foster care

Last week I wrote about Rebecca Gomez’s criticism of foster care. She accurately notes that “a large proportion of foster children will find themselves homeless upon exiting care. The majority do not attend college; do not have stable housing; do not obtain employment that provides a living wage; do not own a car; have never managed money.” Even if they’re not yanked from house to house, Gomez writes that foster children are “surrounded by treatment professionals including foster parents, case managers, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and special education departments. . . . They must gain the[ir] approval . . . to drive a car; take a trip out of state with their foster family; visit a sibling; participate in a contact Read More ›

As this century began, journalist Fred Barnes quoted four discouraging words found in some illustrious newspapers: “First of a series.” Journalist Mickey Kaus defined the typical newspaper series as a “bloated journalistic project driven by egos and internal institutional needs.” But one thing is even more discouraging than most newspaper series: a series of articles from academic journals. Nevertheless, here are some journal articles about the relationship between homelessness and foster care. One, by Heather Taussig in 2002 in Child Abuse and Neglect, had the scintillating title, “Risk behaviors in maltreated youth placed in foster care: A longitudinal study of protective and vulnerability factors.” Taussig noted that “for many maltreated children, the experience of trauma does not cease when they Read More ›

The Safe Families dinner and Rob Henderson memoir I wrote about last month got me thinking more about “the relationship between foster care and homelessness”: That’s the title of a paper delivered at a 1996 conference hosted by the American Public Welfare Association and based on client files and case data from 21 homeless service organizations located in every region of the United States. Of the 1,134 homeless individuals covered by the study, 36 percent had a foster care history. The paper’s authors, Nan P. Roman and Phyllis B. Wolfe, determined that “the foster care system can fail to deal adequately with problems caused by sexual abuse, physical abuse, or troubled or dysfunctional families — that is to say, with Read More ›

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 Read More ›