To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (7 page)

“If that mom thinks he's difficult now, just wait until he's suffering from the attachment problems that'll come when he loses Steve and Erin,” my partner said when I got home from Texas and told her the story. My partner, Lo Charlap, PhD, is a psychologist and a professor of social work at NYU, and she teaches what therapists call “attachment.” She says that the reason that Oliver regresses every time he gets home from seeing Caitlin (returning to the bottle and refusing solid food, clinging to Steve, getting anxious when Steve leaves the room, and so on) is that attachment is being disrupted. Attachment theory, in simple terms, goes like this: Ideally, in infancy, a child connects deeply with an adult who can intuit and then meet his needs and soothe his emotions. This is called a “secure attachment.”
As he grows, this child internalizes this adult who has taught him to manage his urges to scream or kick or rage, and he can begin to contain difficult internal states, rather than act them out. If attachment is ruptured, or never there to begin with, a child doesn't trust that there's anyone constant to soothe him, and there's no internalized, subconscious mom or dad to maintain impulse control. That's why, my partner says, nearly every kid in foster care is diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or even Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD)—they don't have impulse control, because they never had proper attachment. Unfortunately, the system tends to tackle the symptoms rather than the cause, by medicating the children for their hyperactivity or aggression, without addressing the underlying loss, which can take years to repair.

In the case of Oliver, my partner worried, he'd develop ADHD or ODD, and instead of facing a difficult baby, Caitlin would be facing a difficult kid and perhaps an impossible teenager. For his psychological development, my partner believed, Oliver should stay where he was—regardless of the better schools, or the pit bulls, the Habibi's Hutch versus the Golden Corral. And if he did go to Caitlin, both she and Oliver would need a lot of ongoing counseling to manage the mayhem that would come from breaking such an early and important attachment.

But still, I argued—a mother deserves a chance. Just because she screws up in the first year of her child's life, should she be banned from her own baby forever?

“Depends on whose side you're on: the mom's or the kid's,” my partner said. “If she really loves her son, then she should leave him where he's already attached.”

Child welfare, in general, has been soaking up attachment theory since it was first developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the fifties and sixties; it's why states shifted from keeping babies in orphanages to moving them into individual homes. It's the primary theory in the scientific papers on foster care's child-parent dynamics,
and it's the reason experts leverage when they argue for fewer removals and fewer placements once in care. A child's bond with her parent, especially in her first few years, is almost unspeakably critical.

And yet, once a child has been removed and the damage to the attachment has already been done, it's pretty tough to argue that a new attachment to a foster or adoptive parent like Steve trumps any biological claim. Mostly, I've found, the experts don't try—they won't be as bald or assertive in their published papers as my partner was from the privacy of our living room. In one article for the
Juvenile and Family Court Journal
, the authors claimed family courts and judges were too often focused on young children's physical safety rather than their attachments. They described the case of a baby who had been in one loving pre-adoptive home for ten months, but because of some personal family problems, she was removed and placed in a second pre-adoptive home for four months. The first parents resolved their issues, and in the end, both sets of parents wanted the baby. The authors argued she should stay in the second home where she appeared to be thriving; a second rupture in attachment was just too big a risk to take.

The baby in this story was a composite of several cases the authors had overseen, so conveniently there was no biological parent to contend with. Still, the underlying message was to stick with the latest and best connection if, as my partner said, you were really rooting for the kid.

But I didn't know. I thought about all the kids I knew who mourned the separation from their biological parents and acted out all kinds of terrible things from that loss too. And I thought of Steve, hugging me goodbye at the airport, bracing himself to lose the baby he loved, who would clearly grow and flourish in his care. The court date for Oliver was two weeks away; I wished Steve luck and I meant it.

3

B
ABY ALLEN'S BIOLOGICAL DAD
, Tom, learned about parenting from his own family—and if Tom had been left to raise Allen by himself, there would likely have been a lot more physical aggression. I found this out from Tom himself one sultry summer day when I stopped by DeKalb to chat with Allyson. I was surprised to see him; last I'd heard, Tom was meeting the Greens for steely handoffs at child visitation meetings in a downtown Manhattan agency.

They'd recently realized they were living within blocks of one another, and ever since then, Allyson and Tom had been getting along great. If Tom ever wanted to see his kid, Allyson said, he could skip the agency mediation and just come on by.

We sat under a big umbrella on the porch above the carport, and Tom told me about the ways his views on corporal punishment diverged from Allyson's—but he was shifting.

“A couple of weeks ago, Chanel was putting the baby to sleep and Allen went right up to her and whacked her in the face,” Tom said, referring to one of the Greens' older foster daughters. Allen had recently turned three. “Next thing I know he comes running out to me crying, saying, ‘Nell hit me!' I was like, ‘What did you do to Nell?'”

Tom is white, bald, and looks to be in his mid-forties, though he may be younger. He's tall and thin and has no front top teeth—a fact he tries to hide by tucking his upper lip over his gums when he talks or smiles. When he laughs, he covers his mouth with his hand. That afternoon on the porch, Tom was wearing glasses with one earpiece missing, and he leaned forward in his chair as he told his story, glancing every few seconds at Allyson, who was placidly staring at the table. “Turns out Nell had popped his hand after he hit her.”

Allyson wasn't home for this episode, but when she did get back and Tom relayed the details, Tom said she was upset. “She said, ‘No one hits the baby!' But I reminded her of a story that was in the paper. There was a child that hit some guy's girl and the guy choked the child. I don't want that happening to AJ,” Tom said, referring to Allen by the name he prefers. “I'd rather Chanel, Sekina, Mrs. Green discipline him now—pop him in the hand, pop him in the butt, tell him not to do it. Because if he whacks the wrong person, he'll get hurt.”

Allyson took a deep breath. “So I tell Tom that you're dealing with a child that has anger. Hitting him is not teaching him the proper technique for handling anger—because if he sees you do it, he thinks, ‘OK, I'm angry, I hit you.'”

Tom didn't look convinced, but he nodded, slowly, in Allyson's direction. Both he and Allyson were punished as kids with whippings: Tom with a belt and Allyson with a switch. Still, Allyson said, “I was the oldest and I wasn't allowed to discipline my sisters by hitting them. You have to go to the adult and let the adult deal with it because you let a child discipline another child and it goes someplace else.”

OK, Tom said, so what should he have done if Chanel had come to him claiming that Allen had just slapped her across the face?

“If you were mature enough, you would have said you'd speak to him,” Allyson answered. “Let him understand that you're not supposed to hit, that there are other ways of handling things.”

Tom and Allyson's relationship goes against traditional foster care philosophy and protocol. Everybody knows, this philosophy goes, that foster parents usually represent a barrier or even a threat to the biological parents, so the agencies have typically tried to keep the sets of caregivers separated—setting up meetings in neutral locations and through neutral third parties. Agencies worry that biological parents could either bully or charm the foster parents into allowing extra favors or visitations. Also, with shorter foster stays, agencies don't want the foster parents getting too emotionally invested in the kids' (or the kids' parents') lives, since the kids will be leaving. Historically, it has just seemed wiser to keep all the grownups from commingling.

But the biological parents are supposed to be learning the requisite parenting skills to earn their kids back. Theoretically, they could learn these skills by watching the foster parents with their children. So some agencies are encouraging biological parents and foster parents to interact—or to shadow one another and learn key behaviors. Ironically, it was John Mattingly—the previous ACS commissioner—who helped develop a program called Family-to-Family while he was at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which encourages open communication between biological and foster families. In 2001, ACS required that all new foster parents be trained to mentor the biological parents of their kids.
But this program didn't have a lot of traction,
and besides, the scenario works only if the foster parents have significant aptitude themselves (many don't) or are attached to the kids in some way (they still often believe they shouldn't be). And it works only if envy or resentment doesn't burn the key players from the inside out.

This was, at the beginning, precisely the way Tom felt. When he first met Allyson, he had the classic parental response: “I used to say all kinds of things out of the side of my neck at this woman,” he told me. “And she knew it.”

“Yeah, like once, at the agency, when Allen was in one of his little moods and didn't go straight to him, Tom just looked at me and said, ‘Is everything OK at the home?'” Allyson said, narrowing her brown eyes and pursing her lips. “I said what do you mean? I had to start saying scriptures to calm myself down.”

Tom fiddled with his one-armed glasses and tried to defend his comment by claiming it wasn't personal; his son had just had bad experiences in foster care before. “The first foster mother that my son went to—she had him on a Monday and returned him on a Friday, and the next one went to Puerto Rico, and the one after that had a hard time handling him too,” he said. Allyson didn't look as if she bought the story; she recognized that Tom didn't like her at first. Tom countered that he knew his son best: he'd slept with him nearly every night for the first year of his life. “At two months he was already turning over. I know he's a handful.”

Despite their newfound friendship, Tom was still technically working to be independent from Allyson. The courts needed Tom to be clean, to hold a steady job, and to demonstrate parental loyalty before they'd release Allen into his care. The last requirement was easiest: Tom didn't miss visits or court dates, and the pain he felt about being separated from Allen was evident. But when we sat on the porch that afternoon, Tom didn't have a job anymore; he couldn't, because he'd relapsed and was back in a rehab program every day, morning through afternoon.

The first person Tom told about using again was Allyson—even though he knew that would mean he'd lose points with the courts, along with the privilege of unsupervised time with Allen. Allyson did what Tom expected her to: she called the agency, and Tom was ordered right back into treatment. Later, Allyson confided that Tom himself was a bit like one of her kids—he liked to come by the house and play video games with the teenagers and eat meals with everyone on Sunday nights. He may have been lonely, struggling with his addiction in an apartment full of adult male roommates down the block; he missed his son; he liked Allyson's maternal care, and her approval.

“I got my cousin staying with me at the house, and I got a gift certificate—so I was looking to buy a steam cooker or a deep fryer,” Tom told Allyson proudly. “I got the steam cooker. I steam my chicken, I steam my fish. That's all I've been eating, chicken and fish.”

Allyson nodded her assent, and Tom grinned, covering his mouth with his fist. He knew Allyson wouldn't serve pork in the house because she considered it unclean, and she rarely cooked red meat, so Tom recently forswore those foods too. He'd been changing his diet, he said, to be more like hers. This way Allen might not be too confused, he thought, when he made the move. “Look what she's done to my son.” He laughed. “He'll eat bran cereal without the sugar. You can put a bowl of strawberries over here and a bowl of candy over there, and he'll take the strawberries.”

Just then, Allen ran out onto the porch and into his father's lap. “I want candy!” he said, his fine, narrow features blooming in a toothy grin. Allyson reached into her purse and called out to her son Jaleel, to see if he would walk Allen to the store for a treat.

“How about we read?” Tom asked. “Go get your book.”

In an instant, Allen was back with a dinosaur book, and twelve-year-old Jaleel appeared on the porch, grumbling about walking to the corner in this heat. Tom was pointing to the picture book, and Allen looked torn: candy, or a book with his dad? He opted for the candy. Jaleel marched off, obediently holding his younger brother's hand.

One of the things Allyson worried about, she said, was that if Tom got custody of Allen, he'd have another relapse. Not because Tom would hurt his son—she knew he was gentle and loving—but because if Tom relapsed again, Allen would be removed and the chances of Allen landing with the Greens' agency and thus back with the Greens would be slim at best. “Tom could have Allen for a while and then get Allen put back into the foster care system,” Allyson fretted out loud. “He'd be put with a different agency and then just get lost.”