by Cris Beam
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, an
d 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.
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 s
omething 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.”