The Evil You Know
The strategies teenage foster youth use to reduce placement instability
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Douglas (a pseudonym, as he wished to remain anonymous) was placed in the California foster care system in 2001. He was eleven years old. At the time, he expected to be reunited with his mother upon the conclusion of her prison sentence. This would not be the case. He would spend the next seven years in the system, and during that span, he would live with nine different families.
His placements were terminated for a variety of reasons. His first was for fighting at school, his third was due to his foster parents retiring, and his fifth to make room for a group of siblings his foster family sought to adopt. The sheer frequency of these moves — never mind the nature of the placements themselves — inculcated in him a hard-edged cynicism that in many ways persists to this day.
He knew that despite whatever his foster parents said to him — that he was a part of the family, that he was loved, that he finally found his forever home — he would be gone at the first sign of trouble, removed when he became even the slightest inconvenience to his family, and sent packing when the cost of him staying outweighed the meager benefits his foster parents received for his care.
So, he ceased caring when he moved or where he stayed, for it was all the same to him. That is, until he came to his sixth foster home, when he was fifteen years old and had already spent four years in the system.
His home life was more or less the same. He recognized immediately that he and his foster mother would not be getting along. She told him on nearly a daily basis that she didn’t get paid enough to foster him. From his perspective: “She had nothing but nasty s*** to say to me from the second I walked into her home.”
But despite all this, Douglas found a home outside of home: his school. At school — his fifth in as many years — Douglas wasn’t just another foster kid, or an insufficient paycheck.
He was a friend to many. He was a teammate, having joined the junior varsity football team. And he was a boyfriend, having gotten himself his first girlfriend, whom he intended on taking to a dance or two if he could.
Now, he had something to fight for, a reason to stick with this placement. And fight he did. He worked hard to maintain a 2.0 GPA and kept out of trouble. He also, unfortunately, allowed his foster family to mistreat him.
Through his local foster care agency, Douglas was entitled to receive $50 a month in clothing allowance. For the first few months at his placement, he received that money and used it to upgrade his wardrobe and buy a new pair of cleats. But soon his foster mother stopped giving him his allowance.
He never broached it with his foster mother, seeking to avoid an argument. He lied to his social worker, who asked at each visit what he was buying with his allowance. As the months wore on, as he outgrew his wardrobe, as his clothes became shabbier, and as the soles of his shoes eroded, he said not a word. Years later, he’d tell me the following:
"I was supposed to get $50 a month, but [foster mother] was taking that and pocketing it...But what the f*** was I gonna do? Couldn't say anything about it because if I did, I was for sure gonna move. New school, new friends, all that. So I didn't say s***, because I wasn't about to lose my friends for a couple hundred dollars."
He didn’t know for sure at the time, but he suspected that his foster mother was simply pocketing his clothing allowance. The woman tasked with caring for him was potentially stealing from him, yet Douglas said nothing. He felt that if he said anything, he’d be sent packing yet again, losing his friends, his girlfriend, and his place on the football team.
He’d rather suffer in silence than risk losing it all, or risk getting sent someplace worse. Put differently, he’d rather stick with the evil he knew than the one he didn’t.
Douglas was one of the 37 former foster children I interviewed for my BA Thesis (which, I humbly add, earned the 2023 Richard P. Taub Thesis Prize at the University of Chicago). Each interviewee had spent time in the California child welfare system as teenagers, and each of them in some way experienced the dilemma that Douglas had. Each willingly purchased stability with a precious currency: their own well-being.
I knew all of this to be true, of course, for I too had made the same painstaking decisions.
I remember hearing, time and time again, from multiple foster families, the following: “we might be your last family.” The implication of this statement was that should my placement fail for whatever reason, I’d be removed from my foster family and placed in a group home, which were placements that were generally understood to be repositories for older youth who were unwanted by traditional families.
Alone this threat of a group home was poignant enough, as each of my older brothers lived in one and I knew the horrors that each experienced. But the mere possibility of moving was sufficient to alter my behavior, as I was desperate to preserve the social life I had developed at school. And this desperation led me to mask the maltreatment I experienced, whether it was having my own money stolen from me (a common occurrence, I learned) or even suffering physical abuse.
It was from these experiences that motivated me to conduct this research, and tragically, I discovered that I was far from alone.
I remember hearing, time and time again, from multiple foster families, the following:
“We might be your last family.”
I learned that the former foster youth in my study deployed three broad strategies designed to minimize the chances of their placement being disrupted.
The most popular strategy was precisely the one that Douglas deployed — suffering in silence. Put simply, foster youth would resist rocking the boat if it meant they could stay put.
The second strategy was strategic adaptation. Foster youth would adapt to the conditions, cultures, and circumstances of their placement. Examples of this abound:
Jared M. began calling his foster mother and father ‘mom’ and ‘dad’: “I tried to do whatever they liked…if they preferred to be called mom, I called them mom…I even tried to talk like them, watch their shows, tell them that I loved them.”
Melody H. attempted to embed herself into the extended family: “Anyways, I realized it was a cheat code to get in good with the tias and cousins, you know. I’d play Mario Kart with them or something like that, or I’d talk with my foster mom’s sister, and if they liked me, I felt it was harder for my foster parents to kick me out, even if I was being bad…”
Jordan G. tried to embrace Filipino culture at his fourth foster family: “I know it sounds funny as f***, a Black kid talking Tagalog. But…it made the extended family laugh and in a way, it did make me feel part of the family, which was dangerous, but it worked for a minute.”
On and on I can go, with most of the interviewees describing the ways they adapted to their circumstances, all with one goal in mind: stay in place.
The third strategy was cautious back-channeling. This strategy was often doomed to fail, for it relied on the system doing something that most involved in it knew it rarely did: working.
A foster child using this strategy would often try to voice their concerns to an ostensibly responsible adult: a caseworker or a relative of the foster family. They’d plead with whoever it was to try to resolve the issue without letting on that it was the foster child who wanted it solved. Tragically, either such diplomacy was lacking in the trusted adult or the foster family was immune to any entreaties to make things right.
All of this was self-evident to the former foster youth I interviewed, and while I specifically focused on California, my informal interactions with former foster youth from across the United States only confirmed that what we experienced was nearly universal.
However, much of the academic literature treats foster youth as passive participants in the placement process. The research on placement instability largely concerns itself with the following: what causes it, who is most likely to be impacted, and its adverse consequences. But, my research (and personal experience) indicates that foster youth are active agents in this process, trying and often failing to delay what they perceive to be the inevitable.
This silent suffering undercuts the notion that the child welfare system is a safe and stable alternative for children. A system that not only fails to protect children, but in many ways, incentivizes children to underreport their mistreatment is a system in desperate need of reform.
While this is a complex issue, there are steps that states and localities can take now to address this dynamic.
Reduce the salience of placement disruption: Reducing the occurrence of placement instability is a difficult task, but at the very least, policymakers can work to reduce the salience of placement instability. One way that this can be done is by strengthening existing laws (at least in California) that provide foster children with the right to remain in their school during placement changes or transitions. The majority of those I interviewed stated explicitly that they feared moving schools if they moved placements, but if there were greater assurances that this wouldn’t occur, youth might feel more comfortable reporting instances of maltreatment.
Strengthen trusted relationships: Caseworker turnover has long been an issue that plagued the child welfare system. Most of those in my study report that they had little to no relationship with their social worker, and as such, had little reason to trust them enough to share their vulnerabilities. Addressing caseworker turnover is an obvious remedy to this problem, but so is expanding access to Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs), who are volunteers that advocate for the best interests of a child in the foster care system. A trusted adult can make all the difference in the world
Supporting and expanding the supply of families: Simply put, there are too many kids in the foster care system and not enough foster homes. A lack of foster families — particularly foster families willing to take older youth — ensures that foster youth operate on an uneven playing field, where placement instability can be wielded as a disciplinary cudgel. More foster parents are needed, and specifically, more highly-trained and trauma-informed foster parents are needed. Conversely, expanding family preservation and kinship initiatives can reduce the number of children in care and thus obviate the need for more foster homes.
That’s all for this week’s newsletter, the last one of 2023. Thank you so much for supporting this work and this mission of mine. Every subscription, share, read, and reaction matters. For those that have generously pledged to pay for this newsletter, I am especially grateful for your support.
As always, do not hesitate to contact me with your questions, comments, compliments, corrections, and critiques.
Have a wonderful holiday season, and I will see you in 2024!
“A system that not only fails to protect children, but in many ways, incentivizes children to underreport their mistreatment is a system in desperate need of reform.”
Current Read(s):
I’ve just about concluded my first term here at Oxford, and one of my #WinterReads will be Tony Judt’s 900-page Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Tony Judt has long been one of my favorite historians and thinkers, but I’ve put off reading this book for years, given its size and scope. But perhaps that was for the best, because what better place to read about the history of Europe than in Europe itself?
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?
Number of Youth in Formal Foster Care Continues to Decline, Imprint Survey Finds (The Imprint) — An article that summarizes recent trends in foster care, such as fewer foster homes and fewer youth in care.
Judge considers holding state in contempt a third time over foster care conditions (The Texas Tribune) — The Texas foster care system is a travesty, and this article examines why.
The grief of Native American mothers whose children were separated from them (Ohio State University) — As I alluded to in the last newsletter, one cannot understand the US child welfare system without understanding its impact on Indigenous families.
At 45, Indian Child Welfare Act sets standard for kinship care (CBS News) — The Indian Child Welfare Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation in not just the history of the child welfare system, but the history of the United States.
America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child (The Atlantic) — Public policy impacting families (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit) is ill-equipped to handle the rise of joint custody families, “in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time”
Study finds link between child care subsidy requirements and child abuse rates (News Medical) — A properly designed child care subsidy can reduce rates of child abuse while also increasing labor force attachment amongst low-income families (particularly mothers). The full study can be found here.
A foster teen has gone missing. Why, his family asks, is no one looking for him? (Searchlight New Mexico) — When a child goes missing from foster care, one can reasonably assume that authorities would work diligently to track this child down. One family in New Mexico has tragically learned that such an assumption is unfounded.
Legislation in New York Allowing Parents to Contact Kids Who’ve Been Adopted on the Governor’s Desk, Again (The Imprint) — Should parents who have had their parental rights involuntarily terminated be able to contact their adopted children? Child welfare advocates in New York are pushing for this happen, for a third time.
California can take kids from abused moms. Why the separation can harm both (CalMatters) — Women who are abused in California can have their children taken away from them due to the state’s “failure to protect” laws.