9 Quotes by Cris Beam

Just as it was in Kempe’s time, the rate of removals today has less to do with the literal rate of physical abuse or neglect and more to do with a fickle public intermittently enraged by what they hear on the news. When kids die at the hands of their parents, headlines put child protection agencies under intense and sudden scrutiny. Investigators increase their removals, hoping to avoid another high-profile fatality.

A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of thirty-six studies that looked at the physical growth, cognition, language and motor skills, behavior, attention, affect, and neurophysiology found no connection between prenatal exposure to cocaine and a decrease in functioning.

But I’ve struggled, like every foster child I’ve ever met, between two opposing agonies: she didn’t want me, and I’m the one who left. The guilt, still, is immeasurable.

They’d never know how confusion and cruelty change people, make them hard – the way the deepest cuts make the toughest scabs.

There are so many crises in foster care – the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse – that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it’s not a crisis it’s not a problem.

It’s not unusual, while waiting for somebody to kiss the frog and the real parents to come home, for a foster child to live in ten or twenty different houses.

I guess it’s about what you have to give up to gain something else... Did you always have to give something up for a gain?

It’s not that the government made us do it; you can’t think that way,” John said. “They made us not ask questions, they told us what to think, but also, we did it.

If you have the choice of being abused by your mother or abused by a stranger, you’d choose your mother. It’s abuse either way.” This came from Arelis Rosario-Keane, a twenty-two-year-old college student and a veteran of the foster care system, referring to the likelihood of getting mistreated in care.