The Foster-Care-to-Homelessness Pipeline

Earlier this month I wrote about the regular Wednesday dinners for unhoused humans at the University Avenue church. This week I’ll write about a Friday night fundraising dinner in a church gym four miles further north. The beneficiary: Safe Families for Children of Austin — one of a hundred Safe Family chapters in 30 states that try to keep children from having the traumatic experiences that contribute to the psychology of homelessness.

The site was a gym next to the sanctuary of my church, Grace and Peace Austin. The gym itself is usually just a gym, but this evening lights draped from the ceiling turned it into a sparkly saloon with a swinging-door entrance, round tables, and a cowboy band of fiddles and guitars. Servers dressed in black brought out barbecued meat and potato salad.

Cheyenne Erickson, director of the Austin chapter, took the mic. She’s the mother of three, including one resulting from a surprise pregnancy in college. She knows what it’s like to struggle through crisis and how important it is to have a circle of support. She spoke of young moms who choose neither abortion nor adoption and need a friend: “You don’t have to fix her situation. You just have to be with her.”

The next speaker, Ashley Hope, had credibility from both her experience and her Ph.D. She told how she “grew up with a mother in desperate need of support.” Hope spent time in foster care but emerged relatively unscathed through “the power of God’s grace.” She explained how Safe Families does not exist to promote foster care and adoption, valuable as those commitments often are, but to help beleaguered families by coming alongside parents, particularly moms, when they lack support from families and friends.

Hope said many nonprofits have wonderful intentions but never evaluate their effectiveness. They “deal with symptoms of chaos [and don’t] get to the roots of issues.” One root is a lack of relationship with fathers. Another is social isolation. The next speaker, Stacy Baker, said both of those factors were key for her: Since both she and her mom were only children, she didn’t have siblings or aunts and uncles ready to step in.

Baker was unmarried and six months pregnant with her second child when her mom died. The father of the child was abusive. Baker needed legal help, plumbing help, and other help. Other organizations came through with diapers, a coat in winter, and other material needs, but Baker needed human beings who could function like the family members she lacked. Safe Families stepped in: “That’s where my life turned around.”

Some regular readers of this column may be puzzled: What does this account of a Safe Families fundraiser have to do with the subject of this column during the past two years — homelessness? The answer: A lot. Liberals concentrate on the cost of housing. Conservatives speak of mental illness and substance abuse. Neither side emphasizes what research shows: Homeless humans almost always had childhoods so chaotic that they never learned what a home is.

Standing next to the swinging-door entrance, Dr. Hope pointed me to studies of foster youth, many compiled by the National Institutes of Health. For example, among foster care youth who receive at least five different placements, approximately 90% get involved with the criminal justice system. The average number of foster care placements per child: seven or eight. Results include attachment disorder, anxiety disorder, eating disorder, separation disorder, and personality disorder.

The sociological literature includes articles with titles like The Foster-Care-to-Prison Pipeline. Foster care is supposed to be “a nurturing alternative to orphanages,” and some foster care parents do nurture, but as the Beatles put it, “money can’t buy you love.” Research shows the foster care result often falls short of the “level of real care that is necessary for children — especially foster children — to thrive under their difficult circumstances.” Foster care is “plagued with scandals” including abusive tactics, hunger and starvation, disregarding mental health, failing to provide basic necessities, and sexual harassment and abuse.”

But even when those grotesqueries are absent, moving around from placement to placement leaves children feeling that “there’s no place like home” in the literal meaning of that phrase: No place is home, and if a place begins to feel like home, teenagers often think they are fooling themselves.

When I returned from the Safe Families dinner, I picked up Rob Henderson’s extraordinary Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024). I’ll review this next week.