The Lives We Would Like to Set Right

The stories of the killing of Elisa Izquierdo by her mother in New York City last year, like the stories of the killing of Joseph Wallace by his mother in Chicago in 1993, and of the killing of Lisa Steinberg by her father in New York in 1987, and of the killings of so many other children through the years by their parents, created martyrs in whose names other children might be saved. But when such stories become the prism through which we see the child welfare system, journalists risk harming the very children they so much want to help.

It is all but impossible to write about the horrible things that parents

 and the state do to children and not believe that if you only ask enough questions and probe the "system" sufficiently you can balance with something positive the enduring image of the child's photograph taken at the autopsy.

The death of a child provokes rage, a reasonable response. And rage propels the obvious questions: How could a parent do this to a child? Could anyone in a position of authority or responsibility - a relative, a doctor, a social worker - have prevented what happened? Have people paid by the state to protect that child failed? Who are those people?

We then publish or air those peoples' names, alongside accusations by the mayor or the governor or a legislator of shoddy follow-up, and slipshod investigations, and letting yet another innocent "fall through the cracks." Legislation is then introduced, and passed quickly, that will ensure that the particular circumstances that led to this child's misfortune will not happen again. The offending parent goes on trial. Maybe a conviction follows. The case worker is suspended. The punishment offers some satisfaction to the public, and to the journalist.

But this approximation of a solution - a solution propelled in good measure by the force of the coverage - sets into motion an entirely new set of problems, and with it a different sort of story. Because supervisors and case workers (who are each handling, say, forty or fifty families) do not want the next child's death on their watch, case workers begin removing many more children from homes deemed questionable, driving off with the children in gypsy cabs as the mothers and neighbors throw garbage and scream obscenities. The case workers bring the children to the child welfare administration shelter, their way station before placement in a foster home. They tell the parents that if they want their children back they must meet the state's terms, which generally means completing "parenting skills" classes, undergoing drug screening, and finding a job and a home of their own.

 The story now becomes one of a "system" that is "overburdened" with all the new children coming in and with few going home. There are stories of backlogs in family court, of children sleeping on desks at the child welfare administration offices because there are not enough foster-care beds. Case workers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, tell of "burn-out." The "system" is reported to be at the "breaking point," a point that somehow manages to endure for many months, or years. These stories are followed by tales of parents who insist that they have met all the state's demands but cannot get their children back. Children "bounce" through the system for years, often "aging out" at eighteen bitter and angry.

Then comes a final stage of coverage: the search for The Answer. Quotable people talk, at turns, of "family preservation," or "orphanages," but in truth the experts haven't a clue because there is no answer that is applicable to all the children in the care of the state, let alone one that fits into a headline, or a lead, or a quote of manageable length.

There is journalistic virtue in these stories. But parents who kill children are a breed apart. There have always been parents who kill their children, and there always will be psychotic and evil parents who do. And there is very little the state can do about it. The true story of child welfare - the more than half a million children in the care of the state, the twenty state child welfare agencies across the nation in such disarray that they are under court-ordered supervision, the seeming inability of the state to help the children it feels it must take from their homes - is about "the screwups."

 The screwups, a term I heard from a compassionate and wise attorney who represents the fathers and, for the most part, mothers whose children populate the child welfare system, are people who love their children and whose children love them but who are seemingly incapable of independently and consistently being minimally competent parents. By this I mean able to perform such rudimentary tasks as making sure that their children are regularly fed, in bed at night, and up for school in the morning, and that they are kept clean, dressed and, most important, safe.

 The stories of the martyred children have very little do with the everyday grind of parents, their children, and the impossibly malfunctioning bureaucracy that is supposed to make sure those children are safe. When the death of a child becomes the context in which all subsequent child welfare stories get reported and written, then all the failing parents become the homicidal parent and all their children are in grave peril. Sometimes they are. Often they are not. Often they just want to stay home with mom. Sometimes they should. Sometimes they shouldn't.

 To cover child welfare properly is to set aside your instinct as a journalist, the urge to find an overarching answer, and your instinct as a person, the attempt to save the innocents, and to accept a more realistic goal - that of raising a series of increasingly difficult questions. Such questions might better illuminate why for so long the state has had such a maddening time dealing with its failing families, why the state's goal - harshly put, to ensure that the children do not become their parents - is elusive. But more important, the right questions can move public debate closer to the messy and individual realities of these families.

 Consider what happened in Chicago after the death of Joseph Wallace, whose name and story shaped the subsequent coverage and the actions of the state.

 In 1993 a woman named Amanda Wallace, who had been in and out of mental institutions, nonetheless managed to regain custody of her three-year-old son, Joseph. Less than two months after a judge ordered them reunited, she took him home, stuffed a sock in his mouth, secured the sock with tape, wrapped an extension cord around his neck, stood him on a chair, and, as he waved goodbye, hanged him.

 Months later, on a routine drug search, the Chicago police discovered nineteen children living in a reeking two-bedroom apartment, where excrement and toilet paper clogged the single toilet and children slept crowded on sheetless mattresses strewn across the floor. The place was so fetid that several days later President Clinton lamented that this sorrowful case of parental neglect was happening "not in Calcutta but in Chicago."

Of the six mothers - five sisters and a friend - at least four were drug users, one had been a prostitute, two had been in prison. Their only source of income was public assistance, part of which, prosecutors charged, was spent on drugs. None of the children - save for the son of the sisters' friend - displayed any sign of physical abuse. Not that this mattered. In the charged atmosphere in Chicago after the headlined death of Joseph Wallace, poor mothers who at best were questionable were going to be hard-pressed to ever get their children back.

 These nineteen children were immediately made wards of the state and placed in foster homes. Some were sent to live with relatives. They got clean clothes and new rooms and they went to school. The mothers were unable to meet the state's standards for regaining custody of their children. Eventually they either surrendered custody or had their parental rights terminated. It was, on the surface, a satisfying conclusion.

 The coverage of the story of those children revealed a palpable desire for closure, for such a good ending. There was, for instance, a tender and thoughtful piece in the Chicago Tribune in which the writer tracked down many of those nineteen children and showed just how much better their lives had become. The story opened with a series of questions: "Can you see love? Can you watch it unfold? Can you capture it in a photograph?" The writer went on to describe the bond between a foster father and the one child who had been abused by his mother, a child who suffered from cerebral palsy. And while the writer did point out that it was "way too early to tell how this story will turn out," the thrust of her story was how far all the children had come.

 To be sure, the material circumstances of those children were infinitely better than they had been when they lived with their mothers. But were the "best interests" of those children served? Not necessarily. The children, although all placed in new homes, have not all adjusted well to their far cleaner and more ordered surroundings. One social worker with intimate knowledge of the case told me that a year after getting the children the foster parents were no longer witnessing the rapid transformation they had seen in the first months, when the children were learning such skills as eating with utensils and getting dressed for school. Progress slowed and, in some cases, stalled. In its place came the frustration of decent people who had naively believed, the social worker said, "if we just love them they'll be fine." One set of foster parents was changing their minds about adopting one of the children whose behavior was more than they could tolerate.

One group of five brothers lived on their foster mother's farm. The boys went to school, where they struggled, futilely, to catch up. When the oldest, who was ten, got angry in class he simply got up and walked out. As his foster mother sees it, part of his anger was about what the state had done to "save" him. "It's devastating for him to lose everything like that," the foster mother said. "It's been hard on all five boys." Sometimes she found one of the other boys sitting and gazing into the middle distance.

 "I don't care what you are, you love your children even if you don't know how to be a mom, or a TV mom," she said. "Nothing will ever fix the hole that's in those kids' lives. I could be the best mother in the world. I wish I could fix it all." Then, in a weary aside that would seem to defy logic, she explained, "They miss their mother."

Miss their mother? How could they miss their mother if she was, by all accounts, a pathetic mother? Perhaps they missed her because there existed a bond between those children and their hapless mother that eluded the understanding, or the patience, of the agents of the state.

As the state was weighing the fate of the mothers and their nineteen children, a friend of mine from Chicago whose writing on child welfare has won him important prizes called after one of the mothers relapsed into heroin use.

"Is it time to cut the cord?" he asked, meaning the termination of her parental rights. The finality of his question was striking. It grew out of his long frustration with watching the cruelties that parents inflicted upon their children. He was sick of it, and who could blame him? He had heard too many stories and seen too many pictures and, like another colleague who found the child welfare beat so depressing that at times she could not bear to get up in the morning, he had written too many words that brought him no closer to the satisfaction of a resolution.

 But as much as I admired my friend's work and passion, I believed he was asking a question that could not serve to illuminate. Better questions, I believe, would have been: What purpose would be served by legally severing this mother from her children? Would it help the children? Or would it serve the altogether different purpose of satisfying a need to see her punished? If her rights were severed, would adoption be the best course for her children? Or would the children best be served by keeping them in a permanent foster home but allowing them to maintain some sort of connection to her? Was finality in the "best interests" of these children, or of everyone else?

Larger questions might also have been asked in the reporting. Why, for instance, is this mother having such a hard time regaining her children? Is her situation common, or rare? What are the prospects of recovering addicts regaining their children?

What do you do with a woman who insists she wants her children back but whose attempts at meeting the state's requirements end, time and again, in failure? What is an agency to do with her? What can it reasonably expect of her, now and in the future? Can she ever be a competent parent? Who decides? And if the decision is no, then what are the options? What happens when we do "cut the cord"?

Such a story would take readers through the process of trying to make a failing parent into a minimally competent one. Who are the people trying to accomplish this task? What is their training, what are their aspirations, what are their goals? What do they believe a decent parent should be?

 The story, or stories - because these are questions best explored over time - satisfy the basic requirement of drama (will they make it, or not?) and raise any number of broader questions: What is the agency trying to accomplish with the families in its care? How did those goals come to be? How do those goals fit with the realities of the lives to which they are applied?

The stories can look at child welfare through several sets of eyes. For instance, upon what does a family court judge base a decision, and how much of the job is spent trying to cobble together a reasonable judgment based on cloudy information? Or, what is it like to be a case worker who, for a $25,000 annual salary, must perform such unenviable tasks as knocking on a housing-project door at ten o'clock at night to see if a child is indeed being neglected? What is it like for that worker to take a child away? What is it like to make a decision on the fate of a family if you do not feel prepared to do so, or, more disturbingly, if you are only too sure? Or, what is it like to have grown up in the foster care system, to have "aged out?"

 The very act of wrestling with these questions, of applying such questions to the circumstances of various lives, accomplishes far more than producing a set-up paragraph that reeks of finality: it puts flesh on what are otherwise arid and remote ideas. And most important, it shows, in dramatic fashion, that journalists cannot advance the debate over troubled families until we grapple with the complexities of the lives we would, in our hearts, like to set right.

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