To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (15 page)

The federal government, as it rose to meet the public outcry against “battered child syndrome,” embodied this stereotype with its funding mechanism. It opened a new line of foster care funding to states directly through AFDC, or welfare. In 1969, every state had to enroll; to receive the federal dollars for their foster kids, they had to prove each child was poor enough to receive welfare,
thus cementing the notion that the poor (and often black) parents were the child abusers. There are federal monies available for abused kids from wealthier families, but the same funding system operates still, and the bulk of any agency's budget is for AFDC-eligible children. We fund the treatment for the abuse where we believe it's happening, and we find the abuse where the funding is.

And that's pretty much where we are today. Since the sixties, foster care has undergone surges in size (such as with the crack epidemic in the eighties) and contractions (after Clinton's 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act). And it has gone through loose swings in overall philosophies—from those that favor biological family preservation to those that favor removing children at the first whiff of harm—but this is a system plagued with a history of deep racism and classism and the state-sanctioned separation of family members. We've been building a city for children on a sinking foundation.

 

Shawn Wilson's friend Bruce isn't alone in his litany of failed placements. In fact, most matches do fail: about 70 percent of all foster children in this country who have been in care more than two years have been moved three or more times.
This sobering statistic may be due to child welfare's history and the sinking foundation, and it may be due to all kinds of poor management and low funding and scrambled priorities and on and on. Regardless, for the child, it's a statistic with deep and lasting ramifications: each move means another ruptured attachment, another break in trust, another experience of being unwanted or unloved.

 

The former deputy director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute is also a former foster child. Her name is Francine Cournos, and she says it's normal for kids to behave the way they did at Bruce's. It's normal for them to act as if they don't care about what you're giving them, to act as if they don't want to connect, because basically they can't. This is what we should be training foster parents to understand in their ten weeks of classes.

I first met Cournos at Columbia University, where she was giving a talk about her life in care and a memoir she wrote called
City of One
.

“Trauma forecloses grief,” Francine Cournos said to the audience, mostly composed of social work students. She told us that she was devastated by her mother's death but not traumatized. The trauma came from her placement in foster care. “Trauma shuts you down, so you can't grieve. Nobody thinks of children in foster care as bereaved, but they are.”

Now Francine is a doctor and professor of psychiatry at Columbia, and she's a small white woman in her sixties with short white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She spent nine years in psychotherapy twice a week followed by eighteen years in psychoanalysis, four days a week, to access the grief about her mother; before that, she said, she didn't feel much of anything at all.

Or rather, she could feel the suffering of her life, in parts, but she couldn't feel joy. “After I was placed into foster care, I could no longer connect to anybody new. I was so numbed out and I would say that was probably the single most disabling symptom because you're numbed to pleasure more than you are to pain,” she said to me later, from her office at 168th Street and Riverside in New York. We met during a blizzard, and the world outside Francine's window was an impenetrable white. Inside, two couches faced one another over a glass table that held a bowl of candies: Tootsie Pops, Jolly Ranchers, Mary Janes. One wall showcased an oversize rug; the other was crowded with books. Francine pulled an electric teakettle from under her desk and offered me tea. “There's something about betrayal that makes you feel more traumatized—that you trusted somebody to behave in a certain way and they behaved in the very opposite way. And that is, I think, more devastating than somebody dying.”

Francine and I sipped our tea and watched the blizzard. She continued, “If your spouse dies you don't say, ‘Here's a new husband' the next day. But in foster care, that's the expectation: you know, ‘I'm your new mom so love me.'” In her case, an uncle contacted child welfare after Francine's father, and then mother, died, because he himself didn't have any extra beds. A foster mom in Long Island accepted both Francine and her sister, but it was rocky for years: the foster mom loved Francine and expected Francine to love her back. Francine couldn't betray her mother's memory like that, and she never understood why her own uncle didn't step up; for him, she would have slept on the floor. Before they met Mary Keane, the Rosario kids felt the same cold chill toward foster parents—as they too had biological family all over New York who didn't come through. These foster parents were strangers; why would the kids soften up enough to love, or even form an alliance, if their own blood had cut them free? I once met a foster girl with “Matthew 27:46” tattooed on the inside of her arm. I had to look it up. It comes from the moment Jesus is nailed to the cross, and he cries out to his father, “Why have you forsaken me?”

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

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

W
HEN 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.