To the End of June
Page 38
role of investigators in, 20–22
typical process for, 6–7
waiver system and, 164–66
repetitive patterns
agencies and, 259, 261
within families, 137–42, 179
reporting of abuse/neglect, 6
class disparities and, xiv
by family members, 60, 70–72
institutions and, 60–61
mandated reporters and, 6, 24
reasons to hesitate about, xi–xiv
residential treatment centers (RTCs), 125–26, 134
cost of, 131
evaluation of, 131–32
kids’ experiences in, 127–31
Richter, Ronald (ACS commissioner), 27, 133–34
Rittner, Barbara, 28, 56–57, 59, 273
Robinson, Lawrence, 69–72
Roosevelt housing projects (Brooklyn), 3–5
Rosario-Keane, Arelis, 54–57, 209–11, 216–17, 259, 262, 276
Rosario-Keane, Jay Jay, 218–20
Rosario kids, 55–56
running away, 207, 230
Clarence and, 123–24
Fatimah and, 179–80, 181
Tonya and, 173, 176–78
Russell (Green foster son), 9, 195–200, 242–43, 244
S
safe haven laws, 79
“secure attachment,” 35, 272
self-blame, and foster kids, 101, 123, 219–20
sex trafficking, 154, 289
sexual abuse, 119, 240, 268
Shameka (daughter of Doreen), 59–60, 137–39, 140–44
Sharisha (daughter of Shameka), 141, 142
SILP. See Supervised Independent Living Program (SILP)
Smalls, Tolightha (caseworker), 98, 149–52, 154–55
social reform, 62–63, 262
Social Security Act (1935), 87
social services. See also preventive social services; therapy for foster kids
implementation and, 47–48
support for biological parents and, 16–17
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC), 23–24, 269
Solomon (biblical king), 4–5, 13, 48
Soto, Doreen, 58–59, 137–43, 259
contact with her daughter, 137–44
drugs and, 59–60, 66
Kecia and, 145–46
removal of her daughter, 59–60, 138
SPCC. See Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC)
“special needs” kids, 169. See also “hard-to-place” kids
states. See also child welfare system; entries for specific states
abuse legislation in, 23–24
AFDC funds and, 87–88
lawsuits against, 47
parens patriae and, 270
removal guidelines and, 19
support for foster parents from, 83–84
stealing, 119, 148
“Stubborn Child Statute” (Massachusetts), 85
substance abuse. See also newborns
ASFA time limits and, 44–46
as health vs. criminal issue, 64–68
parental contact with kids and, 139
parental termination and, 59
“suitable home” rule, 87–88
Supervised Independent Living Program (SILP), 192–93, 195, 199, 205, 212, 249. See also independent living programs
support for biological parents
drug programs and, 10–13, 14, 66–68
parental rights and, 28–29
social services and, 16–17
support for foster parents
Glenn and Mindy’s experience and, 235–38
Greens’ experience and, 105
history of welfare policies and, 84–89
problem kids and, 83–84
surrogacy, 77
T
Tamara (foster child), 213–14
Taylor family (Shameka’s adoptive family), 137, 138–39, 140, 141, 143
team conferencing system, 8, 9, 10–13, 26
teenage foster kids. See also aging out; homelessness; independent living; You Gotta Believe! program
at Greens’ house, 102–5
homelessness prevention and, 222–25
independent living and, 191–204
reasons behind behavior of, 117–18, 122–23
RTCs and, 134
as segment of child welfare, 101–2
working the system and, 121–22
TFC. See The Fostering Connection
therapeutic homes
costs for, 131
Dominique and, 175, 176, 185
Oneida and, 236–37
removal of kids to, 124, 150, 157–59
therapeutic model, 90–94
therapy for foster kids, 151–54. See also therapeutic homes
Tom (baby Allen’s birth father), 38–42, 48–50
Tonya (Green foster daughter)
after leaving Greens, 248–51, 252–58
contacts with birth mother, 120–21, 178–79, 194
independent living and, 192–95
multiple placements and, 117–22
running away and, 173, 176–78
training of foster parents, 103, 280
foster-to-adopt parents and, 79–80
psychological training and, 91, 92–94, 108, 124
trust. See also attachment
attachment disorders and, 145–48
building of, and time, 233
teen anger and, 111
teen disconnects and, 187–88, 218–20
therapeutic relationships and, 153–54
U
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), 293
urban poor, policies toward, 86–87
W
waiver funding, 164–68, 260–61
Washington, D.C., 268
Washington state, 93–94
“Wednesday’s Child,” 225–26, 229
Welcome, Dominique
adoption and, 160, 173, 174, 175–76, 185
biological mother and, 160–61, 179, 185–87
departure from Greens and, 173–76, 185–87
Fatimah and, 157, 173, 256
the Greens and, 109–12, 114–16, 157–61, 243–44
independent living fantasies of, 201–2
placements of, 161–62
Wilder, Shirley, 46, 47, 275
Wiley, Robbyne, 60–61, 66, 67–68, 80
Wilson, Noble (adopted baby), 74, 80–82
Wilson, Shawn (foster and adoptive parent), 73–74, 76–82
Wilson, Steve (foster and adoptive parent), 15–17, 30–35, 37
Wright, Bruce (Georgia foster parent), 78, 83–84, 122
Y
You Gotta Believe! (YGB) program
as approach to homeless prevention, 222–25
recruitment process for, 225–33
1
The Sound of Science
In the Arkansas town of Conway, tens of thousands of computer servers churn together day and night, swallowing up our secrets. They belong to a giant corporation called Acxiom, a data broker that pulls in more than $800 million a year by culling information about people’s online behaviors and demographics, typecasting us all into elderly singles or Subaru-driving cat lovers, and then selling that intel to marketers across the globe. While I believe this growing capitalist trend of targeting each consumer individually, of mirroring our habits with products more and more precisely, is the real fuel behind America’s drive toward all things empathy, it doesn’t make a very pretty story.
So we tell a different one. We tell a story about a monkey lab in Parma, Italy, and the way those monkeys led us to change everything we thought we knew about empathy.
Giacomo Rizzolatti looks something like Albert Einstein, with the same mane of white hair, a similar bushy mustache, and when he talks in public it’s with a genuine smile in his voice. Rizzolatti directs the lab that discovered mirror neurons in the motor c
ortex of macaque monkeys. Mirror neurons, unlike other neurons in the motor region that fire when the monkey moves, instead also fire when the monkey simply watches someone else performing a motor task. When they first found these neurons some fifteen years ago, Rizzolatti and his team thought they must have been making a mistake: motor neurons only fired to direct bodily movement, they believed, so the monkey was probably moving somehow—maybe a pinkie finger twitch—without their detection. When they repeated the test and realized these neurons fired simply in response to witnessing motorization in somebody else, they had a major publication on their hands.
Nature rejected their paper. Only physiologists, the editors claimed, would be interested in this discovery—which was too narrow for their broad readership. So the team went elsewhere, publishing in a more specialized journal, and the idea blasted outside its borders: the paper has been cited thousands of times and launched incalculable studies in multiple fields. As Rizzolatti said, this happened because one very famous scientist—the charismatic man who developed therapy for patients with phantom limb pain and who writes popular books about people who taste colors, experience psychological pregnancies, and other neurological oddities—was to name Rizzolatti’s mirror neuron study the most important paper published in the ten years prior to 2000. The man was V. S. Ramachandran.
When this happened, Rizzolatti said, “it was a tremendous boost . . . A lot of people outside physiology—sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, others—said, ‘Perhaps we have found a mechanism that can explain many things.’”
The mechanism was the proof, the neurological seedling that could grow into one very human narrative of empathy. Monkey see, monkey do had earned an extra step: monkey sees you do and feels it too. A neuron coded for reflecting movement without moving a muscle was freighted with meaning. Primates (and, by extension, humans) could actuallyexperience the other inside their own brains. With the Parma discovery, empathy wasn’t a utopian wish, or a socially constructed behavior: it was a neurological fact. And this was the story that made empathy come alive.
BEFORE ANY ITALIAN MACAQUES were bolted to their primate chairs to watch men pick up peanuts again and again, there was one predominantly accepted understanding of empathic learning. It went like this: a person (say, a child) has one expectation about the outside world, based on his past experience. The child forms a theory—when Mommy cries, it means she’s sad. When one day Mommy cries from joy, the child revises his theory: another’s tears can indicate sadness or happiness. Through increasingly complex experiences, we keep building increasingly complex theories about others’ states of mind, their motivations, and so on. This is called theory-theory.
In the macaque’s brains, experimenters didn’t see theory-theory happening—they saw something much more basic and self-centered. Monkeys’ grasping neurons fired when they witnessed someone merely reaching toward an apple. They were understanding the other’s state of mind (wanting to pick up an apple) by mentalizing the action themselves. In a famous paper, philosophy and cognitive science professor Alvin Goldman teamed up with Vittorio Gallese from the Parma team to suggest that mirror neurons “underlie the process of ‘mind-reading,’” or serve as precursors to such a process.
Mind-reading isn’t as mystical as it sounds. It’s simply, as Goldman and Gallese describe in their paper, the “activity of representing specific mental states of others, for example, their perceptions, goals, beliefs, expectations, and the like.” It’s pretty much accepted that children are adept at mind-reading by the age of four—when they start to lie.
Before the discovery of mirror neurons, in other words, everybody knew that we could all project ourselves into other people’s perspectives: we just didn’t know how. Neuroscientists had placed their bets on the theory-theory; others proposed what’s called the simulation theory, which posited that our cognition of others’ experiences came from somehow replicating their actions or states internally. Mirror neurons unequivocally favored this approach.
This idea became the cornerstone of the enormous buildup of all things empathy. Psychologists, neuroscientists, businesspeople, laypeople, had found their holy grail: mirror neurons supposedly revealed how we took on the perspective of another—we simulated it, we felt it, directly in our brains. Everybody, it seemed, took up the cause, and this remains one major conceptualization of empathy today.
This multidisciplinary surge to find meaning in empathy seems to run in cycles. Every hundred years or so, whenever current intellectual trends tend to champion rational thought and individualism, someone comes up with a new definition or mechanism for empathy.
A little under two hundred years ago, before the word “empathy” had been coined, David Hume and Adam Smith wrote extensively about “sympathy.” That word didn’t have the same pitying undertones it carries now; it denoted an eighteenth-century definition of sympathy wherein Hume wrote about mirroring as an essential human trait, and Smith said that it went further, claiming that sympathizing required both imagination and understanding the context from which another’s emotion comes.
Hume and Smith were responding in part to the egoist philosophy of the day, promoted by people like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his “savage” man. The egoists claimed that men will act, first and foremost, in their own self-interest. Hume called this the “selfish hypothesis.” He looked for evidence that we’re more than mercenary, greedy beasts. For a while, newly celebrated sympathy found its way into all kinds of disciplines: physicians used the term to describe communication between organs, and the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for “somatic sympathy.” Novels shifted toward the sentimental—with all their swooning, tears, and melancholia, and readers loved the books for the sympathies they evoked.
Soon enough, however, the novels were mocked for their hysteria, and physicians were looking for more precise, less occult-sounding terminology. Sympathy fell out of favor.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the pendulum had swung back toward another “selfish hypothesis” with Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of the superman and his revolutionary belief that the only intentional part of human nature is the will to power. In art, abstract formalism ruled: artists and their admirers talked of the aesthetic appeal of shapes and proportions, and sought to develop a “science of forms.” But adherents to the Romantic Movement rebelled—they knew that art evoked feelings and that feelings mattered—and this was the fertile soil in which empathy again could bloom.
Empathy, the word, is barely a hundred years old, and it began in fact as an aesthetic concept. It was first written as Einfühlung, which means “feeling into.” That term was coined by a philosopher named Robert Vischer but popularized by another German philosopher, Theodor Lipps, who wrote dense, scholarly treatises on the supposed natural, inherent instinct humans have to translate aesthetic experiences into bodily ones. It works like this: say you’re looking at a Doric column. You don’t simply take in the dimensions of the column with your eyes, but you feel it with your body. Without literally moving, you’ll sense yourself as the Doric column, experiencing a straightening.
Lipps described this experience as quick, perhaps even unconscious, a notion that would later influence Sigmund Freud. Einfühlung, the idea that we instantaneously and unintentionally project ourselves into objects—and, as Lipps later theorized, into other people—was controversial but astonishingly far-reaching. By the beginning of the twentieth century (much like the beginning of the twenty-first), empathy was a force to be reckoned with, wending its way into a range of disciplines—aesthetics, of course, but also psychology, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. As part of the swing away from the rational and toward the experiential, numerous thinkers took up this concept of “feeling into” another. They recognized it intuitively as a lived experience but did battle over its precise purpose and application. Phenomenologists, for instance, were interested in empathy as a form of consciousness, but they took issue with Lipps’s insistence on fusion
, as it presumes the “other” is the same as “me.” Empathy is more useful, they thought, as a way to directly experience another’s emotions, but it serves another function too: empathy allows us to experience ways others understand us.
And now here we are again. Just before mirror neurons were discovered, Western philosophers had been mired in poststructuralism and postmodernism—battle cries against mushy universals and feel-good humanism. I came of age when postmodernism cast its hue over most humanities, and I still find its precepts freeing. But all that careful scrutiny of power and social constructions, all the identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s that made way for the more shifting or fluid identities of the 1990s and 2000s, can create a longing for something fixed and inherent. The cult of increasingly specialized and curated personal identities (as opposed to national identities, religious identities, and so on), and the glut of selfies showcased on social media, seem to be the “selfish hypothesis” of our day. And yet we’re shifting: French philosophers like Michel Foucault urged us into our identity politics; now contemporary pop philosophers like Alain de Botton command us to unplug from our Twitter podiums to tune in to deeper feelings. The pendulum is swinging back toward feeling, back toward love and the communal. Back toward empathy.