Faculty Notes Cont'd

RECLAIMING LIVES: FOSTER C HILDREN TELL THEIR STORIES by Jean Reith Schroedel Cont'd

Over the past three years, I have been working on a collection of oral histories of adults, who spent part of their childhoods within the foster care system. This is the first scholarly research, which has as its focus the reconstruction of the foster care experience from the perspective of those who lived it. Oral history, as used in this project, serves methodologically as a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities. It provides a detailed and nuanced understanding of experiential reality, which is often lost in the quantitative studies. This is very important with respect to foster children, because we know quite a lot about them in the aggregate, particularly from social work scholars, but very little about their lived experiences.

I used targeted sampling techniques common in all ethnographic research to pull together a broad cross section of the population, diverse in age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and also in age of entry into the system, reasons for leaving the system and subsequent experiences. Because the foster care label has been applied to a range of different types of out of home care (e.g., traditional foster families, kinship foster families, orphanages, group homes and pre-adoptive homes), I also tried to interview people whose experiences encompassed all of the different types of living arrangements.

Over the past year, I conducted twenty-three interviews; all of which were taped. The interviews lasted from an hour and a half to five hours. Each person was asked a series of open-ended questions covering a wide range of topics: information about their birth families, reasons for placement, experiences within the system, circumstances surrounding their departure from foster care, and the impact of these events on their adult lives. In particular, I hoped to discover what types of factors might mitigate the affects of adversity in children’s lives.

The childhood experiences of the people I interviewed were very typical of children in foster care. Nearly all of them experienced physical abuse and/or sexual abuse during their childhoods. For many, drug and alcohol

abuse has been a problem. Approximately a third have spent time in juvenile detention; some also were incarcerated as adults. Nearly three-quarters “aged out” of the system rather than being reunited with their families or being adopted. However, as adults they are probably a bit more successful than the average ex-foster child. With respect to family status, the interviewees appear indistinguishable from the general population. Although the marriage rate (43%) is lower than among adults in the country as a whole, it is not when controlled for age.

Although I have not yet had an opportunity to do a detailed analysis of the material because I am still working on transcribing the tapes, some of my initial findings are worth noting. Probably the most striking is the absence of a relationship between risk factors experienced during childhood and life outcomes. I found that many individuals, whose childhoods were extremely traumatic, had as positive outcomes as those whose childhoods were relatively stable. Some mix of the following three “protective factors”---stable caring adult figures, a passionate interest, and religious faith---figured prominently in the oral histories of all the people whose adult lives have turned out well. The importance of these factors holds up regardless of the prevalence and severity of trauma in their childhoods. Conversely, the one person, whose childhood story was a litany of horror (hunger, rape, and physical assaults) without any countervailing factors, has turned into a truly scary adult, someone who likes to “hurt women.”

I am absolutely convinced the material can be turned into a powerful and moving book. To provide a sense of the flavor of the interviews, I will close with an excerpt from an interview with a young African American probation officer, who spent most of her childhood bouncing back and forth between foster care and her drug-addicted parents:

“I started to change my life when I got arrested and was in a holding cell. I’d gone to Mervyn’s looking for some shoes and shoplifting and my mom told me, “I’ll take you there but you’re gonna get caught.” And I go, “What do you mean, I’m gonna get caught. I’ve never been caught. I’m good---you taught me.” And she was like, “Cause you got them dukey braids in your hair and look like a straight nigger.” I went in there and there were these white girls shoplifting and I thought they’re gonna get caught. They were real stupid, but sure enough, security was looking at me and I got caught and arrested. Then in the holding cell I wanted my life to change. My drastic change started then at seventeen. I stopped selling my ass, stopped selling dope. I stopped hanging out with my friend Lynn. She was getting very violent. She was clinging with the Bloods. I just decided I wanted to get my life back. I didn’t want to be like my parents. I seen that my sister worked out to be following me. She lost her virginity at the same time, she went to jail at the same time, she was selling dope at the same age. I didn’t want her to be like me.”

(I would like to thank the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and the Fletcher Jones Foundation for their research support. It would have been very difficult to complete this work without their assistance.)