August 4, 2025 • 56 mins
On Chatting with Betsy, host Betsy Wurzel speaks with journalist and author Claudia Rowe about how foster care fails too many children in America. Claudia’s book, WARDS OF THE STATE: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, uncovers the deep flaws in a system that often leaves children more likely to enter prison than college.
Claudia brings over 30 years of reporting experience, including Pulitzer-nominated work and a major role in reforming school discipline laws in Washington State. Her work has consistently explored how foster care fails children by pushing them through cycles of trauma, instability, and mistrust.In this compelling conversation,
Claudia describes how frequent placement changes and lack of emotional support disrupt childhood development. These repeated traumas can lead to long-term behavioral and neurological effects, making it harder for these children to thrive.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/chatting-with-betsy--4211847/support.
Claudia brings over 30 years of reporting experience, including Pulitzer-nominated work and a major role in reforming school discipline laws in Washington State. Her work has consistently explored how foster care fails children by pushing them through cycles of trauma, instability, and mistrust.In this compelling conversation,
Claudia describes how frequent placement changes and lack of emotional support disrupt childhood development. These repeated traumas can lead to long-term behavioral and neurological effects, making it harder for these children to thrive.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/chatting-with-betsy--4211847/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, everyone, this is Betsy Worthal. You're a host of
Chatting with Betsy, my passionate will Talk Radio Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC. We're minxious to educate, enlighten,
and entertain. The views of the guest may not represent
those that host the station, and I want to thank
(00:21):
everyone for joining me today. She you're busy about your day,
you do not want to miss my guest today. Let
me give you some background. Claudia Rowe is the author
and writer of Wards of the State, The Long Shadow
of American foster care. She has been writing about the
(00:42):
hallways where kids in government clash for more than thirty years.
A native of New York City now living in Seattle,
her reporting a racially skewed school discipline for The Seattle
Times helped to change education laws in Washington State, and
her coverage of.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Chino youth gangs was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Claudia has written for The New York Times, Mother Jones,
and Amazon Original Stories. In twenty eighteen, she received the
Washington State Book Award for her true crime memoir The
Spider and the Fly. She is a member of the
editorial board at the Shattle Times, where she writes about
foster care, juvenile justice, and public education and when to
(01:28):
Welcome you, Clodia wrote, chatting with Betsy, welcome.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thanks so much for having me. I'm really glad to
be here with you, Betsy.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I have to tell you, Clodia, I have read and interviewed.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Two people that were in the foster care.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
And a mom who was fostering kids for I think
like thirty five to forty years. But your book is
so unique and that you show for I never knew.
I think it is very eye opening. I think anyone
in social work needs to read this psychologist, anyone really
(02:12):
needs to read your book to understand foster kids and
the system and why it is failing them.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
What a book. Congratulations and thank you for writing it.
It really touts my heart.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Thank you so much, Bety. I wrote it really. I mean,
I hope all social workers and everyone in the system
reads this book. But I wrote it really. I wrote
it very much through the kids' eyes, and I wrote
it for general interest readers who might have heard about
foster care or think they kind of know what it is,
(02:52):
or maybe don't know at all what it is. That's
who I wrote it for, to say, hey, there's this
enormous government system that's almost entirely invisible, and its outcomes
are really troubling, and in fact, it affects all of us,
you me, all of us, because we're all paying for
(03:13):
the car Serle system. We're all paying for prisons and
for homelessness, and those are like some of the primary
outcomes of foster care. That's what I wanted to show
in this book.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And yes, and you did an excellent job, and I just,
you know, congratulations for you. So that's basically I was
going to ask you what motivated you to write the book,
but you just answered that. I'll go up to another question, Well,
do you want to expand some work?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, because you know, even you know I I had
been a reporter when I stumbled on this. I certainly
was not planning to write a book about foster care,
not at all. I had been a reporter. I had
written a little bit about the child welfare system. I
had written a lot more about youth crime. And it
(04:03):
was only in sitting in court watching this teenage girl
being sentenced for a very serious crime that I began
to sort of fully appreciate the incredible overlap between these
two systems foster care and our carsural system, our prisons.
Her story kind of like embodied that overlap. But I
(04:27):
even a reporter me, you know, somebody who's like, actually,
you know, kind of listening for these kinds of patterns.
I hadn't properly appreciated how closely they are linked. And
that's why I wanted to write this book to sort
of explain to readers, like, see these kids understand what
(04:49):
is it to be on the street when you're fifteen
years old it's two o'clock in the morning, Like, what
is that? Like? That's why I wanted to write the book.
I wanted people to see these kids.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And you did a very good job, excellent and doing
that because my heart broke for each a person that
you wrote about, starting with Marianne. And you know, we
sometimes I know I am I'll stick for myself or judgmental, Well,
(05:27):
you know, they shouldn't have killed somebody, don't they know
right from wrong? But then you bring out in your
book something that I never really thought of until I
read your book, is that getting taken away from your
family and as horrible as that situation is at times
(05:48):
where foster kids have come from. Sometimes they come at
a very abusive families, as you know, and sometimes they
don't and then get put in a foster care system
where they're moved around all the time. Time disconnects, and
especially if they're from you know, birth to seven years,
that's the four mud of years of a brain, so
(06:09):
they learn to disconnect to protect themselves from getting hurt
all the time. Right, And I you know, and that
really hit me, Quaoudia of understanding their behavior.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
It's yeah, that was you that really hard. Yeah, that's
exactly it. Like when I, you know, about when I
said before about I really want people, regular everyday people
to see these kids because of course, judgment and fear
are all of our you know, often our first reactions
(06:50):
when we hear about a horrible crime, when we see
a kid, we hear about something that sounds like just depraved.
Of course, our first reactions are judgment, which really comes
out of fear. And I thought it was important to
sort of dissect this, like what is exactly happening when
a kid does something like that? How do they understand themselves?
(07:15):
You know, like what do they think they're doing? How
do they what is their motivation? Where does it come from?
I really wanted to really break this down, and what
I found was that the foster care system not because
of any particular villain, not because of you know, bad
social workers or abusive foster parents. No, no, nothing like
(07:37):
that at all, but because of the system itself, the
sort of mechanized structure of a system that is designed
to undercut connection, to thwart bonds. It is specifically aimed
to make it so that the foster parent does not
bond with the foster kid because the kid will be moving,
(08:00):
and I mean, the whole system is geared traditionally, don't
connect to your caregiver. And by the way, if you
came from a messed up, negligent or abusive family, you
shouldn't know anybody in your family. Ever. Again, you shouldn't
know any of your relatives. That's why kids traditionally were
not placed by the state with relatives who knew them.
(08:22):
And we're just now beginning to appreciate how wrongheaded that
approach is, how seriously a kid's behavior can be shaped
by undercutting connections to adults who know them, and that
like the sort of brain science aspect of this, I
(08:46):
think is really important to understanding the outcomes of foster care.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Absolutely, and I know from interviewing the foster mom, and
you also bring us out and your book that the
foster care system actually failed and helping the foster parents
matching them up, you know, with a as besial as
(09:12):
they can with the child.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You know, I'm just gonna tell my audience. You know,
sometimes foster parents get kids two o'clock.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
In the morning without any notice, I like a phone
call they were coming, you know, and they have to
have everything ready. And sometimes they the foster parent themselves,
they don't know the history of their child that they're
getting the foster child.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Right, right. The system does not treat it's paid caregivers
foster parents very well at all. It treats them like
a way station, like interchangeable widgets, or like little more
than you know, babysitters who are providing room and board.
And so you know, what do you what do you
(09:57):
think that's going to encourage in the foster parents. How
intensely are they going to care about a kid when
they know that kid could be yanked And the whole
system is geared toward discouraging real connection between foster parent
and kid, and that just as you said, the foster
parents are treated kind of like interchangeable was stations, and
(10:20):
that really doesn't work either. So I really think every
reforms that shows any kind of promise is one that
honors the importance of connection, not just like in some
philosophical way because it's nice or something, because there's actual
brain chemistry that is affected, and then behavior and then
(10:43):
you know, really serious social problems.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I also, in my opinion, Claudia Sound and reading your
book and on what I know from other people I've
spoken to, since it's just going through a cycle, and
the cycle has to be broken.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It has to be fixed. The cycle's broken, it needs
to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
That's what I'm trying to say of you know, yanking
these kids from this home to that home, not letting
them get the services that they require. And that's a battle,
uh for forced appearance, to fight for their kids to
you know, get the services at the schools, but being
(11:29):
yanked around, how do they get that education, How do
they get those services so they can.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Be successful.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It's like it's it's like they set them up for
failure over and over and over again.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
My heartbreak the most important.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, you said the two most important words, set up
and cycle. It is a setup. It is a setup.
Not again, not intentionally. I'm not saying any kind of
bureaucrat or admit illustrator is sitting there, you know, rubbing
their hands together and trying to do some something that
hurt kids. Quite the opposite. Basically, everyone in the system
(12:09):
desperately wants to help kids, truly cares about kids. It's
the system itself, this inherited thing that's been largely the same,
you know, for like a century. It's not that different
than it was, you know, when foster care started at
the early part of the twentieth century. It's this inherited
system that is totally misaligned with the way human brains work.
(12:36):
And like, okay, we didn't know before, but now we
do know. We do know, and we should be able
to do better. And the thing about a cycle, it's
exactly that. A lot of advocates who are concerned about
the system will talk about the foster care to prison pipeline.
But one of the most thoughtful guys in the book,
(12:57):
former foster youth, who got a life sentence for very
serious crime he committed almost immediately after being cut from
foster care, he thinks of it more as a cycle,
as a as like a beast that's eating its own tail.
And if he thinks of it as like, you know,
the foster care system, because of what we've just described,
(13:17):
sort of pumps out kids so poorly equipped to function
in a productive, healthy way in sort of the regular
mainstream world. That crime and homelessness, you know, are are
almost like predetermined. And then kid does whatever they do
to survive, they might be taken into like a county
(13:40):
jail or state prison, depending but maybe they already have
a kid. Then that child is going to be taken
into foster care. And it's this cycle parents into prison
or homelessness. State takes the kid, the kid then comes
out of the state system, you know, set up for
a little better than more incarceration and homelessness. It is
a site I should say. Of course, there are kids
(14:03):
who succeed despite this, who break the pattern, and they
are in the book too. But the truth is that
fewer than five percent of children who age out of
foster care when they're eighteen will ever get a bachelor's degree,
a four year college degree. Fewer than five percent, And
like fifty nine percent will have experienced some kind of
(14:26):
lock up by the time they're twenty six. Sixty nine
percent some kind of lock up. It could be while
they're yeah, it could be while they're still in foster care,
like in juvenile detention. That would count as some kind
of lock up. But then there you go, even it's
for the stupidest thing in the world. Like you, you know, you,
whatever you were, You ran from your placement and you
(14:47):
got hungry, and you shoplifted a bag of potato chips,
and the cops come and they put you in juvie
for whatever, a couple of days whatever. You now have
a criminal record. So what do you think is going
to happen when you're eighteen years old and the state says, thanks,
we're done with you, goodbye. You have a spotty education,
you probably have some kind of dinky criminal record. How
(15:09):
is that going to help you get on your feet
and like join the world.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
It truly is a setup, it is, And I just
found all the stories that you have of each individual
self powerful.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
And really did touch my heart. Claudia.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I'm a very sensitive person by nature, That's just how
I am, and very much.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Empathy for people.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And you know when we don't see the red flags
and children and they're usually there, and people you know, whoever, teachers,
they're case workers.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Ignore it.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I mean when a child is reaching out for help
that there's usually signs there.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I We'm just to working at preschool.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
And this child he wasn't and forced to care, but
he came from a split family.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And he said to me, this kid is three years.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Old, Claudia, and he's talking about killing people and he
already was kicked out of a preschool for choking someone.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
This kid is crying out for help.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yes, and it's a shame if they don't provide that
child with.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
The proper psychological help.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
That he needs, because he's gonna end up hurting someone
for real, and and nothing.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I think it's not so much about the system saying yeah,
we don't care. You know, we're not going to give
you the help. It's more again, like the structure. First
of all, enormous numbers of kids in foster care are
medicated to control their behavior, like medicated with a cocktail
of psychotropic drugs for anti anxiety and anti depression and
(17:10):
and oh you know, just to sleep better and antipsychotic
medications like this cocktail of drugs given to children, talking
about children, drugs that were never designed for use on kids.
So enormous numbers of kids in foster care are medicated
(17:32):
to control their behavior. And then, of course, to your
point about the help they need, they have learned, just
by experience to be inherently distrustful of adults, because of
their own families, because of being moved around, because of
case workers who change, you know, without warning. So like
people come and go in their lives, nobody ever really
(17:54):
stays around for any kind of sustained length of time.
And so you talk about, like, can you get these
kids help?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Marianne, who you mentioned, she's the first character in the book,
I mean, she had plenty of therapists she had. I
think I counted. I worked through her case file and
at one point I counted, and I can't remember the number,
but you know, it's like a dozen therapists in her
short during her short time in foster care. I mean
she went into system when she was about ten. You know,
(18:26):
by the time she was fourteen or fifteen, she was
a runaway on the streets. During that time, she had
you know, something like ten or twelve different therapists. I
can't remember the exact number right now, but you know,
she didn't believe any of them were terribly interested in her,
so it didn't work right. She didn't trust them, she
(18:47):
didn't really confide in them. She hated the process. A
lot of kids hate therapy. Kids who aren't in foster care,
a lot of kids hate therapy. And it takes a
while to trust a therapist who's going to be an adult.
And for kids in foster care who might get moved
to another placement while in therapy with this person, I mean,
they might continue, but they might not. It might be
(19:07):
off to the next therapist. So you know, how is
that going to work. It's not really going to work.
It takes sustained connection and trust, and that is what
the system traditionally has sort of undermined.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And that is very true.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And I'm glad you brought up the medications, and that
could be a whole nother show. And interestingly enough, I
had interviewed so in last month about you know, these
psychotropics in the effects of adults and children, and they
are medicated, they're medicated very young, and there's got to
(19:48):
be a better way than to just medicate. Yes, some
children might need to be medicated, some adults might need
to be medicated. But I think I pay you a
quotia that there's got to be a better way to
get behaviors under control. But that and there you go
(20:11):
back again to the neuroscience that these kids are behaving
a certain way because of what they have been experiencing.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I mean, right, you know.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
If you get go ahead, Well, I was just going
to say, near the front of the book, sort of
towards the beginning, there's this teacher I quote who says
behavior is a language, and that's the thing, like, sometimes
this is a language, very hard to interpret, very hard
to translate. And I don't want to like minimize this.
(20:47):
A lot of kids in foster care. Yeah, their behavior
is a language. Yeah they're crying out for sure, But
it doesn't look sweet and nice. I mean a lot
of children in foster care have really really difficult, challenging,
often frightening behaviors. Right, this is not some easy thing like, oh,
just give him a hug and he'll be all better. No,
(21:08):
it's not like that.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's this.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
While I'm saying how deep and how serious these behaviors
are I am also saying in this book, what really
struck me was how powerful, how profoundly powerful, simply sustained
connection with a trustworthy adult, How powerfully that is able
(21:36):
to reroute kids' brains brain circuitry. Now, it doesn't happen
in a week, but like, there's a story in the
book which you saw. There's this kid in the book.
He's in New York City. He's bombed out of three
high schools. He's in foster care. He's trudging around the
city with his clothes and his food and his birth certificate,
all his documents in it. Literally literally a garbage bag
(21:59):
over his sh.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
This is his life.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
He's a teenager. He's sort of bouncing from I hate
that word bouncing, but he's sort of trudging from home
to home. He's spending some time in a group home.
Incredibly unhappy kid, gang involved, and already done time in juvie.
And he lands at his fourth high school. He's seventeen
years old, last chance high school. It's fourth high school.
(22:23):
Nobody thinks he's gonna even get a diploma, right. I
just saw this person, like a month or two ago,
earn his PhD. That kid actually did graduate. He went
to community college, he went to the state university. Then
he got his master's and he got his PhD. Incredible,
(22:45):
and he hinpoints it to connection with a young graduation
advocate at that Last Chance High school. She was twenty
three years old. She was practically a kid herself. She
was not some psycho pologist or heavy trained, seasoned professional,
not at all. She was literally there just just like
(23:08):
help him arrange his class schedule or get to school safely.
He was always worried about being jumped by a rival
gang set, so that's what they would do. They would
literally sit there and map his route to school, different
routes on Google Maps. That was it. They worked together
doing that and just getting him to school and him
checking in for nine months. No kind of heavy therapy
(23:33):
that did it. That made this young person believe in
himself enough to be able to trust her when she said, hey,
your scores are actually quite good, especially because you never
go to school. I mean, considering that your scores are
really good, I think we can get you to college.
He didn't believe her, but he trusted her enough to
(23:54):
let her try to follow her lead, to say, Okay,
I'll listen to you. And it just built from there.
He wants a PhD now, like this is a real transformation.
It's possible.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That that was such a story that I had to
shed some tears because you know, you're rooting for these
people right in the story, and that's all you need
sometimes Claudia is someone to mentor you to be able
(24:29):
to get that connection. That's how important connection is. Yeah,
And I always say, you know, you know, in today's world,
where we're so connected via technology, we're also very disconnected
at the same time. And I think when someone sees
something and someone and they bring it out, I mean,
(24:50):
that's phenomenal. Do you know did that teacher does she.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Know what the student is doing?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Now?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Did he ever get back to her.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
To say, yeah, yeah, it's in the book, I talk
about it. So he for many years she had no idea,
She had no idea about the impact on him. She
was just like he was one of the kids on
her caseload and she was gray glad he graduated and
like that's it. And then just a couple of months ago,
maybe a year ago, he did email her and he said,
(25:24):
you know, I just wanted to let you know what
happened to me. I'm in a PhD program and I
have you to thank for that. She burst into tears.
She had no idea. This was just an email that
landed in her inbox one morning out of the blue.
They had had no connection for you know, better part
of a decade. She was shocked at the impact that
(25:46):
her sort of basic level connection had made on this
young man. So and then, of course, in me writing
the book, in the course of reporting out this story,
I did contact her and we have and I have
talked with her, and so she has some knowledge that
he did in fact earn his PhD. And you know,
(26:08):
she's as amazed as anyone, like, Wow, she had no
idea as a twenty three year old with you know,
coming from a completely different background, you know, a sort
of stable, privileged, middle class background. She just had no
idea of the impact that she would have on this
young man.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
That that's so incredible, Which goes to the show.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
As I always say, you know, you never know how
far your ripples are gonna go, well effect, you haven't
someone you really don't.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
How did you find.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
The people that you interviewed for your book?
Speaker 3 (26:46):
So right, so good question. When I when I first
encountered Marianne. The first thing I wanted to know was
she typical or was she some kind of crazy aberration. Obviously,
she killed a person, so that's not typical. Not every
kid in foster care is going to do that. However,
her experience in foster care was in no way extreme.
(27:11):
It was totally typical. He was sort of passed through
about a half dozen homes. She was adopted out of
foster care. Her adoptive parents could not handle her, and
they kicked her back into the system. And at that
point she just became a chronic runaway. And you know
then soon within a year she had shot and killed
(27:34):
this guy. So what I wanted to find out was
like this path through foster care, adoption and running away,
Like how typical is that? I found out incredibly typical,
and that there are four things that are standard for
adolescents in the foster care system. That seemed to push
(27:55):
kids toward locked cells, toward lockup them is running away.
And I described it before you run away, You're going
to get hungry, You're going to shoplift, the cops are
going to pick you up. There you go. You just
got sent to juvie. You just got locked up The
next thing is failed adoptions. That's exactly what happened to Marianne.
(28:16):
It was also the case for another young person in
the book who had a very different outcome and became
quite successful. However, he also had some intermittent semi homelessness.
Failed adoptions are really under discussed by the child welfare system,
but they are not unusual. A lot of kids are
(28:39):
adopted by families that are not ready for the kind
of behaviors that they might show, and they are not well.
These families are also not really well supported, and they
can't do it. When you send a kid back to
foster care after adopting them, that rejection even if the
experience was really unpleasan for everyone involved, even if the
(29:01):
kid says, oh I hated that family, which was true
for Marianne and true for this other young man who
did become successful. His name is Sixto. He also hated
his adoptive home. But that experience of being rejected by
your adoptive family and kicked back to foster care is
so profound that it too has really serious effects on behavior.
(29:25):
So that was the second thing. The third thing is
group homes. When kids are not adopted or when the
adoption falls apart. By the time they're a teenager, they
probably live in a group home. Group homes, there's tons
of fighting kid on kid and also kid on staff,
and staff called the police and somebody gets brought to
(29:45):
juvie or worse, and there you go. You just got
locked up again. And then the fourth thing is aging
out of foster care without any support when you're eighteen,
which we just discussed before. So these are the four
things that seem to lead to incarceration and homelessness. And
as I was reporting out each of those four paths,
(30:07):
I found young people who exemplified them, whose lives had
been affected by each of these four prongs. And that's
how I found the kids.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Well, yes, I can't imagine. I've heard our stories about
group homes for the delopmentally disabled. I used to work
in the state institution, and the people that worked there
told me what went on in some of the group homes.
So I can only imagine what it's like for young
(30:40):
teenage adults in group homes where they have a behavioral problems.
And you're right, Claudia, when you know, sometimes you know,
with the Feld adoption, maybe the parents don't know about
(31:00):
the behavior problems or they think they could handle it,
and of course they may not have the support that
they should have.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I would they could come.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
If I'm wrong, I would imagine that a lot of
these children and young.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Adults have violent behavior at times. Oh you are, They're through.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
You are correct, for sure. But I also want to
say there's another kind of group home that I talk
about in the book, and it is embodied in the
story of a young person named Monique. Monique grew up
in a group home in Texas near Houston. This was
(31:42):
not some kind of like transient place like what I
just described, where kids kind of come in and out
and are fighting each other or assaulting staff. This was
a very different kind of place. It was more therapeutically oriented.
It was specifically for kids with either developmental or behavioral problems,
(32:03):
and they lived there for years. Monique lived there through
for all four years of high school. And you know,
they give the kids clothes to wear, they're preparing their
food for them as much more institutional and you know,
she did okay while she was there, though medicated, I
(32:24):
mean she was medicated all the time, but she went
to school. She got a high school diploma. She did okay,
but it's an incredibly structured environment and she certainly didn't
enjoy it. When she got out, they were like, okay,
now we're going to hook you up with college, and
Texas is like your foster cable pay for your college.
(32:45):
So great, looks good. So there she goes to a
major university campus in Texas, and without the structure that
had sort of been forming her entire life, she just
completely spun out. She really did not know how to
organize her life. You know, in a traditional or conventional family,
(33:08):
kids grow up, they have an allowance, they learn about money,
they might take on, you know, gradually more and more
responsibility in a home. They have chores, they learned to drive,
they learned to maybe have a part time job, all
these things that are sort of standard markers of growing up.
None of that was normal for Monique. In growing up
(33:31):
in a group home. She didn't have any of that.
So when she got to college, she really did not
know how to organize and manage her life, and she
spun out. I don't think she made it for even
one semester, maybe one semester, and then she was gone.
So there's another side to group homes other than violence,
(33:51):
and it's this thing that six sto cancel. One of
the young people in the book calls learned passivity, which
again and sets you up for like a really bad
outcome when you're a young adult.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yes, I could imagine that.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
I mean, because if you're so structured and even micromanaged
that you can't function once you get out on your own,
because you want someone to structure, you know, to say
hey here, yeah, you know, Betsy, I'll use myself as
an example. You know, this is your schedule for today,
(34:31):
or for the week, or the months, and just as
an example. And they need something like that. Now. I
know that if a child is neurodivergent, they like having
structure and a schedule and they fall apart when their
schedule changes.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Right, Yeah, Monique, it's had a really rough time she
is now. I mean, she's not a kid anymore. She's
I think I think she just turned twenty eight or
twenty nine. She's living in her car. I mean she
has tried, she has tried to hold to get jobs,
(35:12):
to hold jobs, she has tried to pursue college. But
it's really really difficult for her to sort of envision
a goal and sort of do the step by step
perseverance to reach that goal. This is really really hard
for a lot of foster kids, and it's hard for
(35:33):
her to.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Because they're not.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Taught, you know, they're not taught the way we in
sort of conventional families we teach our kids to be ready.
They're not taught. They're taught, you know, here's how you
do your laundry, Like maybe that's what they're taught. They're
not really taught how to sort of build a life.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Her basic life skills.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, you know, I'm attaining a checking account, a budget,
applying you know, for services.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
I think it's uh interesting, Claudia.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
I know sometimes I jump all off our different topics
and put the robus into my head at the time.
This is your subtitle. Your book is Words of the State,
The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. What's the long
shadow you're referring to.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Right the It's two it's two things. So the long
shadow is and it's my effort to indicate, hey, this
doesn't end when you leave foster care. This childhood experience
shapes your whole life. Even people who have managed to
become extremely successful after foster care and They are in
(36:57):
the book too. There are lawyers and activists who have,
you know, grown up in foster care and our functioning,
helpful members of our world, but they too are shaped
by this experience. It doesn't just go away. It is
this shadow over their lives. It's also a shadow over
(37:19):
all of our lives. This is what I was trying
to say at the beginning of our conversation, because foster
care is driving prison admissions and homelessness, because so many
of it's so called alumni from the foster care system
end up in our prisons and our homeless shelters. That
(37:43):
costs us the foster care is thirty billion dollars every
year that this country is spending thirty billion every year
for these outcomes. Fifty nine percent who age out will
be locked up by twenty six, Fewer than five percent
will earn a four year college degree. Those are the
outcomes that were spending thirty billion dollars every year on,
(38:03):
not counting the cost of prison and homelessness services. That's
why I'm saying it's a shadow over American society. I
mean it is. It needs to be recognized absolutely.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
I would could only imagine that it would have long
term effects of what people have gone through.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I had to forgive me quote it. I read your book,
I'd take a month or two ago. Who is the.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Guy who worked down in Washington, d c he that's
six cancel six.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I thought, okay, yeah, sixtoh is he grew up in
foster care in Bridgeport, Connecticut. So the book is national,
it has kids from all over the place. Sixto came
from Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm just safe for I mean,
you read your listeners on the East Coast will know
Bridgeport is a tough town. A lot of people here
Connecticut and if they don't know the East Coast, they're like,
(39:06):
oh Connecticut Country Club. No, no, no, no, not Bridgeport.
Bridgeport is a tough town. And Sixto was in foster
care there from very early, from like babyhood, and then
he briefly left the system, was taken back into the system,
was adopted out of foster care. It was a terrible adoption,
(39:27):
so bad that he begged his caseworker to be sent
to be removed from his adoptive home and be sent
back into the system. But Siko ended up becoming incredibly
passionate about his experience and wanting to use his really
rough experience to make the system better for all the
(39:48):
other kids coming up behind him, and so he has
become a very successful activist in Washington, DC.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
That is that's phenomenal to here, because you know, nobody
knows what it's like until they have gone through that experience.
So I can just imagine that six zero is a force,
a very fierce advocate.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
He is a force, and it's true that people don't
know unless they have gone through the experience. However, I
am hoping that those who read Wards of the State
will at least have a better understanding of what it
feels like. That was my really original goal in doing
this book. I wanted people to know what does it
feel like like? What is it psychological reality for a
(40:41):
child of being pushed around from home to home or
being on the street. How does that make you think?
What does that feel like? That's what I wanted and
I hope readers get some of that from the book.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Oh they definitely will. I mean I did, and I
have you.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Know I told you earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I've interviewed two people who were in the forsters system
and a foster mom. But your book has different stories,
different people and really goes into such depth of each
one and really what is going on in the system
(41:18):
that and with the brains of the children being affected
that I didn't really realized before.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
So I'm glad that you wrote this book. And I was.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
And when I was reading your book, it's kind of
weird in a way. Was reading your book, I was
thinking of the people that I had interviewed. And one
person she was in force secure in the seventies and
she ran away and she was in the prison system.
(41:53):
She got out of it. She's doing very well, but
she was abused in her lot of her foster care homes,
and she and and in jail. This is what's Ironica
Cloya and jail.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
She found friends. She found that connection that she was
looking for.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Super common. It's a it's a sad, really sad commentary.
And there's another story in the book that speaks to
this exactly. Mary Anne you mentioned ends up in a
youth prison and that turns out to be more helpful
(42:38):
to her, not because the prison is so therapeutic or great,
but only in that it that it was a stable place.
She was there for four years and she had, you know,
pretty much the same people handling her and talking to
her and working with her for those four years. For
(42:59):
those four years, she was fed, she knew where she'd sleep,
she knew she'd be warm enough. That kind of stability
was totally new to her, and it had a profound
effect on improving her behavior. So, yeah, going to prison
often helps kids in foster care because they feel a
(43:19):
connection there with others who they know, which is a
really sad commentary on the foster care system that prison
turns out to be more stable and more welcoming in
some horrible way than foster care.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Yeah, I agree, I know that. Running out of time,
I just wanted to bring out one other person in
your book, Arthur Longworth, who is in the prison now
I'm not prison.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
It was in foster care.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
In the nineteen seventies and early eighties. I think reading
about him made me think of this other person and
who also is in that time frame, and there's may
not be and there might be another one who was
in jail for a long time. He's in foster care
and then ended up in jail.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I forgot his name for it was in for a
really long time. I know that was author it was.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Yeah, it's Arthur, Yeah, doesn't take too much because but yeah,
it's that don't take too much because there are some
surprises in terms of what happens with my characters over
the course of the book. But yeah, you mentioned that
he was in foster care in the late seventies and
early eighties, and that's another thing I wanted readers to
understand how long this overlap has existed from you know,
(44:50):
like the sort of handoff from foster care to prison. Like,
this is not a new trend or a sudden spike.
This has been the case basically from the beginning. In fact,
the very first person legally executed in the brand new
state of Wyoming in eight eighteen ninety two, when foster care,
(45:10):
you know, was just sort of beginning, was a former
foster kid. He was seventeen years old. He was hung
in Wyoming, and he was on the run from foster care.
This is an old story. Arthur Longworth is the you know,
the early eighties incarnation of it, and Marianne is in
(45:31):
the twenty teens. This has been going on decades, really
more than a century. This is a long time and
it's time. It's time we confronted it.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
I also liked.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
In your book, Clota that you brought out the history
of the four secure system, which I did not know about.
And I just again, congratulations, folks. There's a lot to
this book. There's a lot I didn't even cover. You
have to read this book.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
That's aw.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
I'm very passionate about this book and everyone really should
read this book because it's like.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
What can we do to hope there are fo secure
parings go ahead.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
So there are a couple of things. I want to
just say two things. So, one thing that is happening,
in part because of the work of six sto cancel
down in Washington, d C. One thing that is happening
is way more kinship care. This is a good thing.
This is not a miracle, but it is a better thing.
It is better to place kids if they can't live
(46:37):
with their biological parents, to place them with a relative,
somebody connected to their community, somebody who knows them. It
could even be like a family friend or a teacher,
which would be called like fictive kids. So it has
always been the case that relatives would take in kids.
You know that, like you know, like grandma would take
(46:58):
in her grandchildren if her own daughter couldn't parent them. Yes,
that is an old tradition. But Grandma never got state support,
meaning money to take care of those kids. Right, So
Grandma is leading her retirement savings to parent children who
she never intended to be taken care of when she
was seventy five.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
The change is the.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Government agreeing that kinship care is actually worth supporting and
is better. So that is happening in a lot of places.
It's not one hundred percent. It's a slow thing, but
it is happening. It is better. So we can all
support kinship caregivers. We could offer ourselves to be kinship caregivers.
(47:41):
We could do what the teacher I mentioned, that graduation advocate.
She just sat down with this kid and worked with
him a couple times a week on how to get
safely to school. Like, we can all do something to
foster an ongoing connection with a kid. And that's the key,
ongoing stability, because people come in and out of these
(48:01):
kids' lives. It has to be ongoing stability. That's the
one thing. The other thing I would say is like
Arthur Longworth committed a terrible crime, so did Marianne Atkins
and a lot of other kids. It is true that
that they're like they these kids in foster care are victims,
(48:22):
but they have created victims as well. There are real victims,
real harm as a result of their actions. I just
want to say to people who might be wondering about
that we're judging these kids. Every young person who I
profile in this book. You know, some of them have
(48:44):
been called like budding sociopaths or no empathy right, No,
every one of these kids spoke to me because they
they wanted to help the system for young people coming
up behind them, kids they'll never know, so they do
have empathy and they are thinking. They spoke to me,
(49:05):
none of them had to write, and one of them
knew it would be a pretty invasive experience. I mean,
I was like all in their business. Every one of
them said, I want to do this for other kids.
So I think that that's important to keep in mind
to understand the humanity here. There's a lot more humanity
than we ever recognize.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I think Quota that it sticks of your character, of
you as a person. For these people to sit down
and talk to you and trust you to tell their story,
that says a lot about you.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Kudos to you. It really does that they trusted you.
You know, well I was there.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
This was a six year process, and like I've been saying,
like sustained connection. I mean, a lot of them didn't
think I would do that. I think a lot of
these young people we're like, yeah, yeah, she'll talk to
me and she'll be gone. We'll do a phone call
and I'll never hear from her again. But here we
still are, six years later, still talking. So I mean
(50:11):
that's that's probably one of the main reasons. Sustained connection.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
You know, yes, very that's very important.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Well, I can't thank you enough Clodia for coming on
my show.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Writing this book. Folks who heard Claudia wrote.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
And the last name is r Owe. Wards of the State,
The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. Where could people
purchase your book, Clodia, and how can they connect to you?
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Thanks for asking? So. Wards of the State is just
easily available at your local independent bookstarer or on Barnes
and Noble or Amazon dot com or bookshop dot org
if you want to go to the nonprofit route. I mean,
it's just widely available on an you have the normal websites.
(51:02):
Also in your local bookstore. And if people want to
reach out to me, it can always go to my website,
which is claudiaow Journalist dot com. There's a little contact
button you can write me an email. I'm also on
Twitter x at Row Report can always hit me up
(51:23):
that way. I'm on Facebook if people like that whatever,
I think, I'm pretty easy to find.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Well, you are such a delight to talk to. And
do you ever want to come back again discuss more
of your book, Please do so, because this is a book, folks.
I truly feel it needs to be out there. People
need to read it. It really will open up your eyes.
It opened my eyes up, and I learned a lot.
(51:53):
I really learned so much, you know. And I I
had an idea wants to care before, but you bring
a whole new perspective and many different elements of information
that I think will benefit readers. And I just got
(52:17):
to say, get the book, folks. I really want everyone
curious this book.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
When I passed about welcome, I appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
I want to tell your listeners as well. I wrote
this to be a good read. This is not some heavy,
boring policy and brain science book. This is I mean
it starts off pretty true crimey and I mean it
starts off like in the middle of a crime happening.
So I wrote it to be fast, engaging read. It's
(52:50):
important that people want to know this stuff, and you're
not going to know it if it's presented in a
boring way. So I do want to tell you your
your listener, is that it is aimed to be you know,
sort of a I mean it is. It is all true.
There is also amazing stories. These are incredible survival stories.
(53:11):
So yeah, yes, I tell you the truth. Cloy I laughed,
I cried. I could not put this book down.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
I was reading this.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Book one two o'clock in the morning. I found it
very hard to put down.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
I really enjoyed reading it.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
You know, when I first thought, oh, well, this might
be book might be a little depressing, it wasn't. It
was really an excellent book. Again, full of information that
people need to know. It's really important because maybe there's
foster kids in your neighborhood you wouldn't.
Speaker 3 (53:48):
Know definitely are I'm gonna tell you, yeah, there are kids,
foster kids. I mean, And if there are not foster
kids presently in your neighborhood, someone you know was probably
in the foster care system. Point it is all around us.
It is just invisible.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Well, I want to thank you again, Clodia, and I'm
best wishes to you on your book. I hope it
becomes the international bestseller and I will post it on
my personal page if that's okay with you, of course okay,
and I'm on LinkedIn, I will post it there.
Speaker 3 (54:28):
Thank you so much, Betsy.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
You are welcome as my pleasure. Folks, you heard Claudia
Rowe as I had just said before.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
And I want to thank.
Speaker 1 (54:40):
Jeanie White, who is the station manager who writes the blog.
All the information about Claudia row and the book will
be in the blog that Genie Waite writes, and she
produces the show. And I want to thank William Caldwell,
who's CEO at Pastoral Talk Radio Network. It makes this
so possible. And I want to thank you the listeners.
(55:02):
Thank you for listening subscribing. Do you want to know
where you could find me? I am on Amazon Music, Spotify, Speaker,
and if you have Alexa, you can even program Alexa
to have chatting with Betsy. Don't ask me how to
do that because I don't have Alexa, but if you
have Alexa, you would probably know how to do it
(55:24):
and if you're looking for a support group, I have
hashtag kick Alzheimer's as movement if you are a caregiver,
And as I always say at the end of my show,
you can follow me on Facebook Betsy E.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Worzel. W or Zel in the world, we could be anything.
Please be kind, shine your light right because we need.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
It now more than ever before. And that's I have
to say today. This is Betsy Worzel. You're a host
of Chatting with Betsy. I'm passion Orle Talk Radio Network,
a subsidiary of Global Media Network l L feng im
By Now
Hello, everyone, this is Betsy Worthal. You're a host of
Chatting with Betsy, my passionate will Talk Radio Network, a
subsidiary of Global Media Network LLC. We're minxious to educate, enlighten,
and entertain. The views of the guest may not represent
those that host the station, and I want to thank
(00:21):
everyone for joining me today. She you're busy about your day,
you do not want to miss my guest today. Let
me give you some background. Claudia Rowe is the author
and writer of Wards of the State, The Long Shadow
of American foster care. She has been writing about the
(00:42):
hallways where kids in government clash for more than thirty years.
A native of New York City now living in Seattle,
her reporting a racially skewed school discipline for The Seattle
Times helped to change education laws in Washington State, and
her coverage of.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Chino youth gangs was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Claudia has written for The New York Times, Mother Jones,
and Amazon Original Stories. In twenty eighteen, she received the
Washington State Book Award for her true crime memoir The
Spider and the Fly. She is a member of the
editorial board at the Shattle Times, where she writes about
foster care, juvenile justice, and public education and when to
(01:28):
Welcome you, Clodia wrote, chatting with Betsy, welcome.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thanks so much for having me. I'm really glad to
be here with you, Betsy.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I have to tell you, Clodia, I have read and interviewed.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Two people that were in the foster care.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
And a mom who was fostering kids for I think
like thirty five to forty years. But your book is
so unique and that you show for I never knew.
I think it is very eye opening. I think anyone
in social work needs to read this psychologist, anyone really
(02:12):
needs to read your book to understand foster kids and
the system and why it is failing them.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
What a book. Congratulations and thank you for writing it.
It really touts my heart.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Thank you so much, Bety. I wrote it really. I mean,
I hope all social workers and everyone in the system
reads this book. But I wrote it really. I wrote
it very much through the kids' eyes, and I wrote
it for general interest readers who might have heard about
foster care or think they kind of know what it is,
(02:52):
or maybe don't know at all what it is. That's
who I wrote it for, to say, hey, there's this
enormous government system that's almost entirely invisible, and its outcomes
are really troubling, and in fact, it affects all of us,
you me, all of us, because we're all paying for
(03:13):
the car Serle system. We're all paying for prisons and
for homelessness, and those are like some of the primary
outcomes of foster care. That's what I wanted to show
in this book.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And yes, and you did an excellent job, and I just,
you know, congratulations for you. So that's basically I was
going to ask you what motivated you to write the book,
but you just answered that. I'll go up to another question, Well,
do you want to expand some work?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, because you know, even you know I I had
been a reporter when I stumbled on this. I certainly
was not planning to write a book about foster care,
not at all. I had been a reporter. I had
written a little bit about the child welfare system. I
had written a lot more about youth crime. And it
(04:03):
was only in sitting in court watching this teenage girl
being sentenced for a very serious crime that I began
to sort of fully appreciate the incredible overlap between these
two systems foster care and our carsural system, our prisons.
Her story kind of like embodied that overlap. But I
(04:27):
even a reporter me, you know, somebody who's like, actually,
you know, kind of listening for these kinds of patterns.
I hadn't properly appreciated how closely they are linked. And
that's why I wanted to write this book to sort
of explain to readers, like, see these kids understand what
(04:49):
is it to be on the street when you're fifteen
years old it's two o'clock in the morning, Like, what
is that? Like? That's why I wanted to write the book.
I wanted people to see these kids.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
And you did a very good job, excellent and doing
that because my heart broke for each a person that
you wrote about, starting with Marianne. And you know, we
sometimes I know I am I'll stick for myself or judgmental, Well,
(05:27):
you know, they shouldn't have killed somebody, don't they know
right from wrong? But then you bring out in your
book something that I never really thought of until I
read your book, is that getting taken away from your
family and as horrible as that situation is at times
(05:48):
where foster kids have come from. Sometimes they come at
a very abusive families, as you know, and sometimes they
don't and then get put in a foster care system
where they're moved around all the time. Time disconnects, and
especially if they're from you know, birth to seven years,
that's the four mud of years of a brain, so
(06:09):
they learn to disconnect to protect themselves from getting hurt
all the time. Right, And I you know, and that
really hit me, Quaoudia of understanding their behavior.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
It's yeah, that was you that really hard. Yeah, that's
exactly it. Like when I, you know, about when I
said before about I really want people, regular everyday people
to see these kids because of course, judgment and fear
are all of our you know, often our first reactions
(06:50):
when we hear about a horrible crime, when we see
a kid, we hear about something that sounds like just depraved.
Of course, our first reactions are judgment, which really comes
out of fear. And I thought it was important to
sort of dissect this, like what is exactly happening when
a kid does something like that? How do they understand themselves?
(07:15):
You know, like what do they think they're doing? How
do they what is their motivation? Where does it come from?
I really wanted to really break this down, and what
I found was that the foster care system not because
of any particular villain, not because of you know, bad
social workers or abusive foster parents. No, no, nothing like
(07:37):
that at all, but because of the system itself, the
sort of mechanized structure of a system that is designed
to undercut connection, to thwart bonds. It is specifically aimed
to make it so that the foster parent does not
bond with the foster kid because the kid will be moving,
(08:00):
and I mean, the whole system is geared traditionally, don't
connect to your caregiver. And by the way, if you
came from a messed up, negligent or abusive family, you
shouldn't know anybody in your family. Ever. Again, you shouldn't
know any of your relatives. That's why kids traditionally were
not placed by the state with relatives who knew them.
(08:22):
And we're just now beginning to appreciate how wrongheaded that
approach is, how seriously a kid's behavior can be shaped
by undercutting connections to adults who know them, and that
like the sort of brain science aspect of this, I
(08:46):
think is really important to understanding the outcomes of foster care.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Absolutely, and I know from interviewing the foster mom, and
you also bring us out and your book that the
foster care system actually failed and helping the foster parents
matching them up, you know, with a as besial as
(09:12):
they can with the child.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
You know, I'm just gonna tell my audience. You know,
sometimes foster parents get kids two o'clock.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
In the morning without any notice, I like a phone
call they were coming, you know, and they have to
have everything ready. And sometimes they the foster parent themselves,
they don't know the history of their child that they're
getting the foster child.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Right, right. The system does not treat it's paid caregivers
foster parents very well at all. It treats them like
a way station, like interchangeable widgets, or like little more
than you know, babysitters who are providing room and board.
And so you know, what do you what do you
(09:57):
think that's going to encourage in the foster parents. How
intensely are they going to care about a kid when
they know that kid could be yanked And the whole
system is geared toward discouraging real connection between foster parent
and kid, and that just as you said, the foster
parents are treated kind of like interchangeable was stations, and
(10:20):
that really doesn't work either. So I really think every
reforms that shows any kind of promise is one that
honors the importance of connection, not just like in some
philosophical way because it's nice or something, because there's actual
brain chemistry that is affected, and then behavior and then
(10:43):
you know, really serious social problems.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I also, in my opinion, Claudia Sound and reading your
book and on what I know from other people I've
spoken to, since it's just going through a cycle, and
the cycle has to be broken.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
It has to be fixed. The cycle's broken, it needs
to be fixed.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
That's what I'm trying to say of you know, yanking
these kids from this home to that home, not letting
them get the services that they require. And that's a battle,
uh for forced appearance, to fight for their kids to
you know, get the services at the schools, but being
(11:29):
yanked around, how do they get that education, How do
they get those services so they can.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Be successful.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It's like it's it's like they set them up for
failure over and over and over again.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
My heartbreak the most important.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, you said the two most important words, set up
and cycle. It is a setup. It is a setup.
Not again, not intentionally. I'm not saying any kind of
bureaucrat or admit illustrator is sitting there, you know, rubbing
their hands together and trying to do some something that
hurt kids. Quite the opposite. Basically, everyone in the system
(12:09):
desperately wants to help kids, truly cares about kids. It's
the system itself, this inherited thing that's been largely the same,
you know, for like a century. It's not that different
than it was, you know, when foster care started at
the early part of the twentieth century. It's this inherited
system that is totally misaligned with the way human brains work.
(12:36):
And like, okay, we didn't know before, but now we
do know. We do know, and we should be able
to do better. And the thing about a cycle, it's
exactly that. A lot of advocates who are concerned about
the system will talk about the foster care to prison pipeline.
But one of the most thoughtful guys in the book,
(12:57):
former foster youth, who got a life sentence for very
serious crime he committed almost immediately after being cut from
foster care, he thinks of it more as a cycle,
as a as like a beast that's eating its own tail.
And if he thinks of it as like, you know,
the foster care system, because of what we've just described,
(13:17):
sort of pumps out kids so poorly equipped to function
in a productive, healthy way in sort of the regular
mainstream world. That crime and homelessness, you know, are are
almost like predetermined. And then kid does whatever they do
to survive, they might be taken into like a county
(13:40):
jail or state prison, depending but maybe they already have
a kid. Then that child is going to be taken
into foster care. And it's this cycle parents into prison
or homelessness. State takes the kid, the kid then comes
out of the state system, you know, set up for
a little better than more incarceration and homelessness. It is
a site I should say. Of course, there are kids
(14:03):
who succeed despite this, who break the pattern, and they
are in the book too. But the truth is that
fewer than five percent of children who age out of
foster care when they're eighteen will ever get a bachelor's degree,
a four year college degree. Fewer than five percent, And
like fifty nine percent will have experienced some kind of
(14:26):
lock up by the time they're twenty six. Sixty nine
percent some kind of lock up. It could be while
they're yeah, it could be while they're still in foster care,
like in juvenile detention. That would count as some kind
of lock up. But then there you go, even it's
for the stupidest thing in the world. Like you, you know, you,
whatever you were, You ran from your placement and you
(14:47):
got hungry, and you shoplifted a bag of potato chips,
and the cops come and they put you in juvie
for whatever, a couple of days whatever. You now have
a criminal record. So what do you think is going
to happen when you're eighteen years old and the state says, thanks,
we're done with you, goodbye. You have a spotty education,
you probably have some kind of dinky criminal record. How
(15:09):
is that going to help you get on your feet
and like join the world.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
It truly is a setup, it is, And I just
found all the stories that you have of each individual
self powerful.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
And really did touch my heart. Claudia.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I'm a very sensitive person by nature, That's just how
I am, and very much.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Empathy for people.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
And you know when we don't see the red flags
and children and they're usually there, and people you know, whoever, teachers,
they're case workers.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Ignore it.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I mean when a child is reaching out for help
that there's usually signs there.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I We'm just to working at preschool.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
And this child he wasn't and forced to care, but
he came from a split family.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
And he said to me, this kid is three years.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Old, Claudia, and he's talking about killing people and he
already was kicked out of a preschool for choking someone.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
This kid is crying out for help.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yes, and it's a shame if they don't provide that
child with.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
The proper psychological help.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
That he needs, because he's gonna end up hurting someone
for real, and and nothing.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I think it's not so much about the system saying yeah,
we don't care. You know, we're not going to give
you the help. It's more again, like the structure. First
of all, enormous numbers of kids in foster care are
medicated to control their behavior, like medicated with a cocktail
of psychotropic drugs for anti anxiety and anti depression and
(17:10):
and oh you know, just to sleep better and antipsychotic
medications like this cocktail of drugs given to children, talking
about children, drugs that were never designed for use on kids.
So enormous numbers of kids in foster care are medicated
(17:32):
to control their behavior. And then, of course, to your
point about the help they need, they have learned, just
by experience to be inherently distrustful of adults, because of
their own families, because of being moved around, because of
case workers who change, you know, without warning. So like
people come and go in their lives, nobody ever really
(17:54):
stays around for any kind of sustained length of time.
And so you talk about, like, can you get these
kids help?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Marianne, who you mentioned, she's the first character in the book,
I mean, she had plenty of therapists she had. I
think I counted. I worked through her case file and
at one point I counted, and I can't remember the number,
but you know, it's like a dozen therapists in her
short during her short time in foster care. I mean
she went into system when she was about ten. You know,
(18:26):
by the time she was fourteen or fifteen, she was
a runaway on the streets. During that time, she had
you know, something like ten or twelve different therapists. I
can't remember the exact number right now, but you know,
she didn't believe any of them were terribly interested in her,
so it didn't work right. She didn't trust them, she
(18:47):
didn't really confide in them. She hated the process. A
lot of kids hate therapy. Kids who aren't in foster care,
a lot of kids hate therapy. And it takes a
while to trust a therapist who's going to be an adult.
And for kids in foster care who might get moved
to another placement while in therapy with this person, I mean,
they might continue, but they might not. It might be
(19:07):
off to the next therapist. So you know, how is
that going to work. It's not really going to work.
It takes sustained connection and trust, and that is what
the system traditionally has sort of undermined.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And that is very true.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And I'm glad you brought up the medications, and that
could be a whole nother show. And interestingly enough, I
had interviewed so in last month about you know, these
psychotropics in the effects of adults and children, and they
are medicated, they're medicated very young, and there's got to
(19:48):
be a better way than to just medicate. Yes, some
children might need to be medicated, some adults might need
to be medicated. But I think I pay you a
quotia that there's got to be a better way to
get behaviors under control. But that and there you go
(20:11):
back again to the neuroscience that these kids are behaving
a certain way because of what they have been experiencing.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I mean, right, you know.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
If you get go ahead, Well, I was just going
to say, near the front of the book, sort of
towards the beginning, there's this teacher I quote who says
behavior is a language, and that's the thing, like, sometimes
this is a language, very hard to interpret, very hard
to translate. And I don't want to like minimize this.
(20:47):
A lot of kids in foster care. Yeah, their behavior
is a language. Yeah they're crying out for sure, But
it doesn't look sweet and nice. I mean a lot
of children in foster care have really really difficult, challenging,
often frightening behaviors. Right, this is not some easy thing like, oh,
just give him a hug and he'll be all better. No,
(21:08):
it's not like that.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's this.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
While I'm saying how deep and how serious these behaviors
are I am also saying in this book, what really
struck me was how powerful, how profoundly powerful, simply sustained
connection with a trustworthy adult, How powerfully that is able
(21:36):
to reroute kids' brains brain circuitry. Now, it doesn't happen
in a week, but like, there's a story in the
book which you saw. There's this kid in the book.
He's in New York City. He's bombed out of three
high schools. He's in foster care. He's trudging around the
city with his clothes and his food and his birth certificate,
all his documents in it. Literally literally a garbage bag
(21:59):
over his sh.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
This is his life.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
He's a teenager. He's sort of bouncing from I hate
that word bouncing, but he's sort of trudging from home
to home. He's spending some time in a group home.
Incredibly unhappy kid, gang involved, and already done time in juvie.
And he lands at his fourth high school. He's seventeen
years old, last chance high school. It's fourth high school.
(22:23):
Nobody thinks he's gonna even get a diploma, right. I
just saw this person, like a month or two ago,
earn his PhD. That kid actually did graduate. He went
to community college, he went to the state university. Then
he got his master's and he got his PhD. Incredible,
(22:45):
and he hinpoints it to connection with a young graduation
advocate at that Last Chance High school. She was twenty
three years old. She was practically a kid herself. She
was not some psycho pologist or heavy trained, seasoned professional,
not at all. She was literally there just just like
(23:08):
help him arrange his class schedule or get to school safely.
He was always worried about being jumped by a rival
gang set, so that's what they would do. They would
literally sit there and map his route to school, different
routes on Google Maps. That was it. They worked together
doing that and just getting him to school and him
checking in for nine months. No kind of heavy therapy
(23:33):
that did it. That made this young person believe in
himself enough to be able to trust her when she said, hey,
your scores are actually quite good, especially because you never
go to school. I mean, considering that your scores are
really good, I think we can get you to college.
He didn't believe her, but he trusted her enough to
(23:54):
let her try to follow her lead, to say, Okay,
I'll listen to you. And it just built from there.
He wants a PhD now, like this is a real transformation.
It's possible.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
That that was such a story that I had to
shed some tears because you know, you're rooting for these
people right in the story, and that's all you need
sometimes Claudia is someone to mentor you to be able
(24:29):
to get that connection. That's how important connection is. Yeah,
And I always say, you know, you know, in today's world,
where we're so connected via technology, we're also very disconnected
at the same time. And I think when someone sees
something and someone and they bring it out, I mean,
(24:50):
that's phenomenal. Do you know did that teacher does she.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Know what the student is doing?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Now?
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Did he ever get back to her.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
To say, yeah, yeah, it's in the book, I talk
about it. So he for many years she had no idea,
She had no idea about the impact on him. She
was just like he was one of the kids on
her caseload and she was gray glad he graduated and
like that's it. And then just a couple of months ago,
maybe a year ago, he did email her and he said,
(25:24):
you know, I just wanted to let you know what
happened to me. I'm in a PhD program and I
have you to thank for that. She burst into tears.
She had no idea. This was just an email that
landed in her inbox one morning out of the blue.
They had had no connection for you know, better part
of a decade. She was shocked at the impact that
(25:46):
her sort of basic level connection had made on this
young man. So and then, of course, in me writing
the book, in the course of reporting out this story,
I did contact her and we have and I have
talked with her, and so she has some knowledge that
he did in fact earn his PhD. And you know,
(26:08):
she's as amazed as anyone, like, Wow, she had no
idea as a twenty three year old with you know,
coming from a completely different background, you know, a sort
of stable, privileged, middle class background. She just had no
idea of the impact that she would have on this
young man.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
That that's so incredible, Which goes to the show.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
As I always say, you know, you never know how
far your ripples are gonna go, well effect, you haven't
someone you really don't.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
How did you find.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
The people that you interviewed for your book?
Speaker 3 (26:46):
So right, so good question. When I when I first
encountered Marianne. The first thing I wanted to know was
she typical or was she some kind of crazy aberration. Obviously,
she killed a person, so that's not typical. Not every
kid in foster care is going to do that. However,
her experience in foster care was in no way extreme.
(27:11):
It was totally typical. He was sort of passed through
about a half dozen homes. She was adopted out of
foster care. Her adoptive parents could not handle her, and
they kicked her back into the system. And at that
point she just became a chronic runaway. And you know
then soon within a year she had shot and killed
(27:34):
this guy. So what I wanted to find out was
like this path through foster care, adoption and running away,
Like how typical is that? I found out incredibly typical,
and that there are four things that are standard for
adolescents in the foster care system. That seemed to push
(27:55):
kids toward locked cells, toward lockup them is running away.
And I described it before you run away, You're going
to get hungry, You're going to shoplift, the cops are
going to pick you up. There you go. You just
got sent to juvie. You just got locked up The
next thing is failed adoptions. That's exactly what happened to Marianne.
(28:16):
It was also the case for another young person in
the book who had a very different outcome and became
quite successful. However, he also had some intermittent semi homelessness.
Failed adoptions are really under discussed by the child welfare system,
but they are not unusual. A lot of kids are
(28:39):
adopted by families that are not ready for the kind
of behaviors that they might show, and they are not well.
These families are also not really well supported, and they
can't do it. When you send a kid back to
foster care after adopting them, that rejection even if the
experience was really unpleasan for everyone involved, even if the
(29:01):
kid says, oh I hated that family, which was true
for Marianne and true for this other young man who
did become successful. His name is Sixto. He also hated
his adoptive home. But that experience of being rejected by
your adoptive family and kicked back to foster care is
so profound that it too has really serious effects on behavior.
(29:25):
So that was the second thing. The third thing is
group homes. When kids are not adopted or when the
adoption falls apart. By the time they're a teenager, they
probably live in a group home. Group homes, there's tons
of fighting kid on kid and also kid on staff,
and staff called the police and somebody gets brought to
(29:45):
juvie or worse, and there you go. You just got
locked up again. And then the fourth thing is aging
out of foster care without any support when you're eighteen,
which we just discussed before. So these are the four
things that seem to lead to incarceration and homelessness. And
as I was reporting out each of those four paths,
(30:07):
I found young people who exemplified them, whose lives had
been affected by each of these four prongs. And that's
how I found the kids.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Well, yes, I can't imagine. I've heard our stories about
group homes for the delopmentally disabled. I used to work
in the state institution, and the people that worked there
told me what went on in some of the group homes.
So I can only imagine what it's like for young
(30:40):
teenage adults in group homes where they have a behavioral problems.
And you're right, Claudia, when you know, sometimes you know,
with the Feld adoption, maybe the parents don't know about
(31:00):
the behavior problems or they think they could handle it,
and of course they may not have the support that
they should have.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I would they could come.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
If I'm wrong, I would imagine that a lot of
these children and young.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Adults have violent behavior at times. Oh you are, They're through.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
You are correct, for sure. But I also want to
say there's another kind of group home that I talk
about in the book, and it is embodied in the
story of a young person named Monique. Monique grew up
in a group home in Texas near Houston. This was
(31:42):
not some kind of like transient place like what I
just described, where kids kind of come in and out
and are fighting each other or assaulting staff. This was
a very different kind of place. It was more therapeutically oriented.
It was specifically for kids with either developmental or behavioral problems,
(32:03):
and they lived there for years. Monique lived there through
for all four years of high school. And you know,
they give the kids clothes to wear, they're preparing their
food for them as much more institutional and you know,
she did okay while she was there, though medicated, I
(32:24):
mean she was medicated all the time, but she went
to school. She got a high school diploma. She did okay,
but it's an incredibly structured environment and she certainly didn't
enjoy it. When she got out, they were like, okay,
now we're going to hook you up with college, and
Texas is like your foster cable pay for your college.
(32:45):
So great, looks good. So there she goes to a
major university campus in Texas, and without the structure that
had sort of been forming her entire life, she just
completely spun out. She really did not know how to
organize her life. You know, in a traditional or conventional family,
(33:08):
kids grow up, they have an allowance, they learn about money,
they might take on, you know, gradually more and more
responsibility in a home. They have chores, they learned to drive,
they learned to maybe have a part time job, all
these things that are sort of standard markers of growing up.
None of that was normal for Monique. In growing up
(33:31):
in a group home. She didn't have any of that.
So when she got to college, she really did not
know how to organize and manage her life, and she
spun out. I don't think she made it for even
one semester, maybe one semester, and then she was gone.
So there's another side to group homes other than violence,
(33:51):
and it's this thing that six sto cancel. One of
the young people in the book calls learned passivity, which
again and sets you up for like a really bad
outcome when you're a young adult.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yes, I could imagine that.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
I mean, because if you're so structured and even micromanaged
that you can't function once you get out on your own,
because you want someone to structure, you know, to say
hey here, yeah, you know, Betsy, I'll use myself as
an example. You know, this is your schedule for today,
(34:31):
or for the week, or the months, and just as
an example. And they need something like that. Now. I
know that if a child is neurodivergent, they like having
structure and a schedule and they fall apart when their
schedule changes.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
Right, Yeah, Monique, it's had a really rough time she
is now. I mean, she's not a kid anymore. She's
I think I think she just turned twenty eight or
twenty nine. She's living in her car. I mean she
has tried, she has tried to hold to get jobs,
(35:12):
to hold jobs, she has tried to pursue college. But
it's really really difficult for her to sort of envision
a goal and sort of do the step by step
perseverance to reach that goal. This is really really hard
for a lot of foster kids, and it's hard for
(35:33):
her to.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Because they're not.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Taught, you know, they're not taught the way we in
sort of conventional families we teach our kids to be ready.
They're not taught. They're taught, you know, here's how you
do your laundry, Like maybe that's what they're taught. They're
not really taught how to sort of build a life.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Her basic life skills.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yeah, you know, I'm attaining a checking account, a budget,
applying you know, for services.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
I think it's uh interesting, Claudia.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
I know sometimes I jump all off our different topics
and put the robus into my head at the time.
This is your subtitle. Your book is Words of the State,
The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. What's the long
shadow you're referring to.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Right the It's two it's two things. So the long
shadow is and it's my effort to indicate, hey, this
doesn't end when you leave foster care. This childhood experience
shapes your whole life. Even people who have managed to
become extremely successful after foster care and They are in
(36:57):
the book too. There are lawyers and activists who have,
you know, grown up in foster care and our functioning,
helpful members of our world, but they too are shaped
by this experience. It doesn't just go away. It is
this shadow over their lives. It's also a shadow over
(37:19):
all of our lives. This is what I was trying
to say at the beginning of our conversation, because foster
care is driving prison admissions and homelessness, because so many
of it's so called alumni from the foster care system
end up in our prisons and our homeless shelters. That
(37:43):
costs us the foster care is thirty billion dollars every
year that this country is spending thirty billion every year
for these outcomes. Fifty nine percent who age out will
be locked up by twenty six, Fewer than five percent
will earn a four year college degree. Those are the
outcomes that were spending thirty billion dollars every year on,
(38:03):
not counting the cost of prison and homelessness services. That's
why I'm saying it's a shadow over American society. I
mean it is. It needs to be recognized absolutely.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
I would could only imagine that it would have long
term effects of what people have gone through.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I had to forgive me quote it. I read your book,
I'd take a month or two ago. Who is the.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Guy who worked down in Washington, d c he that's
six cancel six.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I thought, okay, yeah, sixtoh is he grew up in
foster care in Bridgeport, Connecticut. So the book is national,
it has kids from all over the place. Sixto came
from Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm just safe for I mean,
you read your listeners on the East Coast will know
Bridgeport is a tough town. A lot of people here
Connecticut and if they don't know the East Coast, they're like,
(39:06):
oh Connecticut Country Club. No, no, no, no, not Bridgeport.
Bridgeport is a tough town. And Sixto was in foster
care there from very early, from like babyhood, and then
he briefly left the system, was taken back into the system,
was adopted out of foster care. It was a terrible adoption,
(39:27):
so bad that he begged his caseworker to be sent
to be removed from his adoptive home and be sent
back into the system. But Siko ended up becoming incredibly
passionate about his experience and wanting to use his really
rough experience to make the system better for all the
(39:48):
other kids coming up behind him, and so he has
become a very successful activist in Washington, DC.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
That is that's phenomenal to here, because you know, nobody
knows what it's like until they have gone through that experience.
So I can just imagine that six zero is a force,
a very fierce advocate.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
He is a force, and it's true that people don't
know unless they have gone through the experience. However, I
am hoping that those who read Wards of the State
will at least have a better understanding of what it
feels like. That was my really original goal in doing
this book. I wanted people to know what does it
feel like like? What is it psychological reality for a
(40:41):
child of being pushed around from home to home or
being on the street. How does that make you think?
What does that feel like? That's what I wanted and
I hope readers get some of that from the book.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Oh they definitely will. I mean I did, and I
have you.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Know I told you earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
I've interviewed two people who were in the forsters system
and a foster mom. But your book has different stories,
different people and really goes into such depth of each
one and really what is going on in the system
(41:18):
that and with the brains of the children being affected
that I didn't really realized before.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
So I'm glad that you wrote this book. And I was.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
And when I was reading your book, it's kind of
weird in a way. Was reading your book, I was
thinking of the people that I had interviewed. And one
person she was in force secure in the seventies and
she ran away and she was in the prison system.
(41:53):
She got out of it. She's doing very well, but
she was abused in her lot of her foster care homes,
and she and and in jail. This is what's Ironica
Cloya and jail.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
She found friends. She found that connection that she was
looking for.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Super common. It's a it's a sad, really sad commentary.
And there's another story in the book that speaks to
this exactly. Mary Anne you mentioned ends up in a
youth prison and that turns out to be more helpful
(42:38):
to her, not because the prison is so therapeutic or great,
but only in that it that it was a stable place.
She was there for four years and she had, you know,
pretty much the same people handling her and talking to
her and working with her for those four years. For
(42:59):
those four years, she was fed, she knew where she'd sleep,
she knew she'd be warm enough. That kind of stability
was totally new to her, and it had a profound
effect on improving her behavior. So, yeah, going to prison
often helps kids in foster care because they feel a
(43:19):
connection there with others who they know, which is a
really sad commentary on the foster care system that prison
turns out to be more stable and more welcoming in
some horrible way than foster care.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Yeah, I agree, I know that. Running out of time,
I just wanted to bring out one other person in
your book, Arthur Longworth, who is in the prison now
I'm not prison.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
It was in foster care.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
In the nineteen seventies and early eighties. I think reading
about him made me think of this other person and
who also is in that time frame, and there's may
not be and there might be another one who was
in jail for a long time. He's in foster care
and then ended up in jail.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I forgot his name for it was in for a
really long time. I know that was author it was.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Yeah, it's Arthur, Yeah, doesn't take too much because but yeah,
it's that don't take too much because there are some
surprises in terms of what happens with my characters over
the course of the book. But yeah, you mentioned that
he was in foster care in the late seventies and
early eighties, and that's another thing I wanted readers to
understand how long this overlap has existed from you know,
(44:50):
like the sort of handoff from foster care to prison. Like,
this is not a new trend or a sudden spike.
This has been the case basically from the beginning. In fact,
the very first person legally executed in the brand new
state of Wyoming in eight eighteen ninety two, when foster care,
(45:10):
you know, was just sort of beginning, was a former
foster kid. He was seventeen years old. He was hung
in Wyoming, and he was on the run from foster care.
This is an old story. Arthur Longworth is the you know,
the early eighties incarnation of it, and Marianne is in
(45:31):
the twenty teens. This has been going on decades, really
more than a century. This is a long time and
it's time. It's time we confronted it.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
I also liked.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
In your book, Clota that you brought out the history
of the four secure system, which I did not know about.
And I just again, congratulations, folks. There's a lot to
this book. There's a lot I didn't even cover. You
have to read this book.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
That's aw.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
I'm very passionate about this book and everyone really should
read this book because it's like.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
What can we do to hope there are fo secure
parings go ahead.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
So there are a couple of things. I want to
just say two things. So, one thing that is happening,
in part because of the work of six sto cancel
down in Washington, d C. One thing that is happening
is way more kinship care. This is a good thing.
This is not a miracle, but it is a better thing.
It is better to place kids if they can't live
(46:37):
with their biological parents, to place them with a relative,
somebody connected to their community, somebody who knows them. It
could even be like a family friend or a teacher,
which would be called like fictive kids. So it has
always been the case that relatives would take in kids.
You know that, like you know, like grandma would take
(46:58):
in her grandchildren if her own daughter couldn't parent them. Yes,
that is an old tradition. But Grandma never got state support,
meaning money to take care of those kids. Right, So
Grandma is leading her retirement savings to parent children who
she never intended to be taken care of when she
was seventy five.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
The change is the.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
Government agreeing that kinship care is actually worth supporting and
is better. So that is happening in a lot of places.
It's not one hundred percent. It's a slow thing, but
it is happening. It is better. So we can all
support kinship caregivers. We could offer ourselves to be kinship caregivers.
(47:41):
We could do what the teacher I mentioned, that graduation advocate.
She just sat down with this kid and worked with
him a couple times a week on how to get
safely to school. Like, we can all do something to
foster an ongoing connection with a kid. And that's the key,
ongoing stability, because people come in and out of these
(48:01):
kids' lives. It has to be ongoing stability. That's the
one thing. The other thing I would say is like
Arthur Longworth committed a terrible crime, so did Marianne Atkins
and a lot of other kids. It is true that
that they're like they these kids in foster care are victims,
(48:22):
but they have created victims as well. There are real victims,
real harm as a result of their actions. I just
want to say to people who might be wondering about
that we're judging these kids. Every young person who I
profile in this book. You know, some of them have
(48:44):
been called like budding sociopaths or no empathy right, No,
every one of these kids spoke to me because they
they wanted to help the system for young people coming
up behind them, kids they'll never know, so they do
have empathy and they are thinking. They spoke to me,
(49:05):
none of them had to write, and one of them
knew it would be a pretty invasive experience. I mean,
I was like all in their business. Every one of
them said, I want to do this for other kids.
So I think that that's important to keep in mind
to understand the humanity here. There's a lot more humanity
than we ever recognize.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I think Quota that it sticks of your character, of
you as a person. For these people to sit down
and talk to you and trust you to tell their story,
that says a lot about you.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Kudos to you. It really does that they trusted you.
You know, well I was there.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
This was a six year process, and like I've been saying,
like sustained connection. I mean, a lot of them didn't
think I would do that. I think a lot of
these young people we're like, yeah, yeah, she'll talk to
me and she'll be gone. We'll do a phone call
and I'll never hear from her again. But here we
still are, six years later, still talking. So I mean
(50:11):
that's that's probably one of the main reasons. Sustained connection.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
You know, yes, very that's very important.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Well, I can't thank you enough Clodia for coming on
my show.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Writing this book. Folks who heard Claudia wrote.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
And the last name is r Owe. Wards of the State,
The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. Where could people
purchase your book, Clodia, and how can they connect to you?
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Thanks for asking? So. Wards of the State is just
easily available at your local independent bookstarer or on Barnes
and Noble or Amazon dot com or bookshop dot org
if you want to go to the nonprofit route. I mean,
it's just widely available on an you have the normal websites.
(51:02):
Also in your local bookstore. And if people want to
reach out to me, it can always go to my website,
which is claudiaow Journalist dot com. There's a little contact
button you can write me an email. I'm also on
Twitter x at Row Report can always hit me up
(51:23):
that way. I'm on Facebook if people like that whatever,
I think, I'm pretty easy to find.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
Well, you are such a delight to talk to. And
do you ever want to come back again discuss more
of your book, Please do so, because this is a book, folks.
I truly feel it needs to be out there. People
need to read it. It really will open up your eyes.
It opened my eyes up, and I learned a lot.
(51:53):
I really learned so much, you know. And I I
had an idea wants to care before, but you bring
a whole new perspective and many different elements of information
that I think will benefit readers. And I just got
(52:17):
to say, get the book, folks. I really want everyone
curious this book.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
When I passed about welcome, I appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (52:28):
I want to tell your listeners as well. I wrote
this to be a good read. This is not some heavy,
boring policy and brain science book. This is I mean
it starts off pretty true crimey and I mean it
starts off like in the middle of a crime happening.
So I wrote it to be fast, engaging read. It's
(52:50):
important that people want to know this stuff, and you're
not going to know it if it's presented in a
boring way. So I do want to tell you your
your listener, is that it is aimed to be you know,
sort of a I mean it is. It is all true.
There is also amazing stories. These are incredible survival stories.
(53:11):
So yeah, yes, I tell you the truth. Cloy I laughed,
I cried. I could not put this book down.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
I was reading this.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Book one two o'clock in the morning. I found it
very hard to put down.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
I really enjoyed reading it.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
You know, when I first thought, oh, well, this might
be book might be a little depressing, it wasn't. It
was really an excellent book. Again, full of information that
people need to know. It's really important because maybe there's
foster kids in your neighborhood you wouldn't.
Speaker 3 (53:48):
Know definitely are I'm gonna tell you, yeah, there are kids,
foster kids. I mean, And if there are not foster
kids presently in your neighborhood, someone you know was probably
in the foster care system. Point it is all around us.
It is just invisible.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Well, I want to thank you again, Clodia, and I'm
best wishes to you on your book. I hope it
becomes the international bestseller and I will post it on
my personal page if that's okay with you, of course okay,
and I'm on LinkedIn, I will post it there.
Speaker 3 (54:28):
Thank you so much, Betsy.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
You are welcome as my pleasure. Folks, you heard Claudia
Rowe as I had just said before.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
And I want to thank.
Speaker 1 (54:40):
Jeanie White, who is the station manager who writes the blog.
All the information about Claudia row and the book will
be in the blog that Genie Waite writes, and she
produces the show. And I want to thank William Caldwell,
who's CEO at Pastoral Talk Radio Network. It makes this
so possible. And I want to thank you the listeners.
(55:02):
Thank you for listening subscribing. Do you want to know
where you could find me? I am on Amazon Music, Spotify, Speaker,
and if you have Alexa, you can even program Alexa
to have chatting with Betsy. Don't ask me how to
do that because I don't have Alexa, but if you
have Alexa, you would probably know how to do it
(55:24):
and if you're looking for a support group, I have
hashtag kick Alzheimer's as movement if you are a caregiver,
And as I always say at the end of my show,
you can follow me on Facebook Betsy E.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Worzel. W or Zel in the world, we could be anything.
Please be kind, shine your light right because we need.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
It now more than ever before. And that's I have
to say today. This is Betsy Worzel. You're a host
of Chatting with Betsy. I'm passion Orle Talk Radio Network,
a subsidiary of Global Media Network l L feng im
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