Rethinking Foster Care

There’s a certain way most white folks are conditioned to think and talk about racism in society and within systems in particular.  It’s a way that allows us to acknowledge the problem, make our repulsion known, and at the same time dissociate ourselves from it.  We’ve been able to tell ourselves that our faith tradition, commitment to social justice, career, donations or good intentions put us in the clear.  We do not feel racist and would never identify with what we perceive racist thoughts and acts to be -- the stuff of terror and the active denial of human and civil rights.  We are against the idea that someone should ever be treated differently based on the color of their skin.  Racist ideology and acts of bigotry and ignorance are an anathema to justice that decent people reject.  We may even be involved with efforts to promote equity in some way. But the hard truth is that having benign thoughts are not enough.  If it were, racial disparities in...

  As I started to clean up the kitchen after Christmas dinner with my family, a text message appeared on my phone. The message simply read, “Merry Christmas,” with a picture attached. The pictured showed a young man embracing his mother as he was leaving her home that evening. The picture took my breath away. Fifteen years ago, I represented that young man in the foster care system. He had lived the life in the system we never want to see. He spent a decade in group homes – over thirty placements in total – until he aged out of the system.  When I last saw her, his mother – a sweet and kind woman who loved her children deeply – was battling a long-term addiction to drugs, never able to fully conquer her demons. Her children remained in foster care, most with kin, because she could not get clean. Yet she always emotionally supported them, as we’d want any mother to do.   Now, time had passed, and fifteen years later, here were the two embracing after Christmas dinner....

Poet David Whyte writes, “Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.” I’m thinking of Whyte’s words this morning as my client – a mother who for years has battled an addiction to drugs – prepares to enter an in-patient drug treatment program, days before Christmas. I’m thinking of how many obstacles she has overcome to take this first step. Being dependent on a chemical that controls your brain. Enduring the pain of losing her children to foster care. Receiving threats from professionals about the permanent destruction of her family if she can’t treat her illness. Navigating complex bureaucracies during a pandemic without a phone, or a place to live. Spending the holidays in a facility with strangers, instead of her children.  The list goes on and on. Stress. Grief. Trauma. Whyte further instructs, “Don’t let them smother something so simple.” Yet, how often in child welfare do we do this to parents...