Not Everyone Should Foster or Adopt a Child
But everyone can and should do something; a review of Rob Henderson's "Troubled" and a call to action
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Dear Inklings,
May is National Foster Care Month in the U.S. I’m not going to give you numbers of how many children are in foster care or how many of them will suffer lifelong impediments as a result of their traumatic childhoods.
Instead, I’m going to share stories.
At the end of this email, I have a special discount code for you to watch an amazing movie of a foster community.
Our story began when we met a little Chinese girl in an orphanage in Shanghai, Eliana. Bureaucracy, red tape, and various other restrictions meant she was not adoptable, but because of her, we put a face to the crisis for the first time.
We could never again unsee what we saw in that orphanage.
A number of restrictions meant international adoption was closed to us at that time, so when we came home, we researched until we found a foster family agency that was ethical and vetted by people we trusted who had also fostered and worked with them. The agency focused on children aged five and under, and were dedicated to keeping sibling sets together. Foster parents had to commit to caring for a single child or sibling set until a permanency was attained, whatever that looked like.
Unfortunately, this was not the norm for many children growing up in foster care.
writes in his memoir, Troubled, “Kids preemptively get shuffled around so that they don’t get too attached to any one particular home,” in case a relative becomes available to care for the child. After being removed from his drug-addicted birth mother at the age of three, Rob grew up in a number of horrible foster homes throughout Los Angeles before being adopted, only to experience further unpredictability when his new parents get divorced and his adoptive father cuts off ties with Rob as revenge against his adoptive mom.Instability in a child’s formative years has detrimental effects that linger for a lifetime.
On the surface, Rob looks like a foster kid success story, the kind of adult a foster-adoptive parent would be proud to show off. “Look at my son that I ‘saved’ from the system; he served in the U.S. Air Force. He graduated from Yale. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge.”
And yet, what he truly craved and needed was a loving family.
Rob’s memoir is not just a story of his life, but a social critique on class and elitism. He doesn’t shy away from criticizing the hypocrisy of the elite classes. From the introduction, Rob points out that “even if every abandoned, abused, and neglected kid graduates from college as I did and earns a comfortable income, they are still going to carry the wounds, or in the best-case scenario, the scars, from their early life.”
Rob describes a number of the foster homes he lived in before he was adopted: homes where multiple kids fended for themselves, and one where he was little more than a slave. None of his foster parents took an interest in him; some only took in kids for the government stipend. Not exactly pillars of society.
But most people I know who want to foster or adopt do it because they care about children, or as a way to expand their family.
A stable family for children is what can solve many societal problems, not higher education
Henderson points to America’s obsession with higher education as a red herring. Education can never heal the wounds left by an harmful childhood.
When my husband and I were finally qualified to adopt, our adoption agency required us to attend a three-day parenting training in another state. I’ll never forget what one of the instructors said.
Before pivoting careers to the adoption world, he used to work at a prison. He described the disproportionate percentage of inmates who had grown up in the foster care system1.
“Giving kids a stable home and loving family helps shift the trajectory of their lives sooner rather than later. Maybe less kids will end up in prison as juveniles and adults,” he told us.
He recognised the importance of early intervention.
Imprisonment is not the only negative consequence to childhood instability. Other adverse outcomes include homelessness, teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol use2. And of course, it all comes back to childhood trauma, which can perpetuate trauma. Becoming a foster/adoptive parent has the possibility of breaking intergenerational cycles.
Something to remember, however, is this: no matter how strong it is, your love will not heal all their wounds.
And equally important, fostering is not about you.
Foster care and adoption will break you
We sponsored Eliana for a little over half a year before she disappeared into China’s orphanage system, and we never heard of or saw her again. We don’t know where she is or what happened to her. She will be ten this September.
My husband still cries when he thinks of her.
Six foster babies came through our home when we provided respite care before we adopted our first son. I think of them often. I wonder where they are now, how they are doing, if they are happy.