Another Mother: Co-Parenting with the Foster Care System

3. Help, American-Style

59 3 Help, American-Style w hen mIchael and I became foster parents, we learned how stigmatizing, demoralizing, and just plain inconvenient and time consuming being part of the “unentitled” population can be. With the exception of Early Intervention, we often felt that the programs were more concerned with regulating our behavior than with providing services. As a foster parent, I took on a role; when I accepted services and a stipend for the benefit of my foster daughter, I was no longer a middle-class citizen. Although sometimes my experiences made me feel like quitting foster parenthood, I tried to focus on what foster parenting really should be about—the day-to-day caring for Cecilia. I felt deep gratitude that, independent of my foster parent role, my family and I did not have to rely on any of the available social services. 60 another mother One of the first courses I took to get my master’s in social work was in social policy. I hadn’t been looking forward to this class, thinking that it would be dry material, mostly names and dates. To my surprise, I found it fascinating. I had never thought about the social programs offered in the United States from an academic perspective. As a consumer and a mother of young children, I had used medical systems in three countries and could see big differences in price, convenience, and support, but it was only later that I understood that these reflected social policy choices. My policy class made me think about the social programs we have in the United States. I was especially fascinated by the basic idea that choices or assumptions underlie all government decisions to fund some programs over others. On September 18, 1996, as Professor Staller lectured, I wrote in my notebook: “Social welfare policy is the response to a social problem or need resulting in the identification and/or collection of resources, and the allocation and redistribution of those resources to alleviate the problems or the well-being of individuals or groups.” Or, as I had written more simply in my first class the week before: “Policy is about an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group.’” There are tremendous numbers of groups in need of resources in the United States, and many factors are taken into consideration when prioritizing their perceived needs. When a society decides how much money a group is going to get, one factor that influences its choices is whether enough people consider the group deserving. Poor people, not known to be educated and wellconnected advocates for themselves, are not always considered deserving ; they are often thought of as “lazy” or as responsible for their own condition. Journalist Nina Bernstein writes on the New York City foster care system in The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care: “There has long been an iron rule in American social welfare policy: conditions must be worse for the dependent poor than for anyone who works.” She follows help, american-style 61 with a statement I did not fully understand until I became a foster parent: “The seldom-acknowledged corollary is that the subsidized care of other people’s children must be undesirable enough, or scarce enough, to play a role in this system of deterrence”—which basically means that foster care has got to be bad enough that you wouldn’t be tempted to willingly put your own children in that system (Bernstein 2001a, 13). Groups who might need resources are pretty easy to identify— old, handicapped, young, sick, or poor people. What isn’t easy is figuring out a system that allocates limited resources fairly. Three factors can affect how much money different groups get for services to help them: first, whether the group is considered deserving ; second, whether the group’s condition is universal (we will all be old one day, but we will not all have a chronic disease); third, whether society feels it has something to gain from improving the condition of the group (vaccination programs and educated people benefit everyone). These same factors can also affect how the services or money are delivered to individuals. For example, if two people receive monthly stipends for two hundred dollars from the government, but the checks are funded by different programs, why does one person get a check in the mail while the other person has to go to a...