s inconvenience. And with foster kids, I knew, you had to go to them—very few, I imagined, would travel to unfamiliar neighborhoods to spill their sadness to yet another stranger.
The codirector confirmed my suspicions. “What we’ve found is that foster kids don’t always want, or can’t even imagine, a long-term, open-ended relationship,” she said, adding that the nonprofit often had more therapists on call than it had clients. I thought of Tolightha Smalls lamenting the dearth of qualified therapists in her neighborhood. “I now joke, ‘Build it and they might come.’ There are many mismatches in terms of time, and respecting one’s time.”
What this meant, according to the next speaker, was that patients just didn’t show up. Their parents, or caseworkers, didn’t bring them. She’d make calls to ACS, and nobody would return them; she’d set an appointment, and then sit in her empty office, frustrated. Why didn’t people value what she was offering?
The mismatch, I thought, wasn’t about time. It wasn’t the gift they had that was wrong, nor, as one speaker insinuated, was it the recipients or their “cultural understanding of time.” It was the way that gift was packaged and presented. The final speaker, thankfully, reflected on some of these themes.
“We need to think about our assumptions,” she said, leveling her gaze across the room, “that when they don’t show up they don’t value it. We need to think about what people have internalized and what we represent.”
For kids, a therapist could represent a lot of things. A g
ood percentage of foster children are on psychiatric medications to control their mood swings or hyperactivity and could view a therapist, with a raised eyebrow and a cocked hip, as yet another doctor in the lineup. Others, like the kids Tolightha encountered, were afraid of therapists spreading their private business around; respecting confidentiality hadn’t been in their realm of experience. And others, like Fatimah at the Greens’, wanted therapy, but wanted it to be convenient and familiar. Fatimah had been searching for a therapist, she said, to help her sort through the abuse and the jangle of memories so she could write her book, but she said, “I don’t want to go somewhere far where a lot of white people will be looking at me like I’m crazy.”
A few years after this meeting, I spoke with a therapist who had been volunteering with the Fostering Connection for three and a half years; she had been seeing the same teenager the entire time, and he’d shown tremendous progress. TFC’s model worked, this therapist told me, though she had learned to be flexible: she found her client was more comfortable meeting her in a diner than at her office, so they talked, every week, over turkey burgers and omelets. This long-term, individualized therapy also worked, she said, because her client really wanted to be there. With the luxury of free weekly appointments over several years, they had time to build trust; at the beginning, they played cards and talked about snacks.
This kind of gentle start makes sense, as Francine Cournos says therapy might not always be the best idea for foster kids anyway—at least not while they’re in the tumult of transitions. “When you’re feeling unsafe, it’s not a good time to explore your emotions; you’re too enraged and disorganized to fall apart a little bit,” she said in her talk on foster care at the School of Social Work at Columbia. “These kids don’t need uncovering therapy; they need adults who understand the natural processes of bereavement and trauma.”
