by Beam, Cris
Cournos thinks we need to train the parents to expect and withstand this outlook from foster kids. It’s hard work, so we need to offer better incentives. Caregivers and foster parents face a paradox after a child has been taken from a primary parent. On one hand, kids need attachment to develop properly, but on the other, after they’ve just lost a parent, they’re not ready. “Right up front we need a more therapeutic foster care model in which parents are trained to understand that when kids come to them they’re going to be distrustful, cut off, and too traumatized to make an attachment.”
In most places, children go into traditional foster care first, where they live with a foster parent who has undergone the requisite training classes. If the kids “fail out” of this (and that’s the language), they move on to therapeutic care, with parents who have had more training and are paid more money. Cournos thinks most kids should be placed in therapeutic foster care right away. Or, in other words, change the model: rather than waiting for the child to exhibit psychological or behavior problems, we should be investing money in training and paying the foster parents to help the kids manage their grief.
“If you’re earning $18 a day, and you’re on call for twenty-four hours, you’re getting less than a dollar an hour to be responsible for a child. That’s not a lot of money,” Cournos said, adding that, traditionally, child welfare has been primarily concerned that foster parents meet a child’s physical needs for food and shelter. “But physical survival without psychological survival doesn’t help a whole lot.”
I asked her about the oft-quoted notion that foster parents “do it for the money.” If agencies increased the paychecks to help foster parents do more attaching (or rather, to wait patiently for the kids to attach), could we end up with even worse parent applicants? People should be foster parents because they’re called to do it, because there’s a need, because they have big hearts—but not for something as base and mercenary as cash. The money’s just there to cover expenses, the argument goes, and if we offered foster parents a penny more, venality would trump humanity.
Cournos admitted that some people might, in fact, come forward only for the higher pay. But we need to shift the cultural attitude toward foster parents and treat them with more dignity. Part of this, she says, is providing a respectable wage.
Bruce Green, who has brought several foster kids into his home on DeKalb in addition to baby Allen, doesn’t see anything wrong with treating foster parenting as a job. “You have people who have been foster parenting for years, and there’s no health insurance, no life insurance, and if they stop, there’s no retirement,” he said. Bruce riled at the notion that giving parents more money and benefits would yield a more selfish crop of applicants. “There should be incentives to being a foster parent; there should be deals with cable, lights, and water. Being a foster parent should be something that’s earned.”
And more money, maybe even more than expanded agency recruitment, will draw a broader pool of foster parent applicants. “Right now,” Cournos said, “we can’t find enough good foster parents for all the kids. And is it worth it to continue putting them with bad foster parents?”
Cournos’s ideas—of providing foster parents with more money and training, and children with more continuity and respect—seem to be backed up by a recent study. Its authors compared an enhanced foster care system run by the Casey Family Programs in Oregon and Washington with standard public foster care in those states. The Casey program is endowed by a large grant, and the children involved are allotted about 60 percent more in funding than the kids in standard care. This means that the caseworkers are paid more and have more education and lighter caseloads than their counterparts in regular child welfare. Because the caseworkers at Casey manage half the number of children that the state employees do, they can better ensure that kids stay in one place and also provide more support services when home life gets rocky.
At the time of this study, the Casey foster parents were paid $100 more per month than the regular foster parents. Caseworkers provided access to other financial resources, as well as to tutoring, mental health care, and summer camps. There was far lower caseworker and parent turnover in the Casey group than there was in the state, so the kids generally had more stable attachments. They were also offered postsecondary job training and college scholarships, which the state foster kids were not.
The nearly five hundred kids in the study had entered foster care as adolescents between 1989 and 1998 and were evaluated in the early 2000s. The Casey kids, now adults, had experienced less than half the rate of depression and substance use, and about 70 percent the rate of anxiety. They also endured significantly fewer ulcers and cardiometabolic disorders. The authors, who were headed up by a team at Harvard, claimed this was the first study ever to look at the long-term effects of enhanced, or more thoroughly funded and supported, foster care.
Who’s to say where the seeds of positive influence were planted in these kids? Was it in the more stable parenting, or in the therapy they received? Perhaps the promise of college, and the tutoring. Perhaps having a consistent and available caseworker made a difference. In any case, “front-loading the system,” as Francine calls it—or allotting more money and services for all children as soon as they enter care—is a valid and oft-considered idea.
When you ask the foster kids themselves what they want, they tend to focus on the parents. The kids I’ve talked to have generally wished their foster parents were more compassionate toward their moods and frustrations, and they all hated getting sent back to the agency. Mary Keane, the adoptive mom of Arelis and the other Rosario kids, runs foster parent training and recruitment classes all over New York City. At one of the recruitment nights, she had gathered up a few older foster kids to talk about what they wanted from their parents.
“Basically, I just want someone to understand me, and support me,” one of the girls said plainly from the front of the room. The girl had dirty blond hair, with streaks of purple washed through, and she smiled patiently at the roomful of adults, perched at the edge of their chairs. The adults were more specific about their desires.
“I’m looking for a chorus,” one older woman in the audience said eagerly. “I’m a singer in my church, and I’d love to have a houseful of children to sing with me.”
A man in his forties, who was looking forward to becoming a single dad, said, “All I’m looking for is respect.”
Mary told him it was likely he wouldn’t get that, at least not at first. “They’re not going to meet the parents’ needs—to be appreciated or anything else. Not until they’re grown,” Mary told me later. She was speaking specifically about teenagers, famous for their obduracy whether they’re in care or not. Foster teens can be particularly rough, I thought, so I asked her: Why on earth would anybody sign up for this?
“Altruism,” Mary said, and suddenly we were back to foster care argument number three: you become a foster parent because it’s the right thing to do. Mary has been a foster and adoptive parent for over ten years, and she’s taken in more than twenty-five teenagers and young adults. She has never sent one of them back. She said she parented all of her kids only because she felt the pull to “make a difference in the world.”
“Parents should do it because the kids need. Otherwise they’re going to be disappointed,” Mary said. More money, more training, all of these things would be a boost, but foster parenting, by definition, means personal sacrifice. “You do it because you want to help a kid, and because you enjoy seeing them grow. The gratitude for what you’ve done might come later. Like after five years of hell.”
TWO
HOLD
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
—James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”
6
Surge Control
WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN years old, a child named Lei was removed from her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown and placed
with a Dominican family in Brooklyn who spoke little English. Lei lived with the family until she was eighteen, by which point she could swear a mean streak of Spanish curse words, if nothing else. The foster mom never learned any English or Chinese to communicate with Lei, but she had provided her with the bottom bunk in a bedroom full of other girls, she had fed her, and each month she had handed over the clothing allowance provided by the state. Lei wasn’t loved (or even talked to), but she also wasn’t abused, so her foster home was fine. No reason for Lei to look for something better, because she could have gotten worse.
There are so many crises in foster care—the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse—that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it’s not a crisis it’s not a problem.
Despite ASFA legislation, which requires that foster children either be adopted or go back to their parents within fifteen months, the average foster child in this country has been in care for a little over two years, though this has come down some. In New York, it can be even longer: more than a third of the kids have been in care for three or more years, and a major investigation of ACS kids who had been in foster care for more than two years showed that their average stay was nearly five and a half years.
Lei, with her five-year run with the family who couldn’t talk to her, was entirely average. So was her status as a teenager: about a third of all foster kids nationwide are teens. And where the system swells, it also tends to falter; it doesn’t manage the numbers, or the needs, of its older children very well. But where Lei broke with the averages and the reduced expectations of her placement and the system was this: Lei went to college.
“You just have to meet this girl,” Lei’s caseworker, Tolightha Smalls, had gushed to me. In her ten years as a caseworker for adolescents, Ms. Smalls had known only two kids who left for a college or university; many hadn’t graduated from high school. Nationally, somewhere between 3 and 11 percent of former foster kids go on to get their BAs (depending on what adult age group you poll) compared to 28 percent of the general population.
So I went to meet Lei at a Starbucks, on the edge of Chinatown, where she often went to hang out with her friends. Lei was twenty-two by then, had short, boyish hair, and was wearing green army pants and a plain T-shirt. Somehow I recognized her right away when I walked in; she looked young, and a little tough, and entirely comfortable sitting alone.
The first thing Lei did was pull out a photo album from her high school years. Most of the pages were empty, and the handful of pictures were of her friends—some were from school, but most were from church, where Lei hung out on weekends for the youth groups. Lei had only one picture of her foster family, and she dutifully pointed out each child, and the mom, as though she were naming employees at a job she once held a long time ago. Said Lei, “When I left her house, the mom never bothered to call. I felt like, ‘Screw you, man. I’m ready for my life.’ I felt like she did it for the money. What can I feel?”
Like many kids I’ve talked to over the years, Lei asked me to change her name; foster care is a major reputation stain. But unlike the others who tried to hide the stigma from their friends, Lei was looking to protect her biological family. “My friends knew I was a foster kid; I was always open about it,” she said. Between sentences, Lei sneered a fierce “mmm-hmmm,” like a tic. “I feel like if I can’t deal with my past, then I can’t go any further in life, mmm-hmmm.”
Lei lived in China until she was eleven, when her parents sent her and her brother to New York to stay with an aunt and grandmother and the aunt’s daughter. At that point, Lei didn’t know any English. Both her aunt and grandmother had been destabilized by their own moves to New York; her aunt was angry and violent, and her grandmother was deeply depressed and occasionally paranoid. Lei described her new home, simply, as “the shithole.”
Lei survived the shithole for two years, but when the aunt kicked the kids out of the house and into the street and the grandmother attempted suicide, ACS was called in for an emergency removal. Lei’s brother was a legal adult by then, but as Lei and her cousin were zipped away in a cop car, she said, “I felt relief. My grandma was mentally abusing me; she always told me I was bad, and that someone was after me.”
I would learn that Lei approached many of her struggles philosophically, rather than with a quick bolt of action. The signature quote at the bottom of every e-mail Lei sent read, “Knowledge without humanity is ignorance.” Lei tried to understand her complicated family, which spanned two continents, with humanity and empathy.
This isn’t to say Lei wasn’t angry with her lot; she was. She sucked her teeth and raised her eyebrows with contempt when I asked her about the foster agency she was placed with for eight years, which was closed in 2005, primarily for accepting hundreds of thousands of government dollars for supposed programs it never ran. “Miracle Makers? To tell you the truth, they were crap. They didn’t do anything to prepare us,” Lei said, with her Chinese accent, but the intonation of a Dominican girl on any tough street in New York—a vestige of her time in care.
“I took advantage of everything Miracle Makers had to offer, mmm-hmmm, and Ms. Smalls and my law guardian were awesome,” Lei said. (A law guardian, like a guardian ad litem, represents the child.) It was her social worker, who believed in her, and her law guardian, who funneled her cash for the SAT tests and college applications, who paved her road to college. “They were the only two people I invited to my graduation from college.”
Lei not only went to college and graduated in four years, but she went to an Ivy League school, where the acceptance rate is around 25 percent. Could that accomplishment be traced back to a few good agency hires? Was it because Lei lived in one, albeit substandard, foster placement for her entire time in care and didn’t suffer the trauma of transferring from home to home to home? Or was it something simply about Lei’s tenacity or courage, inherent and ineffable, and hers alone from birth?
“The reason I was able to survive all this was because of my childhood, mmm-hmmm,” Lei said, explaining that her parents sent her to the United States in the hope of better education and opportunities for her. Back in China, Lei’s mother ran a tailoring business, and Lei learned to be friendly and outgoing from her. Lei’s father, she said, protected and adored her and even babied her somewhat. They both encouraged her in school. “We came from a pretty good family, and I had a childhood, a stable childhood, up until eleven.”
Lei cried the first few nights in the shelter, before ACS found her a home, but she did it secretly. “I called my brother and said, ‘I’ll be all right. Tell Mom not to worry about me.’ Before I came here, I was a daddy’s girl. But after that, I learned to be tough.”
And while the toughness got Lei through five years in a home with strangers, the isolation was tempered by the knowledge that foster care wasn’t her fault. “I never felt like I had been abandoned. I was angry—like ‘Why me?’—but I understood why my mom had to make that tough decision, and we were always in contact over the phone. I never felt like a child nobody wanted,” Lei said.
Lei’s cousin, who was exactly her age and placed in the same Dominican family, didn’t fare as well. “My cousin still has a very hard time telling people she was in foster care because it was her mom, and for me, it was my aunt. My cousin has very low self-esteem because of it, mmm-hmmm,” Lei said. After leaving the family, the two lived together in a foster apartment for a few years while Lei went to college and her cousin simply aged out, the way most foster kids do. “I saw a future, because I know why my mom sent me and my brother to this country. Because of this, I felt like I was destined to go to college.”
And this may be the critical difference between Lei and other kids in child welfare: Lei didn’t carry the crucial, crushing belief that foster care was her fault.
Dr. Eliana Gil
has worked in child abuse and prevention for nearly forty years. She’s the author of more than a dozen books on the subject, for both professionals and lay audiences, including Outgrowing the Pain: A Book for and About Adults Abused as Children. She currently directs the Gil Center for Healing and Play in Fairfax, Virginia, where she and her team observe and assess children for signs of abuse and make referrals to child welfare. For her doctoral dissertation, Eliana interviewed one hundred kids in foster care, asking them why they thought they were there. Ninety percent said it was because of something they did.
This was in 1973, but Eliana says kids are no different today: she’s seen hundreds, and mostly they believe that they’re to blame for ending up in child welfare. It’s part of the wiring of childhood: they know themselves as the axis around which events and mishaps and parents and everything else will spin.
And the teenagers get an extra boost to their self-loathing because once they’re placed in care, nobody seems to want them. They’re unlike the babies, who are the most likely to attract adoptive interest, or the young kids, who signify innocence or easy compliance in foster parents’ minds. Forty-nine percent of all teenagers have to be placed in institutions or group homes (as opposed to just 9 percent of children between one and five), largely because there aren’t enough families who will take them.
Teenagers represent the largest segment of child welfare for several reasons. First, they’re the hardest to adopt out, so they often have only two means of escape: return home or grow too old for the system entirely. Second, they can enter foster care through a traditional abuse scenario in their family of origin, but their parents can also put teenagers in foster care, if they decide they’re just too unmanageable to deal with. Finally, juvenile delinquents are often made wards of the state and thus piled onto the foster care rolls too. Add it all together, and more than a quarter of all foster kids nationwide are fifteen or older.
