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Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
Told through the stories of six former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalist
By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she'd run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at the latest man to take her into his car. She pulled the trigger and fled. But with no family to turn to and few reliable friends, it didn't take long for the police to catch up with her.
In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself—or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts didn't listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did. Washington state isn't alone, of course. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America's $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.
Weaving Maryanne's story with those of five other foster kids across the country—including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a gangbanger-turned-graduate-student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House—Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells. Balanced with accounts from psychologists, advocates, judges, and foster parents, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on our country's longstanding foster careto- prison pipeline and the searing realities faced by kids who may be sitting in classrooms next to your own children.
By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she'd run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at the latest man to take her into his car. She pulled the trigger and fled. But with no family to turn to and few reliable friends, it didn't take long for the police to catch up with her.
In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself—or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts didn't listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did. Washington state isn't alone, of course. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America's $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.
Weaving Maryanne's story with those of five other foster kids across the country—including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a gangbanger-turned-graduate-student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House—Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells. Balanced with accounts from psychologists, advocates, judges, and foster parents, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on our country's longstanding foster careto- prison pipeline and the searing realities faced by kids who may be sitting in classrooms next to your own children.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published May 20, 2025
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2327 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
October 22, 2025
This book is the perfect book for anyone living with an inkling of the idea of, “I bet the foster care system is bad, but I don’t know exactly how.” But fair warning, you’ll read this and now knowing more, you’ll understand that this is only touching the surface- only focusing on an aspect of how fucked up this all is.
May 13, 2025
By the time Maryanne was sixteen, she'd been arrested for murder. Rowe met her in the context of that trial: she was used to writing about murder and didn't think there would be anything special here—but then she started to hear the arguments about foster care.
In Wards of the State, Rowe dives deep into what happens when a child is removed from their family and placed in foster care. The statistics are dire:
A study of nearly one thousand foster youth in the Midwest found that half left the system with criminal records, and more than 30 percent were imprisoned for violent crime within a year of leaving state care. At least 20 percent of prison inmates nationally are believed to be former foster children. (loc. 70*)
Conventional wisdom holds that these kids are more likely to end up in prison (or without a diploma, or homeless, or otherwise just struggling) because of troubled family backgrounds—they struggle because of the reasons for which they were placed in foster care. But the more Rowe dug into it, the more she questioned that assumption, and the more the research seemed to support the opposite: foster care wasn't reducing trauma but rather compounding it. When a child is moved from placement to placement to placement—I'm not sure if an average number of moves was mentioned, but Rowe does cite cases of children who were moved fifty or more (sometimes many more) times in a year—how is that child expected to develop healthy attachments and relationships, to keep up in school, and to learn the basic life skills that aren't really taught but learned through observation and repetition?
There are a lot of questions here that just don't have good answers: at what point is it safer to leave a child in a home where neglect or abuse is suspected, and at what point is it safer to remove that child to a system that is stopgap after stopgap after stopgap? And how often does "neglect" (e.g., an empty fridge) simply mean "poverty"? And when the state-as-parent does cause harm, how much can it be held responsible? (Other questions have much clearer answers, such as those surrounding the deep racism embedded in foster care.)
This is compassionate and complex reportage. The people Rowe profiles—former foster children who have found themselves in places ranging from PhD programs to life sentences—are treated with a lot of care, withoug skating over their darker moments. (Whole people, in shades of grey.) What she describes is much in line with other things I have read about foster care and about group homes (some suggestions for further reading below), but very, very pointed.
I am a little unclear on how some of the statistics play out—for example, how often is a child who is placed in foster care returned to their family, and after an average of how long? How do the outcomes differ? What is the tipping point? And, more broadly: What are other countries doing, and does anyone seem to have figured it out? Rowe mentions a program in the New York that is based on a UK model—a program that seems brilliant until (as with so many of the possible fixes Rowe investigates) the cracks begin to show. But the biggest difference between the British version of Chelsea Foyer and New York City's showed up around education. The academic deficits among former foster youth in New York were severe [...] such that the requirement to be in school became a barrier. [...] Within a few years of opening, New York jettisoned the three-pronged European model of housing, education, and career, retooling to emphasize housing and employment only. (loc. 2670)
It's easy to look at this all and think "well, X would help"—but it becomes then a matter of "in order for X to happen, we'd need Y, for which we'd need Z, for which we'd need..." until you come back around to X. Maryanne's situation is one of the more high-profile of those Rowe includes. She was sentenced in 2019, but it seems that some parts of her case are ongoing. (Not getting more specific because how her case played out is a significant part of the book and worth reading in its entirety.) I couldn't find anything particularly recent online, but she's emblematic of a broken system that chews children up until they, too, leave broken.
Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars. Highly recommended.
*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
Related books that readers might find interesting:
Home Made (group home)
How the Other Half Eats (food and poverty politics)
To the End of June (foster care)
No House to Call My Home (group home)
The Turnaway Study (abortion; poverty and body politics)
In Wards of the State, Rowe dives deep into what happens when a child is removed from their family and placed in foster care. The statistics are dire:
A study of nearly one thousand foster youth in the Midwest found that half left the system with criminal records, and more than 30 percent were imprisoned for violent crime within a year of leaving state care. At least 20 percent of prison inmates nationally are believed to be former foster children. (loc. 70*)
Conventional wisdom holds that these kids are more likely to end up in prison (or without a diploma, or homeless, or otherwise just struggling) because of troubled family backgrounds—they struggle because of the reasons for which they were placed in foster care. But the more Rowe dug into it, the more she questioned that assumption, and the more the research seemed to support the opposite: foster care wasn't reducing trauma but rather compounding it. When a child is moved from placement to placement to placement—I'm not sure if an average number of moves was mentioned, but Rowe does cite cases of children who were moved fifty or more (sometimes many more) times in a year—how is that child expected to develop healthy attachments and relationships, to keep up in school, and to learn the basic life skills that aren't really taught but learned through observation and repetition?
There are a lot of questions here that just don't have good answers: at what point is it safer to leave a child in a home where neglect or abuse is suspected, and at what point is it safer to remove that child to a system that is stopgap after stopgap after stopgap? And how often does "neglect" (e.g., an empty fridge) simply mean "poverty"? And when the state-as-parent does cause harm, how much can it be held responsible? (Other questions have much clearer answers, such as those surrounding the deep racism embedded in foster care.)
This is compassionate and complex reportage. The people Rowe profiles—former foster children who have found themselves in places ranging from PhD programs to life sentences—are treated with a lot of care, withoug skating over their darker moments. (Whole people, in shades of grey.) What she describes is much in line with other things I have read about foster care and about group homes (some suggestions for further reading below), but very, very pointed.
I am a little unclear on how some of the statistics play out—for example, how often is a child who is placed in foster care returned to their family, and after an average of how long? How do the outcomes differ? What is the tipping point? And, more broadly: What are other countries doing, and does anyone seem to have figured it out? Rowe mentions a program in the New York that is based on a UK model—a program that seems brilliant until (as with so many of the possible fixes Rowe investigates) the cracks begin to show. But the biggest difference between the British version of Chelsea Foyer and New York City's showed up around education. The academic deficits among former foster youth in New York were severe [...] such that the requirement to be in school became a barrier. [...] Within a few years of opening, New York jettisoned the three-pronged European model of housing, education, and career, retooling to emphasize housing and employment only. (loc. 2670)
It's easy to look at this all and think "well, X would help"—but it becomes then a matter of "in order for X to happen, we'd need Y, for which we'd need Z, for which we'd need..." until you come back around to X. Maryanne's situation is one of the more high-profile of those Rowe includes. She was sentenced in 2019, but it seems that some parts of her case are ongoing. (Not getting more specific because how her case played out is a significant part of the book and worth reading in its entirety.) I couldn't find anything particularly recent online, but she's emblematic of a broken system that chews children up until they, too, leave broken.
Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars. Highly recommended.
*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
Related books that readers might find interesting:
Home Made (group home)
How the Other Half Eats (food and poverty politics)
To the End of June (foster care)
No House to Call My Home (group home)
The Turnaway Study (abortion; poverty and body politics)
Read
August 24, 2025In the interest of full disclosure, I know the author and she has been a past reader of applications for grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation. I first met her at a group booksigning put on by a writers' association called Seattle7. There I purchased and read her first book The Spider and the Fly, a true crime memoir the subtitle of which--"A Writer, a Murderer, and a Story of Obsession'--caught my interest as soon as I saw it. The book did not disappoint. It's honest and compelling and, if you read it (which I highly recommend you do)--you will understand why it won the Washington State Book Award.
Her new book could not have a less compelling subtitle. Yet, here again, Claudia is able to make what could have been a dry polemic absolutely come alive and, in the process, become as compelling a reading experience as was her first book.
She is a writer with multiple talents, all of which are on amply display in this book. Not only does her prose shine, but the humility she possess in leaving unackknowledged her astounding ability to encourage individuals to open up to her is remarkable.
Rather than fill her narrative with general revelations about the damage inflicted upon the psyches, brains, and emotional development of the children and teenagers who are swept up by the foster care system, she instead uses the stories of specific individuals to illuminate the points she wishes to make. And her main point is the most painful one to consider: how the foster care system in the US has warehoused children for decades and, ultimately, how it has greased the skids of so many foster children's trip through the criminal justice system. She certainly gives the reader the statistics. But more than statistics, she gives the reader the foundation to undestand where the idea of foster care came from as well as how it morphed into what it is today.
But it is in the histories of the victims of foster care that her narrative grabs the reader by the throat and demands the reader's acknowledgment of how something intended to help vulnerable children actually acts in ways that can--and frequently does--destroy them. Her narrative's power comes from limning for the reader not only what sort of damage is done to children but, more important, how it is done and why the way it is done creates young men and young women who emerge from it suffering everything from uncontrollable rage to bottomless need to terror of abandonment to PTSD. The reader is left with a profound understanding of the crucial importance of family and connection in a child's development.
I highly recommend this book.
Her new book could not have a less compelling subtitle. Yet, here again, Claudia is able to make what could have been a dry polemic absolutely come alive and, in the process, become as compelling a reading experience as was her first book.
She is a writer with multiple talents, all of which are on amply display in this book. Not only does her prose shine, but the humility she possess in leaving unackknowledged her astounding ability to encourage individuals to open up to her is remarkable.
Rather than fill her narrative with general revelations about the damage inflicted upon the psyches, brains, and emotional development of the children and teenagers who are swept up by the foster care system, she instead uses the stories of specific individuals to illuminate the points she wishes to make. And her main point is the most painful one to consider: how the foster care system in the US has warehoused children for decades and, ultimately, how it has greased the skids of so many foster children's trip through the criminal justice system. She certainly gives the reader the statistics. But more than statistics, she gives the reader the foundation to undestand where the idea of foster care came from as well as how it morphed into what it is today.
But it is in the histories of the victims of foster care that her narrative grabs the reader by the throat and demands the reader's acknowledgment of how something intended to help vulnerable children actually acts in ways that can--and frequently does--destroy them. Her narrative's power comes from limning for the reader not only what sort of damage is done to children but, more important, how it is done and why the way it is done creates young men and young women who emerge from it suffering everything from uncontrollable rage to bottomless need to terror of abandonment to PTSD. The reader is left with a profound understanding of the crucial importance of family and connection in a child's development.
I highly recommend this book.
October 14, 2025
Well worth reading, but please note (since I overlooked this initially) that the book focuses specifically on describing a foster care to prison pipeline and setting it forth as a key piece of evidence for the failures of the foster care system. I would have liked more info on and analysis of the failures of the foster care system more generally and how it insufficiently supports the traumatized youth it is intended to serve, reinforcing prior trauma and adverse childhood experiences or leading to retraumatization that in turn contributes to additional adverse experiences - of which becoming a part of a foster care to prison pipeline is unfortunately only but one potential adverse outcome. Most of the subjects in the book were so deeply traumatized by parental abuse and neglect by the time they arrive to foster care that they were unable to connect with positive and supportive individuals or environments even if they were made available to them (and the author notes that this in itself is all too rare due to a lack of resources within or investment in the foster care system). For me, it was the overall developmental trauma rather than the foster care system specifically that served as the critical risk factor contributing to the additional adverse outcomes the subjects went on to experience. However, if there is a foster care to prison pipeline, that is definitely notable and worthy of awareness, and the book remains convincing that the current system is not sufficiently protective or trauma-informed and often treats youth as prospective future criminals rather than providing a sturdy safety net and promoting healing, resilience, and second chances in the way that vulnerable young people deserve.
November 8, 2025
yeah i knew the foster system was bad in the US but this was pretty eye opening and powerful. def reaffirms my preference towards adoption if ever i do have a child. 4.5 ⭐️
December 30, 2024
Told through eight different case studies with a rich history about the foster care and adoption system in the US, Rowe spells out one of the central arguments in her book she heard in a court case: if the children are the responsibility of the state while in the foster care and adoption system, is the state also responsible for crimes and other transgressions committed by those in foster care and adoption homes? What follows is an extremely compelling argument using first and secondhand accounts of individuals in varying stages of the foster care, adoption, criminal justice, and post-criminal justice systems.
Early on in the book, you see Rowe set up one of the overarching themes of the book: the relatively recent concept of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Going into this book, I was aware of the abuse, underfunded, understaffed, and overworked caseload of social workers and the disregard for foster care kids, but this book opened my eyes up to much more and made me view it a different way. One of my favorite arguments she made in her book was about how the state spends money on “wards” (foster care children) to be raised by random people rather than using that money toward helping the family achieve upward mobility. Children are removed from their homes by the stage where, in a scarily large number of instances, are introduced to many foster and adoption homes, as foster parents “return” the child they adopted or fostered.
In accordance with FTC guidelines, please note that this ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Early on in the book, you see Rowe set up one of the overarching themes of the book: the relatively recent concept of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Going into this book, I was aware of the abuse, underfunded, understaffed, and overworked caseload of social workers and the disregard for foster care kids, but this book opened my eyes up to much more and made me view it a different way. One of my favorite arguments she made in her book was about how the state spends money on “wards” (foster care children) to be raised by random people rather than using that money toward helping the family achieve upward mobility. Children are removed from their homes by the stage where, in a scarily large number of instances, are introduced to many foster and adoption homes, as foster parents “return” the child they adopted or fostered.
In accordance with FTC guidelines, please note that this ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
December 7, 2024
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
I've read quite a few books on foster care and how it fails the kids. But this book digs deep and really shows the link between foster kids and prison. The various former foster kids that were focused on had difficult stories but so many of them took their past and are trying to make positive changes.
I've read quite a few books on foster care and how it fails the kids. But this book digs deep and really shows the link between foster kids and prison. The various former foster kids that were focused on had difficult stories but so many of them took their past and are trying to make positive changes.
February 6, 2025
Journalist Claudia Rowe uses her investigative skills to peer behind the curtain of the foster care system in the U.S. A very eyebrow raising look into an antiquated way of looking after children who are in need.
Must read for those interested in social programs.
*I read an advance copy and was not compensated
Must read for those interested in social programs.
*I read an advance copy and was not compensated
October 11, 2025
This well-researched and compassionate look at the complex and heart wrenching foster system and foster to prison pipeline was eye opening. I started taking more of an interest in the system when friends served as foster parents and saw first hand the lack of support and resources for children in their care and everyone working or volunteering in the foster system. This book points to another broken system in the US. A fact I’m still stuck on, only 5% of foster children apply to college. I want to do something about this fact.
October 18, 2025
Exactly the nonfiction I’m drawn to, Wards of the State investigates the foster-care-to-prison pipeline through the stories of multiple young adults whose lives were impacted by state intervention (mostly in Washington state). A couple of these teenagers seriously harmed others through robbery and murder. Rowe weaves the steps that got them there as well as the evolution of thought on topics like family reunification, being placed with kin whenever possible, attachment theory, and child brain development. It’s heartbreaking what these kids went through, and heartbreaking what their decisions caused, but there are real nuggets where I think the author argues well regarding where we can go. I mean, the judge Ernestine Gray out of New Orleans’s way of thinking blew my mind: while foster care placement rose nationally, it plummeted in Orleans Parish. This is a great narrative nonfiction book for folks who like to learn about people and state systems.
November 19, 2025
i wanna help all the kids
October 15, 2025
The stories Claudia Rowe tells here are undeniably compelling, but the book as a whole felt somewhat surface-level. It didn’t reveal much I hadn’t already understood about how broken the foster system is, though I recognize that might not be the case for every reader. I wanted a deeper interrogation of why some kids emerge relatively unscathed while others don’t; Rowe gestures toward that question but never really sits with it. Still, her empathy as a reporter toward the men and women she profiles certainly comes through.
July 5, 2025
The issues facing children who have interacted with the foster care system are as complicated as the systems that have failed them and as simple as their need for a consistent and caring adult in their lives. Ms. Rowe, through her in-depth and thoughtful reporting of the experiences of those who have been through ‘the system’ and the system itself, lays out a compelling examination of where the children in our foster care system are and have been. I am hoping that this book will be an agent for needed change- where do we go from here?
July 3, 2025
A look at the lives of six adults who were foster youth- moving through regular placements, lack of support, and experiencing the immense problems in the system. A lot of the focus was on the foster care to prison pipeline, and the need for kids to have consistent people pouring into their lives. Worth a read for sure!
November 3, 2025
An absolute must read. I was captivated, devastated, and yet hopeful the entire way through.
November 3, 2025
A powerful, deeply human examination of how the U.S. foster system often fails the children it’s meant to protect. Through the stories of several former foster youth, Rowe exposes how instability, neglect, and systemic dysfunction can lead many toward incarceration, homelessness, and despair.
November 11, 2025
Confirmed a lot of what I see and worry about.
November 5, 2025
I read this book because it's a National Book Award Finalist for nonfiction. And it is very worthy of being a finalist. A look at foster care and how very terrible the system is. How it preys on the poor and people of color. How those children are abused and spit out and are in a pipeline straight to jail. It was a hard read but a great one.
November 2, 2025
The hard truth about the foster care system and all its ugliness. Although the government has tried to fix the pitfalls, it just doesn't work out for most.
January 1, 2025
4 stars-When you think of foster kids a lot of what comes to mind is the little who get placed and then adopted to go to live happy full lives. What you don’t think of is that the majority of teenagers who are placed into foster care will end up in multiple homes, group homes, and potentially prison. The author provided a very thoroughly researched look at the foster to prison pipeline. Through the stories of eight kids, there are successes, but there are also failures in the system. My heart aches thinking about how some kids get placed in foster care and are “returned” to the system. This was an eye opening read, especially being a teacher who has taught kids from foster families. There is a lot of work to be done with the foster care system and this book will hopefully bring some light to that topic. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
October 17, 2025
Disappointed.
As someone who reads every single foster care related book in existence for the most part, here is my in-depth review:
The book has the same problem most of these books do: the person reporting it has never been able to objectively and fully understand what they are reporting. On the other hand, people in the system often do not have the reporting or problem-solving skills. To truly understand the scope of foster care's problems, it would honestly take years of intense involvement and observation.
The system is clouded in so many mysterious privacy protection laws, it makes it extremely hard to untangle the knots. Also, even if you learn one system, you walk over a bridge to another county, and you may as well have entered another country. Every system can have different problems and every era as well.
At the beginning of the book, and unfortunately, I am already seeing the commonly false statistics quoted from people unfamiliar with the system.
It is the equivalent of a writer of the modern day education quoting a state's graduation rate and not digging any deeper but taking it as is. This would leave out how despite graduating in a certain state, most of the kids cannot read, do basic mathematic, and often are given the answers to the online credit recovery courses, allowing them to falsely and easily get a crazy amount of credits in a single month. The graduation rates are not truly reflective of the same things it used to reflect for these reasons.
With such an important topic, these mistakes matter. It also mixes in things that do matter with cliche virtual signaling garbage, distracting from the main topics. It'll be a randomly thrown in an emotional sentence supporting something and then suggest the opposite in the evidence presented.
There are things this writer nails, but she misses the mark and the connections that could have made this book an actual game changer for the people reading it. For example, I love how she writes about the runaway status crisis in foster care, but she doesn't dive into that part of Maryanne's turnaround is how she was forced to stop running, nor how technology is the main driver, even in children not in foster care. I think she tries too, but it clouded and confusing.
She could have explored the various ways state are stopping running, one of the best things a society can do to prevent some of the trauma the atuhor talks about here, as runners are commonly trafficked and raped, as well as dragged into a life of crime. It becomes a hard habit to break, and the trauma is even harder to heal from.
Overall, I do think she did a good job writing about some aspects of it, but I do not know if all readers will fully understand due to the way she writes about it.
Another misleading angle, "As interpreted through the eyes of some twenty-nine thousand screeners and investigators working in Child Protective Services, any number of problems may qualify as child neglect, including empty refrigerators, shut-off power, children arriving at school unbathed and hungry, and children left at school or daycare after dismissal time. All of these things signal a family struggling, and most suggest poverty. None is evidence that a child is unwanted or unloved. Yet the government spends ten times more on foster care payments to strangers than on services aimed at keeping families together. When Monique was taken away, her family was living on about $20,000 a year, most of it from her mother’s job as a waitress at Golden Corral. Much of the time, neglectful parents are drug-addicted or mentally ill. But as advocates frequently point out, a drug test is not a parenting test. A Black mom who smokes a little weed can reasonably worry about having her fitness questioned—especially if she is poor—where white middle-class families almost never face that threat."
This is so misleading. It is not policy to remove a child anymore for pot. Of course, especially before the current drug epidemic, this was more common.
She also never explains a very important fact - did you know the reason categorized for an initial call is NOT necessarily the reason for removal? Currently, there ARE NO ACCURATE STATISTICS for foster care removals due to this reason. Data collection is still extremely weak.
For example, I was on a removal case for "neglect". The children were removed for neglect on paper, but in reality, they were removed due to a case history going back years, including one near child murder attempt of a 6-year-old which left the child hospitalized for months, a second arrest for the sexual abuse of someone else's child, and the second baby was near death due to severe neglect. The removal was for hospitalization and stabilization. Yet, removal is labeled as "neglect". Another example is a child who was left in a carseat 24/7 to the point fabric grew into her skin. Literally. The child was left by the dad with a relative who did not want them. This case was labeled, "neglect".
All of these removals came after months, if not years, of services. Also, many families labeled "neglect" are extreme drug cases, which she says is a parenting test, but it seems she does not understand what it is like living with a drug addicted parent. She tries to but never succeeds in diving into how the damage from neglect can cause worse damage than physical abuse. It would maybe be safer to leave a child for physical abuse developmentally.
I have always wished to see a book write about a system where we forced parents into treatment in an attempt to get them better, rather than losing their children. Surely, the first is more humane, if we are in the habit of forcing things?
Also, many of these children are victims of sexual abuse but disclosure happened previously and was unverified, or comes out after. You cannot really remove based on previous hotline calls. Even if you get an abuse report for vague concerns for extreme neglect, and there's four reports previously for sexual abuse that went unverified by four different people over the years, and the child then discloses again afterwards, that case cannot be counted as a sexual abuse case by these current data collection systems.
Overall, this book, and the inability for us to capture all the problems without it becoming extremely boring (I'm sure you fell asleep reading this), is partially why we are in the situation in the first place. Many reports and books miss the mark, causing bad policies to be developed which perpetuate the problem, and doing nothing to fix or support the families.
Many of these families want to learn and break the cycles of trauma. Some do not and are foster children themselves or abuse victims.
I wish she had explored some of the innovative ways we could support children, as whether in foster care or not, child abuse victims often end up in prison. Read Father Gregory Boyle's books on gang members; all the kids have the same stories of abuse. Not a ton of foster care involvement.
And she also leaves out many of the children who do have better lives through services.
However, the basic idea of this book is sound: foster care systems do often make things worse due to the gross indifference, negligence, and in general, the breakdown of the society, affecting the vulnerable the most.
It is hard to find people who are willing to do anything, as society's general healthiness shrinks with the invention of the social internet, the collapse of reading, and a spiraling drug/alcohol problem going back now for four or five generations in many families.
"Legions of middle class and affluent kids grow up in homes convulsed with addiction, abuse, and neglect. But their families rarely face that risk." This is correlation and causation being confused. By definition, extreme addictions typically do not mix with functionality, and even affluent homes suddenly find themselves extremely impoverished once a family member becomes addicted. I have seen many people in poverty who were from affluent backgrounds, sometimes in the multimillions, but due to addiction, were rendered homeless and impoverished and cut-off from family resources. On the other hand, more functional addicted homes often have the means to maintain facades for longer, and it can also be a sign of a healthier family support network, another protective factor against removal. However, this often cracked and shattered given enough time as well.
The author is right - foster care primes kids for prisons, and has to change. Also, so does doing nothing, although this is never as best explored, and there's a lot of things we could be doing.
She also nails with a big, red BULLSEYE the most important problem in foster care, and with traumatized kids in general: the lack of attachments and relationships. We must stop moving kids, and we must prioritize relationships.
What we can do after reading this book is have a higher toleration for those who come from hard places. Give them a job, give them mentorship, give them kindness.
Give them love.
As someone who reads every single foster care related book in existence for the most part, here is my in-depth review:
The book has the same problem most of these books do: the person reporting it has never been able to objectively and fully understand what they are reporting. On the other hand, people in the system often do not have the reporting or problem-solving skills. To truly understand the scope of foster care's problems, it would honestly take years of intense involvement and observation.
The system is clouded in so many mysterious privacy protection laws, it makes it extremely hard to untangle the knots. Also, even if you learn one system, you walk over a bridge to another county, and you may as well have entered another country. Every system can have different problems and every era as well.
At the beginning of the book, and unfortunately, I am already seeing the commonly false statistics quoted from people unfamiliar with the system.
It is the equivalent of a writer of the modern day education quoting a state's graduation rate and not digging any deeper but taking it as is. This would leave out how despite graduating in a certain state, most of the kids cannot read, do basic mathematic, and often are given the answers to the online credit recovery courses, allowing them to falsely and easily get a crazy amount of credits in a single month. The graduation rates are not truly reflective of the same things it used to reflect for these reasons.
With such an important topic, these mistakes matter. It also mixes in things that do matter with cliche virtual signaling garbage, distracting from the main topics. It'll be a randomly thrown in an emotional sentence supporting something and then suggest the opposite in the evidence presented.
There are things this writer nails, but she misses the mark and the connections that could have made this book an actual game changer for the people reading it. For example, I love how she writes about the runaway status crisis in foster care, but she doesn't dive into that part of Maryanne's turnaround is how she was forced to stop running, nor how technology is the main driver, even in children not in foster care. I think she tries too, but it clouded and confusing.
She could have explored the various ways state are stopping running, one of the best things a society can do to prevent some of the trauma the atuhor talks about here, as runners are commonly trafficked and raped, as well as dragged into a life of crime. It becomes a hard habit to break, and the trauma is even harder to heal from.
Overall, I do think she did a good job writing about some aspects of it, but I do not know if all readers will fully understand due to the way she writes about it.
Another misleading angle, "As interpreted through the eyes of some twenty-nine thousand screeners and investigators working in Child Protective Services, any number of problems may qualify as child neglect, including empty refrigerators, shut-off power, children arriving at school unbathed and hungry, and children left at school or daycare after dismissal time. All of these things signal a family struggling, and most suggest poverty. None is evidence that a child is unwanted or unloved. Yet the government spends ten times more on foster care payments to strangers than on services aimed at keeping families together. When Monique was taken away, her family was living on about $20,000 a year, most of it from her mother’s job as a waitress at Golden Corral. Much of the time, neglectful parents are drug-addicted or mentally ill. But as advocates frequently point out, a drug test is not a parenting test. A Black mom who smokes a little weed can reasonably worry about having her fitness questioned—especially if she is poor—where white middle-class families almost never face that threat."
This is so misleading. It is not policy to remove a child anymore for pot. Of course, especially before the current drug epidemic, this was more common.
She also never explains a very important fact - did you know the reason categorized for an initial call is NOT necessarily the reason for removal? Currently, there ARE NO ACCURATE STATISTICS for foster care removals due to this reason. Data collection is still extremely weak.
For example, I was on a removal case for "neglect". The children were removed for neglect on paper, but in reality, they were removed due to a case history going back years, including one near child murder attempt of a 6-year-old which left the child hospitalized for months, a second arrest for the sexual abuse of someone else's child, and the second baby was near death due to severe neglect. The removal was for hospitalization and stabilization. Yet, removal is labeled as "neglect". Another example is a child who was left in a carseat 24/7 to the point fabric grew into her skin. Literally. The child was left by the dad with a relative who did not want them. This case was labeled, "neglect".
All of these removals came after months, if not years, of services. Also, many families labeled "neglect" are extreme drug cases, which she says is a parenting test, but it seems she does not understand what it is like living with a drug addicted parent. She tries to but never succeeds in diving into how the damage from neglect can cause worse damage than physical abuse. It would maybe be safer to leave a child for physical abuse developmentally.
I have always wished to see a book write about a system where we forced parents into treatment in an attempt to get them better, rather than losing their children. Surely, the first is more humane, if we are in the habit of forcing things?
Also, many of these children are victims of sexual abuse but disclosure happened previously and was unverified, or comes out after. You cannot really remove based on previous hotline calls. Even if you get an abuse report for vague concerns for extreme neglect, and there's four reports previously for sexual abuse that went unverified by four different people over the years, and the child then discloses again afterwards, that case cannot be counted as a sexual abuse case by these current data collection systems.
Overall, this book, and the inability for us to capture all the problems without it becoming extremely boring (I'm sure you fell asleep reading this), is partially why we are in the situation in the first place. Many reports and books miss the mark, causing bad policies to be developed which perpetuate the problem, and doing nothing to fix or support the families.
Many of these families want to learn and break the cycles of trauma. Some do not and are foster children themselves or abuse victims.
I wish she had explored some of the innovative ways we could support children, as whether in foster care or not, child abuse victims often end up in prison. Read Father Gregory Boyle's books on gang members; all the kids have the same stories of abuse. Not a ton of foster care involvement.
And she also leaves out many of the children who do have better lives through services.
However, the basic idea of this book is sound: foster care systems do often make things worse due to the gross indifference, negligence, and in general, the breakdown of the society, affecting the vulnerable the most.
It is hard to find people who are willing to do anything, as society's general healthiness shrinks with the invention of the social internet, the collapse of reading, and a spiraling drug/alcohol problem going back now for four or five generations in many families.
"Legions of middle class and affluent kids grow up in homes convulsed with addiction, abuse, and neglect. But their families rarely face that risk." This is correlation and causation being confused. By definition, extreme addictions typically do not mix with functionality, and even affluent homes suddenly find themselves extremely impoverished once a family member becomes addicted. I have seen many people in poverty who were from affluent backgrounds, sometimes in the multimillions, but due to addiction, were rendered homeless and impoverished and cut-off from family resources. On the other hand, more functional addicted homes often have the means to maintain facades for longer, and it can also be a sign of a healthier family support network, another protective factor against removal. However, this often cracked and shattered given enough time as well.
The author is right - foster care primes kids for prisons, and has to change. Also, so does doing nothing, although this is never as best explored, and there's a lot of things we could be doing.
She also nails with a big, red BULLSEYE the most important problem in foster care, and with traumatized kids in general: the lack of attachments and relationships. We must stop moving kids, and we must prioritize relationships.
What we can do after reading this book is have a higher toleration for those who come from hard places. Give them a job, give them mentorship, give them kindness.
Give them love.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2025
Claudia Rowe’s new book Wards of the State is a powerful look at the child welfare system across the country with a focus on Washington State. Her main argument is that the system creates “the foster care to prison pipeline”. She’s not wrong. Her basic premise is that foster care is bad for kids due to the impermanence and lack of stable relationships with adults, something that kids need badly as they grow up.
It’s a compelling read. This isn’t true of most things I wind up reading on the policy side. She weaves the argument around the stories of five or six main actors and what happened to them in their childhood, and how it’s affected them throughout their lifetime.
Underlying the humanity of the story are some deep threads of policy, and she gets them right. Full disclosure – I’m mentioned in this book and while I wouldn’t generally prefer being described as someone with an overactive ego and sharp elbows, she’s probably mostly right about both. I also was responsible for the foster care and juvenile rehabilitation systems during the time Claudia was writing this book.
First, what happens to you as a child affects you deeply for the rest of your life. Kaiser-Permanente did a series of studies in the mid-nineties looking at the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and long-term health outcomes. The TL;DR version: childhood trauma causes you to die younger from all kinds of surprising causes, get arrested more, spend more time in prison, be less likely to graduate from college, etc.
Second, relationships with trusted adults matter, and kids can heal from trauma. Her in-state protagonists Maryanne and Art both peg the childhood trauma scale and have terrible experiences in long-term foster care. Despite chronic understaffing at Echo Glen (the juvenile rehabilitation center where she is incarcerated) Maryanne develops trusting and supportive relationships with counselors. These matter and provide some hope for long-term healing.
The young people in this book experience overwhelming trauma in their birth family, and again in their time in foster care, even if they don’t experience direct abuse. Moving from placement to placement, school to school, caseworker to caseworker is a common experience for kids in foster care for a long time. The author’s argument is that this lack of stability and adult connection creates the conditions that leads to the violence some foster children commit. If we want to reduce youth violence and lives it destroys, we need to make the foster care system both less needed and more humane.
The book isn’t completely a screed against the existence of foster care. Claudia quotes Sixto Cancel (a powerful advocate for youth in foster care) explaining that the grim reality is that many kids won’t ever be able to safely return to their birth families. Sixto’s prescription is to lean in to kinship care – placing children that can’t return home safely with relatives. Washington agrees and has close to 60% of children in out-of-home care placed with relatives. She also talks about the horrific racial history of foster care and its use as a weapon to control families of color. Though this isn’t the core story of Claudia’s book, you can’t talk about foster care without talking about race.
To avoid the long-term trauma Claudia so eloquently describes, most analysts agree that we’re typically better off supporting families upstream than removing their children. As a result of deliberate policy choices and national trends, Washington has seen a dramatic decline in the number of children in foster care over the last decade. We now have half the number of kids in out of home care that we did in 2017.
If you’re at all interested in how we address juvenile violence you should read this book.
It’s a compelling read. This isn’t true of most things I wind up reading on the policy side. She weaves the argument around the stories of five or six main actors and what happened to them in their childhood, and how it’s affected them throughout their lifetime.
Underlying the humanity of the story are some deep threads of policy, and she gets them right. Full disclosure – I’m mentioned in this book and while I wouldn’t generally prefer being described as someone with an overactive ego and sharp elbows, she’s probably mostly right about both. I also was responsible for the foster care and juvenile rehabilitation systems during the time Claudia was writing this book.
First, what happens to you as a child affects you deeply for the rest of your life. Kaiser-Permanente did a series of studies in the mid-nineties looking at the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and long-term health outcomes. The TL;DR version: childhood trauma causes you to die younger from all kinds of surprising causes, get arrested more, spend more time in prison, be less likely to graduate from college, etc.
Second, relationships with trusted adults matter, and kids can heal from trauma. Her in-state protagonists Maryanne and Art both peg the childhood trauma scale and have terrible experiences in long-term foster care. Despite chronic understaffing at Echo Glen (the juvenile rehabilitation center where she is incarcerated) Maryanne develops trusting and supportive relationships with counselors. These matter and provide some hope for long-term healing.
The young people in this book experience overwhelming trauma in their birth family, and again in their time in foster care, even if they don’t experience direct abuse. Moving from placement to placement, school to school, caseworker to caseworker is a common experience for kids in foster care for a long time. The author’s argument is that this lack of stability and adult connection creates the conditions that leads to the violence some foster children commit. If we want to reduce youth violence and lives it destroys, we need to make the foster care system both less needed and more humane.
The book isn’t completely a screed against the existence of foster care. Claudia quotes Sixto Cancel (a powerful advocate for youth in foster care) explaining that the grim reality is that many kids won’t ever be able to safely return to their birth families. Sixto’s prescription is to lean in to kinship care – placing children that can’t return home safely with relatives. Washington agrees and has close to 60% of children in out-of-home care placed with relatives. She also talks about the horrific racial history of foster care and its use as a weapon to control families of color. Though this isn’t the core story of Claudia’s book, you can’t talk about foster care without talking about race.
To avoid the long-term trauma Claudia so eloquently describes, most analysts agree that we’re typically better off supporting families upstream than removing their children. As a result of deliberate policy choices and national trends, Washington has seen a dramatic decline in the number of children in foster care over the last decade. We now have half the number of kids in out of home care that we did in 2017.
If you’re at all interested in how we address juvenile violence you should read this book.
October 21, 2025
"The state had forced (...) every other incarcerated foster child to account for their crimes. Would it ever do the same of its own."
One more book highlighting the high likelihood of harm done in the American foster care system, which is shifting my mind me more and more in favor of restricting its use to all but the most desperate situations. Claudia Rowe casts a broad net and captures multiple stories--of crime and unexpected success, always in the shadow of life-altering trauma--and highlights why the system broke more than it fixed. The unstable life of a foster child, the constant rehousings, all designed to keep them fed, but starved of affection and stability, is exposed in all its rotten, classist and racist ugliness. The result is a plethora of non-functioning or barely-functioning adults who are often fed back into the system via prison or homelessness. The “foster care to prison pipeline.” was redefined by Longworth, a now rehabilitated killer who suffered tremendously in the foster-care system, more like a circuit. "A snake that fed on its own, an ouroboros of misery, its outputs becoming fuel to keep the best beast alive." It's hard not to look at the Louisiana Parish that limited emergency foster placements as a success story: while there were a few instances of kids whose lack of removal cost lives, the overall child mortality in the area was significantly lower than in parts of the country where foster placement went on unabridged. Again, studies seem to suggest that, except in cases of severe abuse, most children fare better close to their family. At least kin placements are being taken seriously now, but who knows how long that will last. Especially in a society that, although is knowledgeble of the harms done, refuses to take them into consideration when it locks up the individuals it broke. Take the example of this prosecutor who refused pleads for clemency for a former ward of the state: "she found arguments about the science of still developing juvenile brains too simplistic to satisfy the demands of justice, and perhaps naive. In her view being a minor should not necessarily shield one from the consequences of taking a life." Then why is the state being shielded for its responsibility in damaging these humans? The rapes, the stolen lives and loves, the very obvious lack of success--why can the state persevere and not be held accountable? How are we still paying for this lack of empathy, for this war on poor people? Why do we spend more money on taking children away from poor people, instead of investing in raising those poor families out of poverty? When did we reach the conclusion that kids in foster care have no rights? For six years, Washington state attacked Ferris's arguments with first insisting that children in foster care had no constitutional rights, then allowing that if they did, their rights were no greater than those of convicted criminals serving time period it was an illuminating perspective. Whatever it is, we need to reform the system quickly. If you don't care about the harm being done to those in foster care, you may care about the harm they reflect back on society--the higher crime rates, their prolonged need for assistance. Uprooting foster care may even be necessary, considering the disproportionate harm it causes. As the author concludes: "The state had forced (...) every other incarcerated foster child to account for their crimes. Would it ever do the same of its own."
One more book highlighting the high likelihood of harm done in the American foster care system, which is shifting my mind me more and more in favor of restricting its use to all but the most desperate situations. Claudia Rowe casts a broad net and captures multiple stories--of crime and unexpected success, always in the shadow of life-altering trauma--and highlights why the system broke more than it fixed. The unstable life of a foster child, the constant rehousings, all designed to keep them fed, but starved of affection and stability, is exposed in all its rotten, classist and racist ugliness. The result is a plethora of non-functioning or barely-functioning adults who are often fed back into the system via prison or homelessness. The “foster care to prison pipeline.” was redefined by Longworth, a now rehabilitated killer who suffered tremendously in the foster-care system, more like a circuit. "A snake that fed on its own, an ouroboros of misery, its outputs becoming fuel to keep the best beast alive." It's hard not to look at the Louisiana Parish that limited emergency foster placements as a success story: while there were a few instances of kids whose lack of removal cost lives, the overall child mortality in the area was significantly lower than in parts of the country where foster placement went on unabridged. Again, studies seem to suggest that, except in cases of severe abuse, most children fare better close to their family. At least kin placements are being taken seriously now, but who knows how long that will last. Especially in a society that, although is knowledgeble of the harms done, refuses to take them into consideration when it locks up the individuals it broke. Take the example of this prosecutor who refused pleads for clemency for a former ward of the state: "she found arguments about the science of still developing juvenile brains too simplistic to satisfy the demands of justice, and perhaps naive. In her view being a minor should not necessarily shield one from the consequences of taking a life." Then why is the state being shielded for its responsibility in damaging these humans? The rapes, the stolen lives and loves, the very obvious lack of success--why can the state persevere and not be held accountable? How are we still paying for this lack of empathy, for this war on poor people? Why do we spend more money on taking children away from poor people, instead of investing in raising those poor families out of poverty? When did we reach the conclusion that kids in foster care have no rights? For six years, Washington state attacked Ferris's arguments with first insisting that children in foster care had no constitutional rights, then allowing that if they did, their rights were no greater than those of convicted criminals serving time period it was an illuminating perspective. Whatever it is, we need to reform the system quickly. If you don't care about the harm being done to those in foster care, you may care about the harm they reflect back on society--the higher crime rates, their prolonged need for assistance. Uprooting foster care may even be necessary, considering the disproportionate harm it causes. As the author concludes: "The state had forced (...) every other incarcerated foster child to account for their crimes. Would it ever do the same of its own."
November 8, 2024
What a harrowing account of the foster care system, at least in the US and specifically the North-Western states. The author takes us on a journey through the young lives of kids failed by the system, over and over, and the people who tried to help, with middling success.
I was shocked by the statistics: "By conservative estimates, a fifth of America's prison population is comprised of former foster kids." A troublingly large number of these kids are people of colour; although the ranges vary, the number is disproportionately larger than the actual population numbers. The re-election of Donald Trump this week might seem like a random thing to bring up, but he and his posse are emblematic of the problem: race, class/caste, and essentially power differentials that favour certain people over others and can be tied to the slavery of Black people, the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, and the utter racism towards Mexican/Hispanic/Latinx people.
I was heartened by the survivor-turned-lawyer who realized that relationships should be the heart of the system. Even just one solid relationship. Even if it's fleeting. Later, the author writes: "Most striking to me was that this transformation had been generated entirely by the change in Maryanne's environment. And the relationship with Jeanette, her program manager, who scolded Maryanne when she acted petulant or disorganized or inconsiderate—not in the way of a prison guard, more like a mom." This is the key point. We are social animals who have offspring that generally need several years of care after popping out of the womb to survive, let alone flourish. If only the system could be structured around that.
I felt that the author generally wrote with a sympathetic hand. At the same time, I was a bit put off by the interwoven narrative voices: sometimes, the author writes from the perspective of the kids, as if it's a story; and other times, the kids are quoted. I couldn't really tell what was real and what was dramatized. Maryanne's story was a case in point: the author describes the murder from her POV and positions Maryanne as flummoxed and vulnerable, but later documentation and quotes about the event suggest that she hadn't been confused; maybe not willful, but at least reactionary and apparently self-aware.
With another Trump presidency on the horizon, my heart is aching for these kids, who are largely a product of their circumstances, which is clearly tied to a legacy of structural discrimination in the states: a flame for continued suffering. I wish that the author could've provided answers by the end of the book, but this is a wicked problem. I hope that the most recent shift in political tides, however chilling in the moment, will usher in a tsunami that rocks the foundations of this broken system and carries in a new current of change.
Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Abrams Press for the advance copy.
I was shocked by the statistics: "By conservative estimates, a fifth of America's prison population is comprised of former foster kids." A troublingly large number of these kids are people of colour; although the ranges vary, the number is disproportionately larger than the actual population numbers. The re-election of Donald Trump this week might seem like a random thing to bring up, but he and his posse are emblematic of the problem: race, class/caste, and essentially power differentials that favour certain people over others and can be tied to the slavery of Black people, the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, and the utter racism towards Mexican/Hispanic/Latinx people.
I was heartened by the survivor-turned-lawyer who realized that relationships should be the heart of the system. Even just one solid relationship. Even if it's fleeting. Later, the author writes: "Most striking to me was that this transformation had been generated entirely by the change in Maryanne's environment. And the relationship with Jeanette, her program manager, who scolded Maryanne when she acted petulant or disorganized or inconsiderate—not in the way of a prison guard, more like a mom." This is the key point. We are social animals who have offspring that generally need several years of care after popping out of the womb to survive, let alone flourish. If only the system could be structured around that.
I felt that the author generally wrote with a sympathetic hand. At the same time, I was a bit put off by the interwoven narrative voices: sometimes, the author writes from the perspective of the kids, as if it's a story; and other times, the kids are quoted. I couldn't really tell what was real and what was dramatized. Maryanne's story was a case in point: the author describes the murder from her POV and positions Maryanne as flummoxed and vulnerable, but later documentation and quotes about the event suggest that she hadn't been confused; maybe not willful, but at least reactionary and apparently self-aware.
With another Trump presidency on the horizon, my heart is aching for these kids, who are largely a product of their circumstances, which is clearly tied to a legacy of structural discrimination in the states: a flame for continued suffering. I wish that the author could've provided answers by the end of the book, but this is a wicked problem. I hope that the most recent shift in political tides, however chilling in the moment, will usher in a tsunami that rocks the foundations of this broken system and carries in a new current of change.
Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Abrams Press for the advance copy.
November 4, 2025
Took me a while to work my way through this one. Very upsetting, detailed, thoroughly reported case studies of young people poorly served by our foster care and criminal justice systems. Her point of departure is the disproportionately high representation of former foster care recipients in prison. Besides the case studies, she provides useful interviews with those who have worked in or studied the system or can provide some context on it (e.g., Mary Dozier, whom i know slightly from a job interview many moons ago and always admired, on attachment research).
Not a lot of space devoted to advocacy or proposing solutions, but does comment favorably on the notion of taking some of the money we spend on paying foster parents and giving it instead to extended family members who might be able to provide a stable home if they had some additional resources.
it's not this type of book, but fwiw I could have used a little more on the research. That is, yes, there are mistakes to be made in either direction (if you prioritize bio family staying together at all costs, you end up leaving a kid with a murderously abusive parent sometimes when they might have been saved, but as shown by cases in this book you can also yank a kid out of a home for perhaps fixable concerns (family is homeless, or living in squalor, or parent has drug problem....), when an infusion of help might have enabled them to stay together and spared the kid an awful spiraling journey thru the system. But big-picture what approaches are working best for minimizing these errors? she profiles one Louisiana judge who seems to lean hard on avoiding foster care, but sort of left at the level of "some say she's overdoing it, but she says....."
Not a lot of space devoted to advocacy or proposing solutions, but does comment favorably on the notion of taking some of the money we spend on paying foster parents and giving it instead to extended family members who might be able to provide a stable home if they had some additional resources.
it's not this type of book, but fwiw I could have used a little more on the research. That is, yes, there are mistakes to be made in either direction (if you prioritize bio family staying together at all costs, you end up leaving a kid with a murderously abusive parent sometimes when they might have been saved, but as shown by cases in this book you can also yank a kid out of a home for perhaps fixable concerns (family is homeless, or living in squalor, or parent has drug problem....), when an infusion of help might have enabled them to stay together and spared the kid an awful spiraling journey thru the system. But big-picture what approaches are working best for minimizing these errors? she profiles one Louisiana judge who seems to lean hard on avoiding foster care, but sort of left at the level of "some say she's overdoing it, but she says....."
October 27, 2025
The sole reason for four stars: 3.5 was not a choice.
The elevated rating is based on two people featured in the book and not the book itself.
“ Wards of the State” is a short, depressing read about the embarrassing role States play in undermining child welfare in this country. Learning about Sixto Cancel and
Retired Judge Ernestine Gray were the standout sections. Seemingly devoid of any author investment this book reads like so many jumbled case studies. Random statistics and historical references do not render the writing cohesive, nor do they predispose the reader to want to invest in the topic.Toward the end of the book I found myself wondering what motivated the author to write it. Two particularly telling remarks on pages 205 and
209 contributed to that feeling…
The author talks about “ The State” as if it were an entity and not a system or machine requiring actual people working in concert to carry out its functions. Children can only be removed from their biological families by people willing and paid to do so: on behalf of “ The State”. Ponder that: historically people have proven willing to be paid to do that since America’s inception. In all this time VERY little has changed although no ethnicity is safe from “ The State” currently.
The examples of the two change agents mentioned above are the bright spots in the book. If nothing else those interested in furtherance of the cause of juvenile justice and family cohesion will take cues from them or become involved in their organizations.
The elevated rating is based on two people featured in the book and not the book itself.
“ Wards of the State” is a short, depressing read about the embarrassing role States play in undermining child welfare in this country. Learning about Sixto Cancel and
Retired Judge Ernestine Gray were the standout sections. Seemingly devoid of any author investment this book reads like so many jumbled case studies. Random statistics and historical references do not render the writing cohesive, nor do they predispose the reader to want to invest in the topic.Toward the end of the book I found myself wondering what motivated the author to write it. Two particularly telling remarks on pages 205 and
209 contributed to that feeling…
The author talks about “ The State” as if it were an entity and not a system or machine requiring actual people working in concert to carry out its functions. Children can only be removed from their biological families by people willing and paid to do so: on behalf of “ The State”. Ponder that: historically people have proven willing to be paid to do that since America’s inception. In all this time VERY little has changed although no ethnicity is safe from “ The State” currently.
The examples of the two change agents mentioned above are the bright spots in the book. If nothing else those interested in furtherance of the cause of juvenile justice and family cohesion will take cues from them or become involved in their organizations.
March 12, 2025
***Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review***
For someone with only a basic understanding of the foster care system in the US, this book was a fantastic entry point. I appreciated the focus on those on the cusp or recently aging out of the system as this transitional stage presents unique challenges that are often unaddressed. There are other books that cover the topic of foster care from different angles, but this was the first one that I read that focused on this perspective. Claudia Rowe lets the life stories of various current and former foster teens/young adults speak for themselves. She did not need to do any heavy lifting in telling the reader how to interpret these stories because I think anyone with a heart and half a brain could see how the foster care to prison pipeline is harmful. Rowe includes some history and numbers to illustrate certain points, but it is smoothly woven into the narrative and does not affect the readability of the book. The reader need not be a scholar in order to understand; they simply need to be human and be able to access their humanity. I was tremendously affected by this book.
For someone with only a basic understanding of the foster care system in the US, this book was a fantastic entry point. I appreciated the focus on those on the cusp or recently aging out of the system as this transitional stage presents unique challenges that are often unaddressed. There are other books that cover the topic of foster care from different angles, but this was the first one that I read that focused on this perspective. Claudia Rowe lets the life stories of various current and former foster teens/young adults speak for themselves. She did not need to do any heavy lifting in telling the reader how to interpret these stories because I think anyone with a heart and half a brain could see how the foster care to prison pipeline is harmful. Rowe includes some history and numbers to illustrate certain points, but it is smoothly woven into the narrative and does not affect the readability of the book. The reader need not be a scholar in order to understand; they simply need to be human and be able to access their humanity. I was tremendously affected by this book.
October 20, 2025
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗
这本书读完已经有段时间了，拖到现在是因为读完如鲠在喉什么也写不出来。
作者追踪了六个在寄养家庭里长大的孩子的经历，向读者揭示美国的 foster care 的运作缺陷。这些孩子每个人都辗转于不同的 foster 家庭、虽然长大却不断受到心理创伤，多数人流落街头或最终犯罪被送入监狱。
Foster care，我不知道翻成中文「寄宿」是否合适。因为 foster 并非「领养」，而是在政府机构把小孩从家里带出，在找到真正的领养父母之前，安排的临时住宿家庭。用其中的一位 foster mom 的话来说，政府也告诉他们，他们的最大责任是「确保这些小孩不要受伤，不要死掉」，而并非关心，更别谈爱。可是因为大多数想要领养孩子的父母都想要领养婴儿，导致一旦孩子超过五六岁的年纪就非常难找到领养父母，最终被不停地送到不同的寄宿家庭。
所以这样的 foster care 制度，既没有 foster，也没有 care. 美国社会根深蒂固地认为，如果一个小孩在原生家庭中受到伤害，那么只要把这个小孩从那个家庭环境中带走，小孩就会受到保护。
可是，与其说是为了保护儿童设立的「关爱」制度，不如说是对亲生父母和小孩双方面的惩罚。数据显示，让未成年，尤其是儿童，不停辗转于寄宿家庭为他们带来的不安全感，远大于留在有缺陷的父母身边，甚至加剧这些小孩原本经历的伤害。因为辗转于不同的寄宿家庭会他们频繁地经受「分离」带来的不确定，无法对身边的人建立联系产生信任。而监狱里囚犯的寄宿经历更是惊人地高。儿童救助社工甚至把寄宿制度叫做「囚犯运输管道」。
作者认为，与其惩罚父母，不如教育他们。如果教育真的收效甚微，不得不把小孩带离父母时，政府应该真正负起所谓「监护人」的责任（寄养制度的实质就是政府从父母手里收回监护权，代为监护他们的子女），而不是把小孩带离之后丢给「中继站」就算了事。
读完非常憋屈的原因就在于，意识到这个问题在现有框架下似乎是无解的。有些父母的确不该为人父母（比如只顾嗑药不管子女、家暴、酗酒…）但有些父母可能只是疲于奔波生计而一时疏忽没看到小孩，导致小孩受伤。这两类父母显然不该面对相同的惩罚，但现实就是后者受到的惩罚和前者并无不同，以至于最后他们的孩子很多变成流浪儿童或者问题儿童。政府有多少精力来设计一个完美制度，或者说，政府到底该如何界定哪些父母有权监护子女？读完这本书才意识到，不论是出于系统性原因还是政治原因，政府其实并不清楚如何界定。
这本书读完已经有段时间了，拖到现在是因为读完如鲠在喉什么也写不出来。
作者追踪了六个在寄养家庭里长大的孩子的经历，向读者揭示美国的 foster care 的运作缺陷。这些孩子每个人都辗转于不同的 foster 家庭、虽然长大却不断受到心理创伤，多数人流落街头或最终犯罪被送入监狱。
Foster care，我不知道翻成中文「寄宿」是否合适。因为 foster 并非「领养」，而是在政府机构把小孩从家里带出，在找到真正的领养父母之前，安排的临时住宿家庭。用其中的一位 foster mom 的话来说，政府也告诉他们，他们的最大责任是「确保这些小孩不要受伤，不要死掉」，而并非关心，更别谈爱。可是因为大多数想要领养孩子的父母都想要领养婴儿，导致一旦孩子超过五六岁的年纪就非常难找到领养父母，最终被不停地送到不同的寄宿家庭。
所以这样的 foster care 制度，既没有 foster，也没有 care. 美国社会根深蒂固地认为，如果一个小孩在原生家庭中受到伤害，那么只要把这个小孩从那个家庭环境中带走，小孩就会受到保护。
可是，与其说是为了保护儿童设立的「关爱」制度，不如说是对亲生父母和小孩双方面的惩罚。数据显示，让未成年，尤其是儿童，不停辗转于寄宿家庭为他们带来的不安全感，远大于留在有缺陷的父母身边，甚至加剧这些小孩原本经历的伤害。因为辗转于不同的寄宿家庭会他们频繁地经受「分离」带来的不确定，无法对身边的人建立联系产生信任。而监狱里囚犯的寄宿经历更是惊人地高。儿童救助社工甚至把寄宿制度叫做「囚犯运输管道」。
作者认为，与其惩罚父母，不如教育他们。如果教育真的收效甚微，不得不把小孩带离父母时，政府应该真正负起所谓「监护人」的责任（寄养制度的实质就是政府从父母手里收回监护权，代为监护他们的子女），而不是把小孩带离之后丢给「中继站」就算了事。
读完非常憋屈的原因就在于，意识到这个问题在现有框架下似乎是无解的。有些父母的确不该为人父母（比如只顾嗑药不管子女、家暴、酗酒…）但有些父母可能只是疲于奔波生计而一时疏忽没看到小孩，导致小孩受伤。这两类父母显然不该面对相同的惩罚，但现实就是后者受到的惩罚和前者并无不同，以至于最后他们的孩子很多变成流浪儿童或者问题儿童。政府有多少精力来设计一个完美制度，或者说，政府到底该如何界定哪些父母有权监护子女？读完这本书才意识到，不论是出于系统性原因还是政治原因，政府其实并不清楚如何界定。
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 11, 2025
The premise is very interesting, but terribly executed. The author just seems terribly naive and entrenched in her own world view. All of the diverse people she interviews end up having the same narrative voice: hers. Theoretically she was a crime journalist for many years, but somehow she still believes that people who have committed murder are these scary 'psychopath sociopath' monsters like on a cop procedural. She touches on a lot of big ideas but is incapable of really exploring any of them. I read lots of books by authors whose worldviews I disagree with, but this author is omnipresent in her work and somehow simultaneously fails to explain her journalistic methodology. The book is mostly anecdote based (which is fine), but the anecdotes are all colored by the author. The author also tries to add some big sweeping claims onto the anecdotes without any data.
The people whose stories were told in this book deserve better.
The people whose stories were told in this book deserve better.
November 25, 2025
This is a well written, although sometimes hard to read, book about the Foster Care System. The author, a journalist from Seattle, showcases several people from the system, not only from WA state. One of my first thoughts was that I need to become a foster parent, and then I quickly corrected myself. Even though I have aware of problems in the system, reading this book will cause me to pay more attention and possibly see what I can do to help improve it. Very sad stories, but also some successful ones, but it sure points out the problems. For example, I haven’t spent time considering what happens when young people “age out” of the system. With no support and no one to bounce back to or ask questions or assistance from, is it any surprise that many of the end of homeless? Not a beach read, but worth the time.
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