To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (14 page)

This is why Bruce started thinking about adoption. And it happened to converge with the foster care presentations at his church, which focused on the children's needs—and what the church members could provide. Bruce started to pray about it. “God told me, ‘I didn't place you in this huge home to be consumed with yourself and all your toys. To whom much is given, much is required.'”

So Bruce got licensed as a foster parent, with the intention to adopt. The first two boys were simply a shock to Bruce's system: their first overnight visit was at Christmastime, and Bruce wore himself out doling out presents and driving to the movies and the ice rink. Unfortunately, the boys' social worker told them Bruce wanted to adopt them, but Bruce drove them back to the group home after Christmas and never saw them again. The next big chance was a baby, very much like Shawn's son, Noble: he was a newborn, and Bruce named him Carrington. After ten months, Bruce and Carrington had bonded deeply and the county called with an ultimatum: the mother's rights had been terminated, and if Bruce wanted to keep him, he would have to adopt. Otherwise, the county wanted the baby back, as Carrington was still young enough to place in a real adoptive home.

“Here again was the pressure to make a decision,” Bruce said. Because Carrington was under a year old, he wasn't considered “special needs,” so, if Bruce adopted him, he wouldn't receive any assistance from the state. He would have to raise him entirely on his own. “If this had happened three months later, I would have continued to get fifteen bucks a day and Medicaid until he was eighteen years old. But in this case, everything would have stopped. Here's your baby. Congratulations. Nothing else from the state of Georgia.”

Bruce said members of his church offered to pay for Carrington's health insurance; they would collect, they would help out. But he refused. “I am not a charity case. This child was the state of Georgia's. If they wanted me to have this kid, they should be able to do something to help me.” The state couldn't, or wouldn't, and so, Bruce said, “I just ended up severing all ties with him.”

And the state kept sending Bruce kids; there's always a shortage of college-educated, financially stable foster parents. There's always a shortage of dads, especially African American dads. And technically, Bruce was providing the only things required of foster parents: food, shelter, and medical and educational attention. But while Bruce could have adopted many of the thirty-plus children who cycled through his home in under four years, none ever seemed quite right.

Bruce pegs most of his troubles with his placements on the state of Georgia, though there were problems with the kids too. He's sent back babies after twenty-four hours because they cried all night, and he's sent back children who were too wild or destructive. “If I have a kid in my home who's destroying my home and not respecting my rules, I just can't do it. I have a huge wall of plasma TVs or whatever, and DFS [Division of Family and Children Services] is not going to replace them, so I can't have this kid in my house,” he explained.

I asked Bruce about retraumatization. He knew that many of the kids who came to him had been badly abused and were acting out to test him and their new surroundings. I suggested that sending them back to the county would only harm them further, or deepen their sense of being unwanted.

“There may be some truth to that,” Bruce said. “But the other side of it, for me, as a single parent trying to keep my sanity, is this: if I lose it, I'm no good to myself or to the child, and I have to do what's best for myself and my home. And if DFS is not going to give me the resources to facilitate that, then it's your problem.”

Bruce has heard about services like wraparound care, where a child might get tutoring or daycare or therapy—all kinds of services in addition to what the foster parent can provide. But so far, Bruce says, he's seen none of it. When he takes in a hard kid, all the hardship falls on him. “If I have to leave my office because a troubled child that I've placed in the school district nearest my home is now cutting up in school, at least DFS could go pick him up, provide some resources. But no, I'm the one that gets the call,” Bruce said. He's struggled with the fact that he's sent so many kids back, but, he said, “My truth is, if you're not going to help me, then it's not my place to put myself in peril. It's your problem—it's your problem.”

In a way, Bruce's confusion about who bears the responsibility for an abused child's problems makes a kind of historical sense. Bruce, and other foster parents like him, may not know the history of child welfare precisely, but they do often know that government aid has been used to both help and control various segments of the population at various points in history. This legacy is a heavy one, and understandably it can engender the contradictory feelings of both suspicion and entitlement. With foster care, it's no wonder everybody's pointing fingers in different directions.

Foster care is actually the fascinating, if sad, culmination of
three
separate lines of social policy—toward poverty, racial difference, and child abuse—finally braiding together in the middle and end of the twentieth century. Each one of these historical lines helped form our current notion of the proper family—and the improper family that should get broken up, their children sent to foster parents like Bruce in Georgia or Bruce in Brooklyn. Because the “improper” families are so disproportionately poor and black or Hispanic, there's an understandable—if often unspoken—friction inherent in aligning in any way with the institution that “destroys families,” even as a foster or adoptive parent. It's just uncomfortable all around.

But that's partly because the history—along all three lines of social policy—is so damning. As it is with a single dysfunctional family, there may be no way for the country to wipe the slate clean and start over. There will always be the shadow.

When this country was in its infancy, poor, indigent, or otherwise incapable families were cared for by their local community governments, and it was the white families who garnered such assistance; they were the perceived community members and were funded via taxes. The assistance was called “outdoor relief,” and it came in the form of grocery orders, fuel, doctor fees, and small amounts of cash, delivered directly to the family home.
By the turn into the nineteenth century, state aid shifted to almshouses, and the white poor were increasingly taken away from their communities rather than helped from within. As the nineteenth century progressed, a breed of “child savers” cropped up—emboldened with the mission of “rescuing” the children of impoverished families. (At this point in history, no one was considering the biological parents' feelings or experiences.) Child savers were private citizens, mostly middle- and upper-class white women, who created orphanages and worked with churches and synagogues to find other families with whom these poor children could live, thus creating the first foster homes.
African Americans didn't receive any state aid and had to create their own institutions (there was a Colored Orphans Asylum in New York as early as 1836).

Wealthier white families, generally, were spared the scrutiny of authorities; as long as they weren't indigent, families were seen as precious and untouchable units wherein the man was head of household and could do what he liked with his wife and kids. (There was even a “Stubborn Child Statute” in Massachusetts that allowed a father to execute a son for misbehaving.
) After all, in the mid-1800s and as late as 1880, children could contribute nearly half of a household's income in a two-parent family. Kids would sell flowers or matches, or scavenge for wood or coal, or even work in factories.

The children of the urban poor were removed at times for physical violence, and at others simply because their parents had unrecognizable parenting styles. This was a time of major immigration, and foreign parents were often mistrusted; kids could be removed for their own “protection” from strange, un-American ways. For instance, at the time when Italian immigration was increasing, garlic was considered a powerful aphrodisiac. Mothers who cooked with it were deemed unfit, as they neglected their daughters' decency.
Many child welfare associations, like the one in New York, were private, but some had police authority to remove children from their homes at will.
New York State, in fact, outlawed any inspection of these associations, reasons for child removal, or the kids' treatment (usually in religious-run institutions or orphanages) once removed.
Biological parents, including those who cooked with garlic, had few rights.

Immigration laws of 1924 curbed the flow of newcomers into Ellis Island and changed the face of the urban poor. African Americans were moving north after the war and filling the cities, and these families became the focus of child welfare, post–World War I.
In rural communities, a large family was desirable and culturally expected, as more hands could handle more crops, bring home pay from more jobs, and so on. But as these families migrated to the cities, they were viewed with suspicion, especially by the middle classes, where fewer children were the norm. Having too many “dependents” was reckless—a view that bleeds through foster care rhetoric today.

Controlling this recklessness came mostly in the form of institutionalization; the orphan trains that had been moving thousands of (mostly white) urban kids out of New York City and off to country homes died out by 1929, and “caring agencies” had cropped up in New York and elsewhere to place children in orphanages. But these caring agencies were private, and mostly religious, institutions—and they were thus free to discriminate widely. In 1923, for instance, a census report shows 1,070 child-caring agencies in thirty-one northern states; 711 of these were for white children, 60 were for black kids, and the rest were for others or a mix of the two.
Children of color were being removed from their families, but there weren't enough places to put them, and the kids were crammed into overcrowded, dangerous, and unsanitary institutions.

 

Along a separate track, in 1911, welfare as we know it was first established in Illinois.
Originally called Mothers' Pension Programs, this public aid was set up primarily for white widows to be able to raise their children in “suitable homes”; to qualify for such money was deemed a sign of respectability, requiring, for instance, home inspections and character evaluations from neighbors and clergy.
By 1935, every state except Georgia and South Carolina had a pension program, or what came to be known as a “mothers' aid law.”
In 1931, the Department of Labor conducted the only survey on the demographics of “mothers' aid” recipients: 96 percent were white, 3 percent were black, and 1 percent were of “other racial extraction.”
Mostly, states didn't employ mothers' aid programs in areas with large African American populations, and the subjectively imposed “suitable homes” statute allowed states to discriminate widely. Although many families had their kids removed because of their poverty, some poor parents, namely, single white mothers, were allowed to keep their children at home and were given the help to do so.

In 1930, the White House held a conference at which the director of research at the National Urban League described systematized discrimination in subsidized programs. Aside from the mothers' pension programs, he said, infant and newborn care was mostly for whites. And despite the fact that more black mothers worked than whites, daycare provisions were provided by and large for white children.
Legislators finally recognized the need for parity with the famous Social Security Act of 1935 and the AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) program, wherein states were to receive matching funds from the federal government to provide relief for needy families. While superficially an equal-opportunity program, AFDC eligibility was again subjectively determined. Each state could “impose such . . . eligibility requirements—as to means, moral character, etc.—as it [saw] fit.”
Aside from restricting access based on a “suitable home” or “moral character,” during the late thirties and forties, southern states determined that “blacks could get by with less” and would cut their funding off during cotton-picking season.
Even in Washington, DC, social workers had a two-tiered welfare system—one amount for blacks, another for whites.

This is where racism and foster care begin to wind together. Poverty is and always has been the one constant in child welfare: the poorer you are, the more likely it is your child will be taken into custody. But in early times, poor white kids were the only kids marked for provisions; they were the ones whose families got outdoor relief; they were the kids, by and large, who were sent on orphan trains, or placed in almshouses, terrible as these options were. But as the country systematically made African Americans poorer, we were about to widen the lens on the children viewed as needy or abused.

 

During the civil rights movement, activists began demanding access to the public monies they'd been paying into with their taxes but had been steadily denied to them. In 1961, the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) changed the “suitable home” rule. If states wanted matching funds from the federal government, he said, they could no longer discriminate. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 strengthened this decision, and racist eligibility practices in welfare administration were effectively dismantled.

And with that, welfare offices surged with applications and buckled under pressure to comply with new federal regulations. The public perception of public assistance began to shift from that of a noble and needy mother to that of a welfare queen with too many kids,
another idea that threads through foster care rhetoric today.

As the public face of welfare changed from white to black, so did the face of foster care. At precisely the time blacks qualified for welfare, child abuse was “discovered” by Kempe and his x-ray data. It was a perfect storm: for the past century, state-sanctioned foster care had been about “rescuing” (albeit mostly white) poor children from their parents, but now black families, with their access to the AFDC money, were the recognized poor. African American families were prime suspects for child maltreatment and their children the targets for foster care.