Tag: foster care
What Students at Yale Don’t See About Their Own Success
The writer Rob Henderson recalls a classmate at Yale, where he was an undergraduate, telling him that “monogamy is kind of outdated.” But she was raised by monogamous parents and said that she planned to have a traditional marriage.
Henderson shares that anecdote in his new memoir, Troubled, an account of his upbringing in foster care and his escape into the Air Force and higher education. For him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated” is a “luxury belief,” a term
The Failure of Affirmative Action
Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to
The U.S. Child-Welfare System Fails Its Children
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.
For one, I believed that orphanages were
The Story of Baby O—and the Case That Could Gut Native Sovereignty
In March of 2016, a newborn baby was left at a hospital in Nevada. In court documents, the child is called “Baby O,” but we will call her “Octavia.” When she was 3 days old, Octavia went to live with a couple named Heather and Nick Libretti in the small city of Sparks, Nev., just outside of Reno. At the time, Heather did PR for a classic cars festival, while Nick worked as a mechanic. The
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles
Two politicians from the Green Party, which has championed the rights of sexual minorities, accused the AfD of manipulating the victims. “What the AfD is trying to do, to instrumentalize this crime for its own purposes, is unacceptable,” a representative said.
Schweer, the AfD adviser, tried to find a lawyer who could advocate for Marco in a civil lawsuit. “I stand up for a friend, the victim of the so-called Kentler experiment,” he wrote in an e-mail to a large