Fragile Families. Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez
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Toward the end of our interview, once my notepad had been put away and we were speaking more casually, Josh looked down at his lap and said, “I just don’t know if we are doing the right thing by taking Emma away.”1 Josh told me he wondered about what they were doing, explaining that he was happy to adopt but he worried that sometimes adoptions happened in cases where it was not truly the only option. Citing the case of Kyle, one of Josh’s former foster children who had been reunified with his father only after the forceful intervention of Josh and Trevor, Josh asserted he was speaking not from conjecture but from experience.
Kyle’s parents split up when his father was hospitalized for severe depression. Kyle’s mother remained with him in San Diego while his father relocated to another state. Months later, two-year-old Kyle was placed in foster care, with Trevor and Josh, due to allegations of maternal drug use and neglect. When Kyle’s mother’s parental rights were terminated, Kyle’s father continued to fight to regain custody. Josh and Trevor believed the social worker had written Kyle’s father off as a good placement option because she didn’t feel that he had a strong relationship with Kyle, and their “visits” over the phone were not going well. Though Kyle did display anger at his father and unwillingness to speak with him on the phone, Trevor felt that no two-year-old could rebuild a relationship through phone calls. He and Josh set up Skype communication with Kyle’s father, and each week coached him through reading stories and playing with finger puppets, something Trevor and Josh had discovered that Kyle loved. Kyle was eventually reunified with his father, and while Trevor and Josh were thrilled with the result, they felt that the reunification had occurred largely through their efforts and in spite of, rather than because of, the actions of the social worker and the routine workings of the child welfare system. Their experiences with Kyle left them feeling that the system did not always work toward reunification as enthusiastically as it might and, as a result, split up families without legitimate cause to do so. Josh explained that he had raised these sorts of concerns with Emma’s adoption social worker, wondering whether all avenues had been exhausted before termination of parental rights, if adoption was really in her best interest. She had responded that Emma was going to be adopted, and that if he and Trevor did not “open their arms” to her, another family would. When I asked Trevor whether the various case outcomes he and Josh had witnessed were, in his opinion, largely contingent on the social worker who happened to be assigned to the case, he responded, “One hundred percent, oh, absolutely.” But he went on to say how amazed he was by social workers and impressed by the passion they give to their job regardless of the “gross underpay” they received. “I wouldn’t do it for that money,” he told me, “No way.”2
The vast majority of foster parents I spoke with articulated a nuanced understanding of their foster child’s biological parents as not “bad” parents, but as people caught up in bad circumstances. But none except Josh expressed such an explicit sense of discomfort with their own adoption of a foster child and with a concern about what they saw as a potentially unnecessary severance of family ties. Josh, based on his own experiences, expressed a belief that the foster care system made it difficult for parents to get their children back and that the system as a whole supported adoption over reunification. He felt that the county was not sensitive to transportation difficulties parents faced in attempting to get between work, therapy, and visitations with their children. This was particularly the case given the size of San Diego County, the lack of effective public transportation, and the likelihood that biological parents were without their own vehicles. He had also heard that parents had their “salaries cut” when their children were removed.
Josh was correct, in a sense, because parents whose children were removed from their care did often lose benefits such as food stamps and housing subsidies based on the number of people in their “family.” They also often had difficulty qualifying for subsidized housing or childcare while they did not have physical custody of their children.3 This was a substantial obstacle for parents who had to demonstrate their ability to provide stable housing and a childcare plan before their children could be returned to them. The concerns that Josh voiced were issues that impacted parents entangled in the child welfare system, regardless of their social position, by virtue of being subject to the regulations and expectations of the social worker assigned to their case. However, as I argue throughout this book, these difficulties disproportionately impacted low-income parents, particularly those who were racially marginalized and undocumented, due to the precariousness of their legal status, their network for social support, and/or their economic circumstances. This differential impact was, in some sense, the issue Esperanza was founded to address. Most other foster parents I spoke with seemed to carefully avoid consideration of the possibility that they might have been raising children who could have been safely and happily returned to their parents’ care. Josh, on the other hand, was willing to articulate this problem out loud and to mark the circumstantial differences between those who lose their children and those who adopt them.
Josh’s concern about the patterns of removal and what he perceived to be the agency’s inclination toward adoption rather than reunification were also concerns about the means through which child welfare pursued its goals of child protection. His concerns raised questions about what the personal stakes were for foster parents who participated in the removal and subsequent adoption of children. As I discuss throughout this chapter, processes of child removal have commonly taken place through a framework of “best interest.” This framework asserts that state interventions into families, including the removal of children from their parents’ custody and termination of parental rights, are not about social control or the production of social norms governing family life. Rather, these interventions are framed as being a singleminded pursuit of the “best” possible lives for children. “Best interest” is a powerful framework for intervention precisely because it is seemingly beyond reproach—who wouldn’t want children to have their best interests met? Yet “best interest” is a slippery, multivalent category, and ideas about what is best for particular children, and from whose perspectives, varies across time and space.
“Best interest” is a discretionary legal framework, privileging those who are positioned to speak authoritatively while silencing others. And, as I suggest below, this framework has historically been mobilized to remove children from families who were framed as “unworthy” citizens, or noncitizens, rather than to protect children from concrete instances of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. As such, a “best interest” framework has the propensity to categorize entire communities as abusive or neglectful through their social position, positing, in many cases, that the trajectory children might pursue under the care of white middle-class Protestant citizen parents is more important to their well-being than remaining in the custody of their natal family. To be clear, I am not arguing here for the necessary primacy of biological connections. Rather, I am interested in the way the agency may nominally prioritize the natal family while pursuing this policy for some individuals and not for racially or otherwise marginalized others.
This chapter takes up an examination of the “best interest” framework through a historical perspective. I consider practices of child removal, institutions and policies that have positioned some parents as unfit throughout U.S. history, and contemporary structural forces that mark out particular individuals as objects of intervention. I examine what these historical moments reveal about the ways children and families have been positioned as central sites for the production of citizenship, race, and national belonging and explore how philanthropic agencies and government actors have been involved in both the promotion and the dissolution of particular families. I consider what sorts of families have been positioned, throughout various points in U.S. history, as ideal homes for children. And finally, I ask how “best interest” is mobilized in the contemporary context of child welfare.
Family, Population, and Nation
The child and the family have been positioned at the frontlines of an effort to police the racial categories and citizenship limits that mark the boundaries of the national body within the contemporary United States. From eugenics to national hygiene campaigns and public health interventions, mothers and children have been the primary targets of widespread efforts to shape the national citizenry (Molina 2006; Donzelot 1979; Stoler 2002). The framework of “family values” serves as a stand-in for a particular