To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (16 page)

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.

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.