HS&M Foster Care and Human Services Curriculum Series
HS&M FOSTER CARE AND HUMAN SERVICES CURRICULUM SERIES
An Excerpt
From the Author
I am not a neutral observer.
I spent twenty-two years co-owning and operating a therapeutic residential agency for foster children ages eleven to seventeen in North Carolina. I served hundreds of young people — children living with severe mental illness, victims of sex trafficking, teenagers whose trauma had been criminalized before anyone thought to ask what was underneath the behavior, and children with no story at all — family unknown, in the system as far back as memory goes, with no one coming.
I watched them survive extraordinary circumstances. And I watched them walk out the door at eighteen into a world that was not prepared for them.
That failure drove me back to school. I completed my doctorate at Northeastern University, studying the lived experiences of five foster care alumni in North Carolina. They were not children anymore. They had survived. They sat across from me and told me their real stories — not the version that lives in a case file, but the real one. What they taught me changed everything I thought I knew about what actually helps.
My father modeled something I did not have a name for until writing this series — when I could hear his voice in every word I was crafting. He was consistent. Not dramatically. Not heroically. Just reliably. The same way, every day, without condition. He showed up when it was convenient and when it was not. He simply did not leave. And he is the same to this day.
That consistency became the philosophy of everything I built. Predictably, boringly, consistently present. That is what my father was. That is what I spent twenty-seven years trying to build into programs for children who never had it. That is what this series is about.
For twenty-two years I was a provider. These books made me an educator. And if they move someone to build something better for the kids I keep talking about — then I have become what I always wanted to be. A motivator.
From Book One: Now I’m In Foster Care, Now What?
Chapter One: It Was Not Their Choice
Before talking about what happens next, one thing has to be understood — something most people get backwards.
When a child ends up in foster care, the first question people ask is usually: What did that kid do?
That is the wrong question.
It is the wrong question because twenty-two years of sitting in rooms with these children made that clear. Sitting in the meetings. Sitting with the families. Sitting across from social workers, DJJ officers, teachers, and court-appointed advocates. Over and over again, adults entered those rooms carrying the wrong question. They came in looking for a diagnosis. A behavior pattern. A file that explained what was broken about the child sitting across the table.
What they should have been looking for was a story.
Every single participant in the research said the same thing: they did not choose to be in foster care. Not one of them. They ended up in the system because their families fell apart. By the time you meet them, they are not starting from zero. They are starting from somewhere much harder.
One participant — called Kellie here — described what it felt like to move from placement to placement, over and over, never knowing where she would land next:
“They don’t ask you or tell you why, you just have to move. This would happen to me all the time. I would move all the time, and nobody cared where I wanted to go or who I wanted to live with. You can’t be with your family, celebrate holidays like other kids or even be with your friends. You feel like you’re on the sidelines and nobody understands you. You must depend a lot on the kindness of strangers.”
Read that again. Depend on the kindness of strangers.
That is what foster care looks like from the inside. Not safety. Not rescue. Strangers. Rules no one chose. A bed no one picked. A family that may or may not want them there.
Another participant — called Susan here — lost her father before entering care, and was then removed from her mother. She described what that loss did to her:
“After I got taken from my momma, I pretty much became a cold person and I didn’t talk to anybody and I didn’t like people. I was just really angry all the time because I was taken from my mom and dad had died a few months before that. The moving around affected me negatively; it made me become angrier and more depressed than I should have been.”
That child — that angry, grieving, cold child — was not a problem child. She was a bereaved child. She had lost her father and then lost her mother and then been handed to strangers.
The anger was not the diagnosis. The anger was the evidence.
So here is what needs to happen before you read another word. Put down whatever judgment you are carrying about the child in front of you. Replace it with curiosity. Replace it with the understanding that they did not choose any of this.
They are doing what all human beings do when their survival is at stake. They are adapting.
The job — for every adult in the room — is not to punish them for adapting. The job is to show them, slowly and consistently, that it is safe to stop.
There is one question worth asking.
Not: What did that kid do?
But: What happened to this child?
That question changes everything.
The Series Continues.
This is where the excerpt ends. The full series — six books, two halves, one argument — is coming soon.
The Foundation Edition follows the human journey from entry into foster care through age twenty-six. The Field Edition addresses how to build the residential programs, independent living homes, and community-based services organizations that serve this population with dignity.
One sentence runs through all six books.
Put the person at the center. And do not leave.
