A Child Welfare Reading List for 2024
36 Books I'm Reading, Rereading, or Recommending for 2024
(For ease of reading, click here to access the website version of this newsletter.)
Happy New Year! I hope you had a fantastic end to 2023 and are having an even better start to 2024. For my first newsletter of the year, I thought I’d throw an assist to the folks who resolved to read more in 2024. This year, I intend on reading widely on child welfare, and so over the last few weeks, I compiled a list of books on the foster care system, on children, on poverty, and on families. Below are the results of this search.
A few notes before diving in:
I’ve read several of the books on this list already, but I intend on doing some re-reading.
There is a book on this list for everyone. While there are a handful that are geared more toward child welfare professionals, there are a ton of books for folks who just want to learn a bit more about child welfare.
I like to be challenged, so I selected a few books written by authors who do not share my views on child welfare (and perhaps even hold positions that I find to be antithetical to the cause). I’ll leave it up to you to decide which books I’m talking about.
Please let me know if you choose to read one of these books, and better yet, if you have a recommendation of your own you’d like to send my way. I provide a few sentences from the back cover of each book on the list, so folks get an idea of what each book is about.
Without further ado, here are 36 books that I will be reading, rereading, or recommending for 2024. Happy reading!
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts — “Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system.”
Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz — “Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care.”
To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care by Cris Beam — “Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories.”
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott — “Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter…By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality.”
A Place Called Home by David Ambroz — “There are millions of homeless children in America today and in A Place Called Home, award-winning child welfare advocate David Ambroz writes about growing up homeless in New York for eleven years and his subsequent years in foster care, offering a window into what so many kids living in poverty experience every day.”
Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs — “Taking Children argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their kin and caregivers.”
Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and how Abolition Can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts — “Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities.”
Of Boys and Men: Why The Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It by Richard V. Reeves — “Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family…Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue.”
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver — “Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.”
Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services by Kelley Fong — “In Investigating Families, Kelley Fong provides an unprecedented look at the inner workings of CPS and the experiences of families pulled into its orbit. Drawing on firsthand observations of CPS investigations and hundreds of interviews with those involved, Fong traces the implications of invoking CPS as a “first responder” to family misfortune and hardship.”
What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights by Martin Guggenheim — “From foster care to adoption to visitation rights and beyond, Martin Guggenheim offers a trenchant analysis of the most significant debates in the children's rights movement, particularly those that treat children's interests as antagonistic to those of their parents.”
Acceptance by Emi Nietfeld — “From journalist, mental health advocate, and software engineer Emi Nietfeld, this searing coming-of-age story is both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it. Exposing the price of trading a troubled past for the promise of a bright future, Nietfeld explores whether any amount of success can make trauma worth it.”
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian — “On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway…Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy.”
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas — “Over a span of five years, [the authors] talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms…to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.”
Climbing A Broken Ladder: Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care by Nathanael J. Okpych — “Drawing on data from one of the most extensive studies of young people in foster care, Nathanael J. Okpych examines a wide range of factors that contribute to the chances that foster youth enroll in college, persist in college, and ultimately complete a degree.”
The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney — “Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents—holding steady among upper-class adults, increasingly rare among most everyone else—functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others. As these trends of marriage and class continue, the compounding effects on inequality and opportunity grow increasingly dire.”
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam — “Central to the very idea of America is the principle that we are a nation of opportunity. But over the last quarter century we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. In Our Kids, Robert Putnam offers a personal and authoritative look at this new American crisis, beginning with the example of his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. The vast majority of those students went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have faced diminishing prospects.”
Raising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare State by Catherine E. Rymph — “Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care.”
Live To See The Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty by Nikhil Goyal — “In a triumph of empathy and drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal follows Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel on their mission, plunging deep into their lives as they strive to resist their designated place in the social hierarchy. In the process, Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of “welfare as we know it,” after “zero tolerance” in schools criminalized a generation of students, after the odds of making it out are ever slighter.”
A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado — “Drawing on the latest research on the value of early intervention, investment, and empowerment, A Minor Revolution makes the urgent case for putting children first—in our budgets and policies, in how we develop products and enact laws, and in our families and communities.”
This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home by Lauren Sandler — “Every day, more than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive below the poverty line. Every night, nearly sixty thousand people sleep in New York City-run shelters, 40 percent of them children. In This Is All I Got, Sandler brings this deeply personal issue to life, vividly depicting one woman’s hope and despair and her steadfast determination to change her life despite the myriad setbacks she encounters.”
The War on Kids: How American Juvenile Justice System Lost Its Way by Cara H. Drinan — “The War on Kids reveals how the United States went from being a pioneer to an international pariah in its juvenile sentencing practices…The book chronicles the shortcomings of juvenile justice by drawing upon social science, legal decisions and first-hand correspondence with Terrence and others like him - individuals whose adolescent errors have cost them their lives.”
Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Up Families and How to Mend Them by Polly Curtis — “Meet the mother whose children were taken away, and the father who fought for his son. Listen to the radical social worker, the judge, the lawyer. See inside the homes of foster carers, adoptive parents and children in care. Because behind closed doors, a scandal is ongoing.” [Note: this book focuses on the child welfare system in the United Kingdom.]
Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States by Juliet F. Gainsborough — “In Scandalous Politics, Juliet Gainsborough presents quantitative analysis of all fifty states and qualitative case studies of three states (Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey) that reveal how well-publicized child welfare scandals result in adoption of new legislation and new administrative procedures. Gainsborough’s quantitative analysis suggests that child welfare policymaking is frequently reactive, while the case studies provide more detail about variations and the legislative process.”
Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty by Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox — Broke in America offers an eye-opening and galvanizing look at life in poverty in this country: how circumstances and public policy conspire to keep people poor, and the concrete steps we can take to end poverty for good. In clear, accessible prose, Goldblum and Shaddox detail the ways the current system is broken and how it’s failing so many of us. They also highlight outdated and ineffective policies that are causing or contributing to this unnecessary problem.”
No Way to Treat A Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists are Wrecking Young Lives by Naomi Schaefer Riley — “Kids in danger are treated instrumentally to promote the rehabilitation of their parents, the welfare of their communities, and the social justice of their race and tribe — all with the inevitable result that their most precious developmental years are lost in bureaucratic and judicial red tape.”
Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City by Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson — “Drawing on years of fieldwork, Doing the Best I Can shows how mammoth economic and cultural changes have transformed the meaning of fatherhood among the urban poor. Intimate interviews with more than 100 fathers make real the significant obstacles faced by low-income men at every step in the familial process: from the difficulties of romantic relationships, to decision-making dilemmas at conception, to the often celebratory moment of birth, and finally to the hardships that accompany the early years of the child's life, and beyond.”
Some Type of Way: Aging out of Foster Care by Lisa Schelbe — “Based on over 90 interviews and almost 1,000 hours of observation of youth aging out and service providers in a mid-Atlantic county in the United States, the book presents real stories along with relevant research and theories to help understand how youth transition out of foster care and into adulthood.”
Ball Don’t Lie by Matt de la Peña — “Sticky is a beat-around-the-head foster kid with nowhere to call home but the street, and an outer shell so tough that no one will take him in. He started out life so far behind the pack that the finish line seems nearly unreachable. He’s a white boy living and playing in a world where he doesn’t seem to belong. But Sticky can ball. And basketball might just be his ticket out . . . if he can only realize that he doesn’t have to be the person everyone else expects him to be.” [Note: this is a Young Adult novel, and one of the few I read growing up that featured a foster child.]
Ghosts of the Orphanage by Christine Kenneally — “Centering her story on St. Joseph’s, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice.”
The Most Important Year: Pre-Kindergarten and the Future of Our Children by Suzanne Bouffard — “With engrossing storytelling, journalist Suzanne Bouffard takes us inside some of the country’s best pre-K classrooms to reveal the sometimes surprising ingredients that make them work—and to understand why some programs are doing the opposite of what is best for children. It also chronicles the stories of families and teachers from many backgrounds as they struggle to give their children a good start in school.”
The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Schaefer, and Timothy J. Nelson — “Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.”
Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption by Laura Briggs — “In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces—poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence—that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.”
Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty by Jeff Madrick — “By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens.”
Out of Harm’s Way: Creating an Effective Child Welfare System by Richard J. Gelles — “Despite many well-intentioned efforts to create, revise, reform, and establish an effective child welfare system in the United States, the system continues to fail to ensure the safety and well-being of maltreated children. Out of Harm's Way explores the following four critical aspects of the system and presents a specific change in each that would lead to lasting improvements.”
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care by Nina Bernstein — “In 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name.”
