Rob Henderson

I summarized last week reviews of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, a book published in 2016 that uses Dickens-like characters and won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Two months ago, the New York Times even put Evicted in 21st place on its list of 100 books of the 21st century. A Chronicle of Higher Education writer called Desmond “sociology’s next great hope.” One problem, though, is that Evicted offers almost no hope. Based on my experience, I’d say that those who talk about personal causes of poverty and those who talk about structural/societal causes are both right: People are poor for both reasons, and the proportion varies from individual to individual, but I’ve never seen it 100% one way or the other 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 ›