Unfamiliar Spaces: Writing the Foster Care System, a guest post by Joseph Moldover – Teen Librarian Toolbox

Novelists need to enter unfamiliar spaces.

We write what we know, though not in the place that we learned it. Emotions, observations, and characters come from our experience but we venture onto unfamiliar terrain to lay them out and set them in motion. Doing this in an ethical way requires that we conduct research and open ourselves to new perspectives, often radically different from the ones we began with. My experience writing about the foster care system illustrates these challenges and opportunities.

As a child psychologist I often interact with the child welfare and foster care systems, but I have been neither a foster child nor a foster parent. My second novel, Just Until (Holiday House/Margaret Ferguson Books), centers on a family in the system; to write it, I needed not only to deepen my understanding but expand my perspective beyond my own limited experience.

Just Until follows Hannah Lynn, a seventeen-year-old on the cusp of breaking free of small-town Maine when her nephews are taken from her older sister by the state, leaving Hannah and her father as the only people standing between the boys and the child welfare system. They represent a kinship placement, an increasingly common form of care that represents about one-third of all foster placements and involves placement with a family member or friend of the family.

Lessons Learned

First: Kids in foster care feel invisible in their communities.

There is a stigma to foster care. It often follows events that are loaded with social disapproval and shame: substance dependence, physical or sexual abuse, poverty and neglect. There is little incentive for telling these stories, and there are often forces pushing to cover them up.

Compounding the problem of invisibility is the fact that this vulnerable group is highly fragmented.

The “system” isn’t very systematic; it’s actually a nationwide quilt of thousands of federal, state, county, and city agencies and private contractors responsible for hundreds of thousands of children from infancy to adolescence. It screens millions of referrals annually. About a third of all American children will experience a Child Protective Services investigation prior to their eighteenth birthday. Most will not end up in foster care, but on any given day around 400,000 minors in our country are in that role. These children live in all of communities, attend all of our schools. They need to know that they are not alone and that their stories are worth telling.

Second: Kids in foster care are treated differently.

Researching my book, I met parents who spoke passionately about how much worse their foster kids were treated at school and in the community, compared with their own birth children. Kids in foster care are commonly stereotyped as dirty and damaged, if not dangerous. Foster parents can be framed as exploitative, looking for state benefits and stipends. We cannot perpetuate these stereotypes. We need stories that depict foster children, and the families who care for them, with the nuance and complexity they deserve.

Third: There are stunning class and racial disparities within foster and child welfare programs.

My view of the “system” as essentially benign and beneficent, existing to support families and protect children, was shaped by my background as a member of the white professional class. Yet the Child Welfare System is an expression of state power: families can be monitored, homes can be inspected, services can be mandated, and children can be removed. The ultimate power is termination of parental rights (TPR), which permanently severs physical custody and the right to communicate with a child. About 1 out of every 100 American children will experience TPR, but Black and Native children are more than twice as likely to go through it. Among Black children, more than half will experience a child services investigation, and in some counties this number approaches two thirds.

These families often experience the system as punitive and family-destroying, a punishment for poverty, and as a concrete expression of their second-class status and inadequacy within our society with one of the worst consequences imaginable: family separation. We have to create space for their stories and perspectives; no more than we should negatively stereotype kids in foster care, we also must not oversimplify or romanticize the system through narratives of (often white) saviors dropping into (often non-white) communities to save children from their own parents.

Being an Ethical Storyteller

So, what does it mean to be an ethical storyteller on unfamiliar terrain? It means doing your research, going out and meeting people with firsthand experience, reading scholars with conflicting points of view. This isn’t just in the preliminary phase; it also means submitting your manuscript to critique by some of these individuals and opening yourself up to their feedback. It means interrogating accounts of trauma, constantly asking whether they meaningfully further the character and the story or whether they are an indulgence in trauma porn. It means telling the stories that need to be told with nuance and dimensionality, facing harsh realities but avoiding stereotypes. It means acknowledging the difficult reality that complex systems function differently for different people, often on the basis of race and class, often with radically different outcomes.

It means reporting back, when the story has been written, to share what you have learned with the storytelling community and doing so with humility, not as a newly minted expert with facts to share (although do share those!) but as someone with new questions, deeper questions, more complex questions for the next storyteller to ask.

About the Author

Joseph Moldover is a writer and clinical psychologist who lives and works in Massachusetts. His debut novel, Every Moment After, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019 and his second novel, Just Until, is forthcoming from Holiday House on October 29, 2024.  His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Stonecoast Review, MonkeyBicycle, One Teen Story, Typehouse, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. From 2020-2023 he co-hosted the online program and podcast Authors Love Bookstores for A Mighty Blaze. He is online at josephmoldover.com.

About Just Until

Hannah must choose the impossible—put her nephews into foster care so she can stay true to her dream, or take them on and lose everything she’s worked so hard to achieve.

17-year-old Hannah Lynn has just one goal: to get out of Evans Beach, Maine. It’s where she lost her mother to cancer. Where her estranged sister, Pauline, fell apart before moving out. Where her father, Larry, holds court as a local legend who once played for the Red Sox. Hannah has never fit in, but that doesn’t matter now that she is finally on the cusp of escaping to her dream college.

Then her life is turned upside down when Pauline’s two sons are taken by the state, leaving Hannah and Larry the only people standing between the boys and the child welfare system. Her father wants to provide them with kinship care and promises that it will only be for a little while, just until Pauline gets back on her feet. But Hannah knows nothing is that simple when it comes to her troubled older sister.

When her father’s health declines Hannah must make a soberingly adult decision: is she willing to give up her dream and raise her nephews on her own or can she let them be placed in the foster care system?

Drawing on his clinical psychology background, Moldover challenges readers to face some of life’s most difficult questions through the eyes of an unforgettably complex heroine. Unflinching yet ultimately hopeful, Just Until is a heart-wrenching tale of the weight some teenagers carry when no one else can do it for them—one that will linger with readers long after the final page.

ISBN-13: 9780823456192
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 10/29/2024
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. Which SDGs are addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article?

• SDG 1: No Poverty
• SDG 4: Quality Education
• SDG 5: Gender Equality
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
• SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

2. What specific targets under those SDGs can be identified based on the article’s content?

• Target 1.3: Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable.
• Target 4.7: By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.
• Target 5.2: Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.
• Target 10.2: By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status.
• Target 16.2: End abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and all forms of violence against and torture of children.

3. Are there any indicators mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets?

• Indicator 1.3.1: Proportion of population covered by social protection floors/systems, by sex, distinguishing children, unemployed persons, older persons, persons with disabilities, pregnant women, newborns, work-injury victims, and the poor and the vulnerable.
• Indicator 4.7.1: Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development (including climate change education) are mainstreamed in (a) national education policies, (b) curricula, (c) teacher education, and (d) student assessment.
• Indicator 5.2.1: Proportion of ever-partnered women and girls aged 15 years and older subjected to physical, sexual, or psychological violence by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months, by form of violence and by age group.
• Indicator 10.2.1: Proportion of people living below 50 percent of median income, by sex, age, and persons with disabilities.
• Indicator 16.2.2: Number of victims of human trafficking per 100,000 population, by sex, age group, and form of exploitation.

Table: SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

Source: teenlibrariantoolbox.com