To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care

True. Heartbreaking. Objective. Inspiring. As a foster parent I know all this in and out. Every word rings true and every word left me a little more wounded. Well written and researched. Even though I am not in New York, much of the sentiment and resentment and resigned attitudes crosses state lines. It makes me want to fix the system and help more even as it makes me one of those foster parents that is too burned out and jaded and pushed too far. I highly recommend this book.

This is a great book for anyone considering foster care, especially if you want to foster older children and teenagers. It may scare you away because of the honesty, but it also emphasizes the need this age group has for stable, loving foster homes who will truly stick with a kid. The interviews with the social workers, the teens, their biological families and their foster families helps to give insight from all perspectives. My only negative is that Cris Beam wrote entirely from the point of being in NYC and dealing with the foster care system in NY. I would really like her to expand her work to be more inclusive of other states - maybe highlight what is working in some places? Or at least explain systems in other states that may be more applicable to families reading this book. I had a hard time relating some of the practices to where I live in Illinois. But overall, this is a very worthwhile read and I hope that the author continues exploration in this field.

This is a well-written, engaging exploration of an important issue. Anyone who works in the areas of education, social services, youth services will find this to be a worthwhile read. These issues are troubling and there are no easy answers, but the author shares from her experiences with several children and foster parents who are on the front lines struggling to find solutions. I am an educator in the NYC public schools where the effects of the poor performance of the foster care system is heart-breaking to see. While this book makes it clear that there are no quick fixes, it helped me understand more of the nuances and ultimately made me more hopeful.

As a current foster parent this was an eye opening book to read that included history and current facts about how DSHS works. We are experiencing some of the dysfunction here in Washington as we have had two permanency meetings that we were told we could adopt the 4 year old girl we have and then we found out the adoption social works who want kids to be placed together, said they would check and see if anyone around where we live would take 3 half siblings. Now we have to sit on eggs and wonder if we will get to adopt her or not. I certainly hope we can, because she wants to stay here and be our daughter. It is such an interesting book.

This book was hard to put down when it covered the stories of actual kids in foster care, but it lost momentum whenever the author climbed up on her soapbox to make inflammatory statements which are blatantly contradicted by empirical research. First off, Beam is a talented writer and she does a superb job weaving the stories of various foster children and parents throughout the narrative. A large number of children and families were presented, but the book never became too scattered and I was anxious to see the outcome for each child and family. I also found myself cheering on the foster parents who went beyond the call of duty to help kids, yet still feeling sympathy for the foster parents who made an effort yet somehow fell short. There are no villains in this book; what we have here is a candid portrayal of people trying to make the best of difficult circumstances. It is hard to point the finger at a foster parent and assign blame when they are essentially trying to raise someone else's child with a meager stipend from the state. But the book is more than a narration of the lives of foster children and parents, for it delves into the inner workings of the U.S. foster care system and attempts to understand why the system is the way it is. In particular, the author grapples with the saddening statistics that relate to life outcomes for foster children, many of whom become homeless once they "age out" and very few of whom will ever graduate from college. These statistics are indeed depressing, and in such a context it is natural for one to become angry and look for someone or something to blame. The author has chosen her scapegoat, and it is the system itself. Time after time, an emotional story of a child or parent is interrupted so that Beam may launch an attack on the foster care system. Some of these attacks are legitimate and well-deserved-- far too many children are bounced from home to home, for example, which makes it difficult for children to form an attachment that is so crucial to the child development process. The system doesn't have to be this way, of course, and it is good that there are people like Beam to call attention to these issues and lead the charge for reform. But unfortunately Beam does not stop there. Instead, she goes further than the evidence merits in issuing blanket indictments of the system that are not just unsupported, but actually contradicted, by empirical evidence. Here are two prominent examples: (1) On page 63, Beam notes that the second and third NIS studies (national surveys of child abuse and neglect) "found no significant differences in the incidences of abuse and neglect across any ethnic or racial lines." This is misleading and has been de-bunked by Brett Drake and Melissa Jonson-Reid in their paper "NIS interpretations: Race and the National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect" (published in Children and Youth Services Review, a leading peer-reviewed journal). Long story short, the data from both NIS-2 and NIS-3 show blacks having much higher maltreatment rates than whites. The reason this relation is "suddenly" statistically significant in NIS-4 whereas it was not significant before is because the sample size increased, thereby increasing the power of the statistical test and reducing the standard error. (2) At several points in the book, Beam notes the disproportionately high number of black children in foster care (47% of the kids in foster care are black, yet blacks comprise only 19 percent of the U.S. population of children, p. 61). She attributes this to several factors, one of which is racism/bias against black/poor people. This explanation has been offered up for years but unfortunately for the author it too has been de-bunked, this time by the paper "Is the overrepresentation of the poor in child welfare caseloads due to bias or need?" by Melissa Jonson-Reid, Brett Drake, and Patricia Kohl (published in Children and Youth Services Review). These authors, who unlike Beam actually bothered to do empirical tests with actual data, find that "overrepresentation of poor children is driven largely by the presence of increased risk among the poor children that come to the attention of child welfare rather than high levels of systemic class bias." The author's blatant disregard of empirical findings suggested that either (1) she did not adequately research the topic before writing the book or (2) she did research the topic, but chose to ignore studies which contradict her pre-determined beliefs. In either case her credibility as an author is seriously undermined; how can we trust someone who either does not know the facts or chooses to hide them to advance her agenda? The narratives of the foster children and parents made the book memorable, but the author's biased attacks against the U.S. foster care system reduced the book to nothing more than a pro-reunification-diatribe that paints the system as a racially-driven, heartless bureaucracy that is yanking children out of loving homes simply because the families happened to be poor or black. The U.S. foster care system indeed suffers from a host of problems, but inane attacks based on discredited theories will get us nowhere.

This book is well-written and presents the system as it truly is. As a foster/adoptive parent for over 10 years, I've see much of what Cris Beam describes accurately and clearly. Her facts are accurate and the history woven through explaining how we got to this point in society was fascinating. The stories are not dramatic, just realistic. It makes me wonder when we are going to insert "humanness" back into the system as she suggests. New Jersey is no better than New York, specifically New York City which is where the book is focused. Well worth reading!

Great communication from the seller. I received the item when I was told I would, and it was as described. I would highly recommend this seller and would buy from this seller again.

Amazing to see how the care system compares to that of the US. Such a fantastic read!