Coming Out of Trouble
Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024) is well worth reading. I’ll give you two reasons Henderson’s life and book are not exceptional, then two reasons why they are.
1. Sad to say, Henderson’s background does not make his book exceptional these days. Mother: drug addict. Father: nowhere in sight. Number of foster care placements: ten, more than the national average of seven or eight. Once a child gets past three he often lives with dread, the word Henderson says best summarizes his feelings while growing up and sliding down. He dreads “suddenly being moved somewhere else. . . . The dread was sharp — I’d see an unfamiliar car outside or a puzzled look on a foster parent’s face and begin to panic.”
Masochists often get so used to being hurt that they psychologically want more of it. That’s one reason Housing First often doesn’t work for those with unstable childhoods. Many, given apartments, abandon them for movable tents or blankets on different pieces of pavement. Children who experience no place as home may feel no place is home.
2. Henderson’s troublemaking does not make him exceptional. Those who feel they have nothing to lose see destruction as painless. Henderson broke out of boredom by breaking stuff: “We climbed into the building and began to destroy it. I saw a fire extinguisher in a glass case fixed to the wall. I broke the glass, grabbed the nozzle, and sprayed everywhere.” Henderson used a baseball bat to break taillights in parking lots. He filled a Crock-Pot with fireworks and lit them. He used paintball guns to shoot bicyclists.
When the best of his foster caregivers told Henderson smoking is bad, he gave his standard reply: “I know a lot of stuff is bad. I just don’t care.” That is learned behavior. Developing “executive function” often seems of little benefit to those who have learned that whether their behavior is good or bad, they have no control over their future. Henderson did not “understand that there were reliable connections between good choices and good outcomes and bad choices and bad outcomes.” He did not “internalize these connections because outcomes were so often delayed.”
3. Troubled is exceptional because Henderson recognizes that poverty is not the major impediment to success: “Childhood instability has a much stronger effect than family socioeconomic status for a variety of important outcomes, including education.” At the low end of educational attainment, only 65% of foster kids graduate from high school, compared with 87% of kids categorized as “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” At the high end, less than 3% of children with foster care backgrounds graduate from college, compared with 11% of children from the poorest fifth of families.
Instability kills security. Henderson writes, “Kids who don’t form close bonds with a caregiver before the age of three are far more likely to have social and economic problems later in life. [When kids do not] feel safe early on, then it is harder for them to feel safe later.” The result: delinquency, aggression, and depression. “It was strange to read this map of my own experience. I recognized myself in all of it.”
4. Henderson himself is exceptional because he did not go to prison, like 60% of boys with foster care backgrounds. He came to think that he had agency, some control over his future. It started in the eighth grade when he “was walking home from school and saw a bunch of guys outside of a neighbor’s house doing construction . . . their trucks were dirty from all the dust around. I asked if I could wash their cars for six dollars each.” They agreed, and Henderson “did a good enough job that some of them hired me later to stack wood for the upcoming winter. I also raked leaves, cleaned gutters, and helped them haul heaps of garbage and old appliances to the local landfill.”
Henderson made several hundred dollars and was able to pay for boxing lessons and the purchase of a portable outdoor basketball hoop. The next step came after high school when he became a U.S. soldier and gained “a structured environment, a sharp contrast to the drama and disorder of my youth. I was surrounded by supportive people who wanted me to succeed.” He learned that behavior had consequences within “an environment in which it is very hard to do something reckless, because the consequences of failing to meet standards are both clear and severe.”