Nell Bernstein is the author of A Rage to Do Better: Listening to Young People from the Foster Care System. She has covered children in foster care and their families for Youth Outlook!, Salon.com and other publications. She is currently a media fellow with the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture of the Open Society Institute.

A Rage to Do Better, commissioned by the Pacific News Service, is a compilation of voices of kids in foster care and an analysis of challenges facing the system from their point of view. Says Bernstein, "One thing we try to do is connect the voices of individuals with policy issues... We wanted to marry both of these concepts."

Julee Newberger spoke with Bernstein by phone on Oct. 31, 2000.

Q: As a journalist, what led you to covering the lives of vulnerable children, particularly those in foster care?

A: It's something that I had been involved with most of my life, starting in college, and then after, when I was trying to avoid being a journalist. My first job out of college was in a group home outside San Francisco. I was very taken with the young women who lived there, and eventually came to believe I was actually doing more harm than good. It's not a criticism of the specific place I worked. Everybody had the best intentions, staff and the administration really cared about kids, but we were working within a structure where we couldn't really give kids what they needed.

For example, we had a new administrator come in who instituted a no-touch policy where the only thing you could do was an "air-hug." Here was a system that was in some ways afraid of kids they were serving: we were surrogate parents and we couldn't give them a hug. I felt like I was constantly being instructed and trained not to believe them. I remember thinking how crazy it must make these kids to never be believed. Then I spent time editing a youth publication [Youth Outlook!]. We periodically worked with kids who had been in foster care.

Q: What most surprised you about these kids when you interviewed them?

A:That they would talk to me. There's such a stigma attached to being in foster care. They have been poked and prodded and analyzed and scrutinized. I thought it would be harder to get them to talk to me. I found that they had been asked, "What happened to you?" but rarely, "What do you think about that?" The moment I asked, it was like turning on a tap.

Q: What do you think is missing in media coverage of these children?

A: The voices of the kids. When young people are quoted, it's usually just describing their plight. Adult sources are brought in to tell us what it means and what to do about it. Asking young people about their situations themselves is often missing from coverage.

Q: The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has speeded up the termination of parental rights, and accelerated the adoption process. From the words of youth in the book, it sounds like the legislation has not been a panacea. Can you elaborate?

A: My views about that legislation were transformed by what I heard from kids. In my survey I asked them all, if you had an opportunity to be adopted, would you want to be? A significant majority of them said they wouldn't. Those who said they would were the kids the law was designed to help—kids who had been in care already for 16 years and who knew they were never going back to families—the minority of kids. We all want to write legislation that helps but it's difficult because this is a situation in which every family is different.

Overwhelmingly, I was struck by the intensity of the kids' sense of connection to their biological parents, whatever they could or could not do to take care of them, and regardless of how long it had been since they'd been together. Adoption would have been more appealing if it didn't mean losing their biological parents. The idea of permanently severing a family is terrifying and kind of heartbreaking to them. That really challenged my idea of what family is.

Q: Another important issue for kids in foster care is emancipation, or "aging out." The Foster Care Independence Act (or Chafee legislation) has provided funds to states to help kids get on their feet after leaving foster care. Did you get the impression from the youth surveyed that it's working?

A: The services that Chafee makes available are wonderful and very valuable to kids. I also think that you run the chance of overemphasizing services, per se. That's the missing piece. How do we make sure kids don't leave system at 18 with no relationships and no family?

There is a certain percentage of kids that feel so stigmatized, they're not going to sign up for a program. There are some wonderful new transition programs here in the San Francisco Bay area. But some kids won't go near them with a ten-foot pole. It's the idea of a "program" or a social worker who's going to help them. Kids in the juvenile justice system are overrepresented in that group.

I also think a college education should be an automatic entitlement for kids in foster care.

Q: What is most important for people to understand about kids in the foster care system?

A: That it's not their fault, especially with teenagers and the foster care system and the juvenile justice system, which are so intertwined. There is a sense that it is their fault they're there. It comes from not wanting to admit the depth and pervasiveness of problems that have led to so many kids being in foster care.

The kids who come in are overwhelmingly from poor families. Why do we have so many of these families in times of prosperity? Why isn't it getting better for these families in times of economic boom? Why are we cutting welfare programs in a boom period? Once kids enter foster care, they have access to health care, but not when they're living with their birth families. One question I asked kids was, if there was one thing that would've helped your family stay together, what would it have been? They said, help with parents' drug problems. But we're incarcerating more people on drug charges than we are treating .

The second thing is to see kids in foster care as a resource rather than a population in need of services. They bring this up a lot—they are more than just a drain on services. They are individuals.

For More Information
Copies of A Rage to Do Better: Listening to Young People from the Foster Care System are available for $10 each from:

Pacific News Service
660 Market St., Ste. 210
San Francisco, CA 94104
Attn: Nell Bernstein

• Read "Make as Much Noise as You can": Kids Speak Out, excerpts from the book.

• For more about youth in foster care, explore Connect for Kids' Children in Foster Care feature.

• For more voices of youth in foster care, take a look at Foster Care Youth United.

• YO! (Youth Outlook) is a monthly newspaper by and about young people, including some who have experienced foster care.

• The Child Welfare League of America is an association of public and private nonprofit agencies that assist abused and neglected children and their families with a wide range of services.