by Beam, Cris
We know the ways the system fails this population, in part, by tracking what happens to them right after they “age out,” or graduate, from foster care. By age nineteen, 30 percent of the boys have been incarcerated, and the girls are already 2.5 times more likely than their nonfostered peers to have been pregnant. Within four years, 51 percent are unemployed. Within an average of six years, a third have acquired a mental health problem like major depression, anxiety, or substance abuse. Ultimately, according to some figures, 30 percent of the homeless in America were once in foster care.
“Find me someone in one of these houses who wants a teenager,” Bruce Green said to me one day as we were driving around his Brooklyn neighborhood. He waved his arm out of the minivan in the general direction of a bunch of large apartment buildings. “They’re sexually motivated, they’re rebellious, they’re outspoken, very lazy, dirty, self-centered, and when something goes down, it goes down BIG.” Here Bruce paused, seemingly reflecting on his own frustration. “Compound that with the possibility of theft and destruction. Teenagers have no respect for the property they didn’t pay for.”
Bruce has a good sense of humor. He calls me Chris Rock and he laughs when he catches any of his teenage foster kids with hard-core music on their headphones. “Whaddya want us to play, Dad? Alicia Keys?” they whine. “That’d be fine,” he answers with a smile, snapping the headphones away.
Bruce and Allyson Green are polar opposites of what Lei experienced in foster care; the Greens didn’t expect to wind up with a house full of teenagers, but once they got them, they rallied. The house on DeKalb was more than a roof and walls: it was a permanent home for a growing family. And once the teenagers came, it was a growing family with a mission.
Their agency, Edwin Gould, kept calling and, perhaps because the Greens just kept accepting the kids, sent them six teenagers in the course of a year. One of the teenagers was autistic and previously violent; several were being treated for depression, trauma, and mental illness; others had learning disabilities and developmental delays, truancy records. All, Bruce said, were “special needs”; all were “hard to place.”
Caseworkers, famously overstressed and underresourced, try to match up parental interests, cultures, and their preferred child type with the kids in their caseloads, but often their caseloads look like disgruntled kids in a high school lunchroom. And because adolescents are the hardest to place, the Greens must have looked like a feast for the starving: they had a teenager of their own; they had kinship-fostered, and then adopted, a family member; they’d fostered a troubled toddler; they had an enormous home with eight bedrooms; and two parents—a mom and a dad—were engaged with the kids. Bruce told me that of the 450 homes licensed with Edwin Gould at that time, only four had dads.
Both Bruce and Allyson were horrified by the stories their new foster children told them about the multiple placements they’d endured. In some cases, the foster kids weren’t given enough to eat or were fed from different cupboards from the rest of the family. In others, they were verbally or even physically abused.
“Sometimes where they go is as bad as where they came from,” Allyson said sadly as she and Bruce talked with me in their living room. The kids were all hiding out in their bedrooms because we were in front of the biggest television and the kitchen was occupied by a math tutor and one of the teenagers. “The foster parents need to be more educated—not just this little mock training that they do. The agency is so busy looking for somewhere to put the child that they don’t really evaluate a lot of these foster homes.”
In truth, we don’t know much about foster parent demographics nationwide; most information is anecdotal rather than cumulative or comprehensive. The largest study was a sample of a little more than 1 percent of all foster parents—and it found that they were more likely to be older, have less education, and live below the poverty line than caregivers in the general population. They were also half as likely to provide stimulating environments for their kids.
Bruce said a lot of foster parents he knew didn’t properly supervise their kids. “These children have had freedom since they were twelve or fourteen, roaming the streets until four in the morning.” And this is why he shifted his vision from wanting younger children and became excited about helping the teenagers. Bruce knew what happened to young adults with too many distractions and too little discipline; every day cop cars pulled up at the projects across the street. When he fostered teenagers, he could stem the tide just a bit.
“I tell you, I think they love the environment here,” Bruce said, explaining that all the foster kids first resisted, but then relaxed into the rules of the Green household. The basic rules were these: every child had to come home directly after school; no going out on weekend nights (even for the teenagers over eighteen); and on Saturdays, after chores, the kids could have free time, as long as they were in the door by 8:00 p.m.
Generally, Bruce had to play bad cop to Allyson’s good: she gave them the nurturing and religious instruction, and Bruce took away their television privileges when they didn’t come home right after school. But they both explained why the rules were important. “We had a family meeting on Sunday and the kids were under the impression that the rules were about right now,” Bruce said, smoothing his hand across the top of his shaved head. “But it’s not about right now. Ultimately, there are a million and one rules outside of here that if you don’t follow, you’ll lose your job. If you don’t follow them, you’ll go to jail. Ten years from now, what you’re going to have are these past experiences to help you.”
Allyson liked taking teenagers in particular because each one reminded her of an aspect of herself. “I used to lie, for example—say I’m going to the library, but where am I? With my boyfriend. It’s the same behavior these children come back and do,” she said, revving up for storytelling, her Belizean accent coming on thick. Allyson herself was raised almost entirely by her grandmother, so she handled her kids with the same love and firm determination—a mix of spiritual grace and resolute work ethic—that her grandmother showed her. “You see a lot of you. That is why you cannot judge them. I just have to be understanding and teach them. I look deep into myself—to be patient and nurturing. I say, ‘I see what you’re doing and where you’re going with this. This is not the right way, but eventually you’re going to get it.’”
The family didn’t earn enough to get by on the $500 and change they received each month per foster child, so Bruce worked nights as an electrician for the train company, for $80,000 a year. In the daytime, he was carting around and parenting the kids. He didn’t get much sleep. Then again, neither did Allyson, who was responsible for cooking and cleaning and parenting too. At night, she shared her bed with any number of children who ended up climbing in.
And the agency didn’t help. Once they’ve sent a child, both Bruce and Allyson claim, they pretty much wash their hands of him. “All the goods and services we tracked down for our children ourselves,” Allyson said, ticking off that each child was enrolled in a charter school; most had after-school enrichment activities; many went to therapy; many had tutoring; and much of this was free or provided through the state. “Nobody held our hands through any of this stuff.”
Bruce was busy trying to get the agency to make even small changes—such as providing the family with portrait vouchers at Sears whenever a new child came into the home, to make her feel more welcome. The Greens have pictures of all of their kids framed on the living room wall. “Given what they pay facilities to house the children,” Bruce said (and it can cost five times more to keep a child in a group home facility than in a family home like his), “I would say the city owes at least that much.”
One day, I went with Bruce and Allyson and their biological son Jaleel to something their agency did provide: a Saturday afternoon class on family emergency preparedness. But what was supposed to be a quick lecture ended up being a long, de facto support group for foster moms. They complained about what was most difficult in their liv
es: the teenagers.
When we walked into the conference room at Edwin Gould, Bruce was the only man in attendance. I was the only white person. Everybody else was an African American woman, and they were mostly older, parenting their foster children alone. They fit the demographic of the families in their neighborhood (single moms of color) but not that of foster families nationally, where there aren’t enough minority foster families to meet the disproportionate number of minority children in care.
The fluorescent lights audibly buzzed as a middle-aged woman in a headscarf and jeans called the meeting to order, apologizing that the firefighter who was supposed to explain emergency procedures for foster families hadn’t arrived yet, but there were still orders of business to discuss. An older woman in a flowered blazer and fishing hat leaned back to listen, and another one took a call on her cell phone. Foster care meetings are one place where people won’t turn off their phones; there can always be a crisis at home.
“OK, so there are a whole lot of things being put in place with this I.O.C.,” the leader started in. Bruce leaned over and whispered that she was a parent advocate, meaning someone who lost her kids to foster care but eventually got them back. She advocates for biological parents in the system but also does crossover trainings, like this one, to help foster parents understand what it’s like on the other side. “One new rule is, you have to honor the ten days. You can’t just drop a kid off at the agency anymore with a garbage bag all filled up with clothes.”
I.O.C. stands for “Improved Outcomes for Children,” and it was part of a new set of standards and rules that the city’s then-new commissioner of ACS, John B. Mattingly, established in March 2007. His idea was to streamline operations somewhat, to incorporate consensus building from the bottom up with the “family team conferencing” (essentially giving biological parents more of a say), and to make sure kids get moved around less. And part of this meant foster families couldn’t just dump their wards as easily as they used to. They had to wait ten days.
“I understand when it’s not a match,” the parent advocate said, responding to the wave of murmurs rising up in the conference room. People were asking about the most difficult pairings—what’s a parent to do when a teenager continually breaks curfew, skips school, swears at you, is all-around nasty? “To be honest, if you don’t want my child in your home, I don’t want my child in your home, and at the end of the day, they’re still mine. But for now, you’ve got to honor the ten-day rule.”
This meant that rather than loading up the trunk with a child’s music, socks, photos, and T-shirts and leaving him at the curb of the agency (and most kids I know have experienced this), the parents had to make a warning call. They had to tell their social worker of their plans to “terminate” and then sit on it for ten days, during which time (the thinking went) the family may be able to work it out.
Of course, the foster moms willing to give up a Saturday for training at Edwin Gould were among the more dedicated on the rosters, and still they were worried. In lieu of the firefighter, they vented about their own emergencies. One woman in sweats and gold jewelry said the social workers were never available when she called, and if she ever did get through, they talked to her “like you’re lower than they are.” Others nodded in agreement.
Another mother in a white T-shirt and a headband was concerned and angry about the turn her foster daughter was taking. “Our relationship as mother and daughter has been going quite a distance,” the woman said. There were several children in the room, some foster, some biological, all under twelve years old. They were well behaved and listening to the story, or picking at the breakfast the agency provided. “Everything’s been fine, until lately; her attitude’s been changing. She lost three cell phones. She’s been coming home later. And now”—the mother paused for dramatic effect—“she tells me she’s gay!”
Several women in the room gasped. One covered her mouth and threw back her head. Another said, “Oh, no!” and another whispered, “Oh, Lord.” Everybody looked distraught, and the foster mom nodded miserably, her eyes wide.
The parent advocate lifted a hand to quiet the room. Her hoop earrings bobbed as she shook her head solemnly. “Remember,” she said. “This could happen with a biological child.”
The implication, of course, was that you can’t take a biological child back to the agency with a bag of clothes. Stitched into every foster care arrangement, as every foster kid over ten will tell you, is that he can be shipped out, ten-day notice or no. It’s a threat foster parents use, sometimes, as a punishment.
“They don’t equip foster parents with enough knowledge to deal with these children,” Bruce told me later, in the car. (The firefighter had never shown up.) Allyson lamented the parenting classes she and Bruce were forced to take, taught by caseworkers asking rote questions from photocopied packets. The questions proposed anecdotal scenarios that Allyson found ridiculous, she said, such as: “If your child was burned by cigarettes in his former home and he saw cigarettes while in your care, what would you do?”
“It was all simple common sense, common knowledge,” Allyson said. Instead of hiring case managers to run the trainings, or parent advocates for the supplemental meetings, she wished they had psychologists. “A lot of these children have mental illnesses, and we need doctors telling us how to structure their lives to best deal with the diseases.”
But foster parents don’t get much training, and they have to come up with their own structure on the fly. Bruce and Allyson’s system was one that may seem very strict from the outside, but it was one that worked to manage all their children’s disparate temperaments and background experiences equally. It was fair: there were no curfews because everybody (biological children included) had to be home straight after school. It wasn’t punitive, because the rules were formed around good morals rather than as responses to bad behavior. And it wasn’t too lonely: even if all the kids were stuck inside, there were always ten of them stuck together.
And there was a loophole. If the kids could find some positive, extracurricular activity, like a job or a sport or an extra class, they could get it approved by Allyson and come home later. The loophole had a double-edged benefit: the kids felt more freedom and they were doing something good for themselves. Kids buy a juice for the flavor; moms buy it for the vitamins. So this is what they did.
Both Sekina, the biological daughter with the crazy hair, and Chanel, the first teenage foster daughter to arrive at the Greens’, had jobs after school. Tonya, the second foster daughter, went to therapy a few times a week and sometimes to tutoring. Fatimah, the third, played sports and ran on her track team every day and often on the weekends. Russell, the fourth foster child, was autistic and didn’t like breaking his routine or leaving the house very much, so the rules weren’t a problem for him. Jaleel, a biological son, was a nationally ranked chess player and stayed out for chess clubs and training and sometimes got to travel for tournaments.
Allyson monitored all of the kids’ whereabouts to the minute, and when I first met the family, it seemed to be working like a well-oiled machine. These kids who had once been “roaming the streets until four in the morning” were now attending charter schools, rounding out their extracurriculars for college applications, and going to bed by ten.
The trouble hit only when a new foster teenager came in, wearing the hard face of rebellion and the ineffable scent of freedom and the streets that the other kids used to know. The new kid had to be molded to the Greens’ way, and this was a tough transition for everybody.
“The last one we got, she’s been in foster care since she was five years old, and she has so much pain. She argues with everybody; she argues with Russell, she argues with the baby,” Allyson said to me that day we were talking in the living room. I met this argumentative girl later, about three months into her tenure on DeKalb. Her name was Dominique Welcome; the other kids teased her about her name because they said she was the least welcoming person in the house. Dominique was seventee
n years old, and on the day I met her, she was particularly miserable because she had just broken a particularly big rule. She was in serious trouble.
“If somebody’s eating, it’s gotta be Dominique,” Bruce said, by way of introduction, as he and I walked downstairs to the kitchen. A teenage girl was slumped over a cup-o-noodles at the kitchen counter, and she lifted her head to glare at him. Dominique had straightened hair that she’d tried to collect in a tiny bun, but it was sticking out in wiry spikes all around her head. Her protruding top teeth made her mouth look defiant even when it was closed. Her almond-shaped eyes, I realized, could be pretty, but they were glittering with a steely hatred.
Allyson was already dressed up in a knee-length maroon coat and high-heeled boots and was mixing kasha and organic yogurt at the counter. She smiled gently at Dominique and reminded her that she had therapy later that morning. We would all pick her up. Dominique groaned.
Out of earshot, Bruce and Allyson explained to me what had happened. Dominique had been getting better, they said; she’d been following the rules and trying to get along with everyone. When she hit her three-month mark, she asked for a special favor. Her very best friend was having a birthday party on a Friday night at the movies, and she wanted to go. Against their better instincts, the Greens relented—as long as Dominique was home by ten. She walked in the door at 1:30 in the morning. Dominique was never going to be let out again.