We now know the child welfare system has a long shadow thanks to the history lesson Prudence Beidler Carr shared with us in episode 4. We also heard powerful stories and testimonies from Valerie Frost, Dr. Pegah Faed and others in episode 5 about what happens to individuals and families in those shadows. Yet, the dominant narrative in our society still suggests that the system exists to protect children from harm. Yet, as we will hear today from our guest Claudia Rowe, a veteran investigative journalist and author of Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, over half of all children who have been in foster care end up in the criminal justice system. That is a mission not just unfulfilled, but actively harmful to those children and families, and it costs society—and taxpayers—billions in incarceration, mental healthcare, and lost potential, money that could have been invested in strengthening poor and overloaded families to keep them together in the first place. This is today’s challenge for journalism and all of us as readers. How do we push beyond the simple, often sensational headline to tell the whole story, connecting the dots between how our systems have come up short, their real-life impacts on kids and families, and the solutions that may exist as an alternative? Today, we welcome Claudia Rowe, who takes us beyond the narratives of 'monsters' and 'heroes' that dominate headlines and public discourse. She reveals the immense responsibility of journalism to challenge the dominant narratives it often helped create, and the years of patient, contextual work it takes to truly understand a life shaped by systemic trauma. Welcome to Episode 6: Shining Light on the Long Shadow
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Guest:
00:14–03:29 – Luke Waldo
Luke sets the stakes for this episode: despite a dominant narrative that the child welfare system exists to protect children, over half of all children who pass through foster care end up in the criminal justice system. He frames the central challenge for journalism: how do we push beyond sensational headlines to connect systemic failures, their real-life impacts, and the solutions that might exist? He introduces Claudia Rowe, whose book explores these questions across 34 years of reporting on the intersections of youth, poverty, and government policy.
03:29–05:57 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia traces the origin of her career to a first editor who sent her to cover public schools in the Bronx in the early 1990s, telling her: "You want to understand people, you've got to look at the beginning." That directive became a lifelong inquiry into motivation, driving her from education into juvenile justice and child welfare. At the center of her work is one foundational question: what is the logic behind behavior that seems self-destructive or baffling to the rest of society?
05:57–10:25 – Luke Waldo and Claudia Rowe
Luke asks Claudia what dominant narratives she has encountered across her career. She identifies fatalism as among the most persistent: the belief that some children are "doomed from birth," damaged beyond reach, incapable of learning or growing. She notes a child welfare researcher communicated exactly this sentiment to her just two weeks before recording. Her reframe is critical: this isn't about the child. It's about a society that has structured sorting systems rather than uplifting ones. Schools, she was told by one educator, are sorting systems.
10:25–15:37 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia identifies two warring narratives within child welfare: "the family is sacrosanct" (keep children with their family of origin at all costs) versus "the family is a disaster" (remove children at the first sign of problems). She points out the selective nature of both: virtually all families in the child welfare system are low-income. Affluent families with neglect and addiction are rarely touched by CPS. The system, she argues, demonizes certain families by economic class and race, not by actual harm.
15:37–21:24 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia addresses the book's central data point: 59% of young people who grow up in foster care will have been locked up by age 26 (juvenile detention, county jail, or state prison), based on the landmark Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth conducted by Chapin Hall. The country spends $31 billion annually on foster care, yet this is the outcome. She walks through four pathways that drive that statistic: running away (leading to shoplifting, trafficking, arrest), violence in group homes, failed adoptions, and aging out at 18 without support. She adds that 50% of foster youth leave high school without a diploma, and many lack the internal resources to envision and plan for a future.
22:05–35:34 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia recounts how she came to write the book: she was sitting in a Seattle courtroom during the sentencing of a teenage girl named Maryanne who had shot and killed a man while on the run from foster care. Over six weeks of continued hearings, Claudia realized this was not a crime story. It was a foster care story. The question that crystallized: is foster care creating future inmates?
Maryanne's path was typical for older foster youth: multiple placements, a failed adoption, eventual group placement. Claudia notes most reporting on foster care focuses on infants and toddlers, almost never on adolescents.
38:29–49:38 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia confronts the "monster" narrative directly, a label she finds opaque and unilluminating. She shares two stories from the book that challenge opposite dominant narratives:
Claudia's core message from both stories: connection can happen, even brief connection at the right moment can change everything. And it is never too late.
50:31–55:34 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia addresses why foster care is largely invisible to the public. But the outcomes, homelessness, incarceration, are entirely visible. Her goal in writing the book was to connect those dots: to make the invisible system visible by writing with novelistic depth and suspense, so readers feel it rather than just absorbing statistics.
55:34–1:04:17 – Luke Waldo and Claudia Rowe
Luke asks how practitioners and advocates can effectively engage journalism to shift the narrative. Claudia's response centers on trust and depth.
1:08:09–1:09:39 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia offers a sweeping reframe of foster care itself: it is currently a holding system, designed to keep children nominally safe until they turn 18 and are released into adulthood without support. What it needs to become is a healing system. Every child in foster care has, by definition, experienced developmental trauma. A smaller, therapeutically reimagined foster care system, not just one that medicates behavior, is the direction Claudia sees as essential.
1:10:10–1:13:45 – Claudia Rowe
Claudia reflects on the status of child welfare and education as beats within journalism. She sees a slow shift, particularly in education. Her argument for editors: readers invest time in stories with depth and detail. Those stories build audience loyalty. And for journalists who care only about dollars and cents: $31 billion spent on foster care is driving even more expensive systems, including incarceration and homelessness interventions. The story pencils out.
1:13:45–1:16:56 – Claudia Rowe
Asked what she has learned about her role in narrative change, Claudia returns to a single principle she has held across every book and every story: look closer. Especially at the things that frighten or confuse us. The label of "monster" or "sociopath" tells her nothing; understanding motivation tells her everything. And the added benefit of looking closer, she says, is that you puncture your own fear. You become less afraid of what you better understand.
1:15:23–1:18:00 – Luke Waldo
Luke synthesizes the episode's challenge: Claudia has delivered a call to action to every reader who encounters a headline about a person in crisis, to every journalist who covers these stories, and to every professional who designs the systems meant to serve families. Her work makes it undeniable that stories told with context and complexity are among the most powerful tools we have to counter the devastating simplicity of dominant narratives. Without those stories, the invisible remains invisible, and the outcomes we all live with every day continue without origin, without explanation, and without remedy.
He previews Episode 7: "Do Stories Really Matter?" a conversation with Jess Moyer, Rinku Sen, Megan McGee, Tarik Moody, and others on the science, art, and measurable impacts of storytelling on narrative change.
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Visit our podcast page on our ICFW website to learn more about the experts you hear in this series.
Luke Waldo 00:14
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
We now know the child welfare system has a long shadow thanks to the history lesson Prudence Beidler Carr shared with us in episode 4. We also heard powerful stories and testimonies from Valerie Frost, Dr. Pegah Faed and others in episode 5 about what happens to individuals and families in those shadows.
Yet, the dominant narrative in our society still suggests that the system exists to protect children from harm. Yet, as we will hear today from our guest Claudia Rowe, a veteran investigative journalist and author of Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, over half of all children who have been in foster care end up in the criminal justice system. That is a mission not just unfulfilled, but actively harmful to those children and families, and it costs society—and taxpayers—billions in incarceration, mental healthcare, and lost potential, money that could have been invested in strengthening poor and overloaded families to keep them together in the first place.
This is today’s challenge for journalism and all of us as readers. How do we push beyond the simple, often sensational headline to tell the whole story, connecting the dots between how our systems have come up short, their real-life impacts on kids and families, and the solutions that may exist as an alternative?
Today, we welcome Claudia Rowe, who takes us beyond the narratives of 'monsters' and 'heroes' that dominate headlines and public discourse. She reveals the immense responsibility of journalism to challenge the dominant narratives it often helped create, and the years of patient, contextual work it takes to truly understand a life shaped by systemic trauma.
Welcome to Episode 6: Shining Light on the Long Shadow
Claudia Rowe is a National Book Awards finalist for her book Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, and a member of the Seattle Times editorial board. She has been writing about the places where youth and government policy clash for 34 years. Claudia is the recipient of a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and multiple honors for investigative reporting. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She has been published in the New York Times, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones and The Stranger. In 2018 Claudia's memoir The Spider and the Fly won the Washington State Book Award.
Welcome, Claudia, thank you for joining us today, and again, congratulations on your National Book Award finalist nomination and the well-deserved success and recognition for your book. It's wonderful having you on the podcast.
Claudia Rowe 03:29
Thank you so much for having me, Luke. I'm thrilled to be here and really gratified by your interest in the book.
Luke Waldo 03:35
So in in the introduction that I just read, we shared that you have been writing about the places where youth and government policy clash for the past 34 years. Can you tell us more about what you've seen and written about and why you were drawn to these stories where youth and government policy collide?
Claudia Rowe 03:53
So my entire career, you know, it seems like an accident, but there's really nothing. There are no accidents. So my entire career has been public education, child welfare and juvenile justice. The this is the pool where I swim, and you could say, oh, an editor. And it is true, my very first editor said, I want you to cover schools. That was the first thing. I did not want to cover schools. I was not thrilled to be in school when I was a student. I was all too happy to get out of school, and I could not understand why they were assigning me to education. This was, I was a baby reporter. This was at a weekly newspaper in the Bronx. It was my first reporting job. New York City, the Bronx. It was the early 90s. Why are you making me write about public schools? He said, You want to understand why people do the things they do. You want to understand people. You got to look at the beginning. You should be looking at schools, and that, that is what drew me to journalism at the you know, even before then, at the very, very beginning, trying to understand motivation.
I am, I am riveted by trying to detangle the reasons that people do what they do, particularly when those acts seem counter to their own interests or utterly baffling to the rest of society, and when those acts are very, very destructive. What is the logic behind that? What does, what does a person think that they are doing? Why are they doing this? That that's what I wanted to understand when I went into journalism. And that was the directive I got from my editor. You want to understand, you got to start looking at schools, so that that is where it started. And I naturally sort of broadened out of there into juvenile justice and child welfare, because it's all of a piece. Of course, it's all the same kids, really. And it has been now for 34 years, a hunt to find an answer to that sort of foundational question. What drives people
Luke Waldo 05:57
Yeah, so this season, and the reason why we're having this conversation today is that we're really exploring how narratives, in many ways, can inform our behavior. So as you put it right, in the beginning of your career, it was really kind of trying to understand why people behave the way they behave, right? And our education system can, of course, mold or inform our future behavior, certainly, as can kind of these dominant narratives that we come across in our lives, right, whether it's in in school, in the media, in our family structure. And so I'm curious, what are some of the dominant narratives that you have confronted when investigating and reporting on these issues right as you mentioned public education, child welfare and juvenile justice? And how did those narratives impact how you were first alerted to certain stories and how you responded to them?
Claudia Rowe 06:58
Annoyingly, some of the narratives that were, that were that I was hearing then, and I should just say, for like the general listener, just mean stories, right? We say narratives. We just mean sort of the storyline about this person or that person, or this system or that system. Some of those storylines have not changed all that much. And I am, I am surprised, frankly, that I still encounter them even up to, you know, like last week, and they are along the lines of, there are some kids that are so damaged you can't do anything for them.
Literally, a researcher in child welfare wrote that to me within the last two weeks. I was stunned. There are some kids who are never going to be able to do math. There are some kids who will never be able to really comprehend the themes of a complicated novel. And there are some kids that are kind of doomed from birth. And, you know, look, to be fair, there is a good part of our culture, our society, that does dictate a kid's life from birth. I mean, this is a real thing, but I don't think it's anything about the kid. It's about our society and the way we structure it and channel people, or as one educator put it to me not too long ago, that schools are sorting systems. Schools are, in fact, sorting systems, rather than uplifting systems.
And this is old. I mean, it must be tiresome for somebody listening to, man, really, still, still, after all we know, and all the brain science and everything, but yes, in fact, still the idea that certain people are destined for a particular end from the day they are born, and there's really nothing you can do to change that that offends me. That narrative is offensive to me, but it persists.
Luke Waldo 09:06
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the first, the first narrative, you know, this kind of dominant narrative that comes to mind as you're talking is, is this narrative of fatalism. It's striking and yet not surprising that you started this conversation with 30 years later, we're still hearing a very similar kind of fatalistic narrative that certain kids are doomed. I really appreciate how you kind of very quickly in that response, pivoted to but let's understand that this isn't necessarily a kid-specific fatalism. It's a, it's it's an environmental it's a, it's a systemic kind of fatalism. And that, you know, as you've noted, we have sorting systems, right? We have systems who, in many ways, have been either designed or have kind of transformed into kind of adversarial systems. We can get, we'll get into child welfare, shortly, and that's a lot of what we're trying to explore here is, how do we how do we shift that narrative to one of greater optimism? But before we get to that, because we're gonna talk a lot about that today, what do you believe ultimately has driven and reinforced, in particular, this narrative of fatalism? And then we'll get more into kind of why they change. It's going to be a lot of our conversation today. But what drives these?
Claudia Rowe 10:25
So narratives, narratives are used for political ends. I mean, narratives are a tool, and anybody who wants to support or drive a particular policy end uses narratives to push that. And this is, you know, we can talk about child welfare, just like education, just like many other areas of sort of social endeavor, highly politicized, right, like highly politicized. And again, another thing that sort of baffles me and irritates me as I go through, you know, my work as a journalist, I'm not terribly interested in the politics. I'm really interested in what am I seeing. I don't really care how it fits into this narrative or that narrative. I'm particularly I'm trying to answer my question, why is this happening? Why is this kid doing this? That's what I want to know. Anyone can use it for whatever they want. But narratives are used. They are tools deployed to advance policy ends or political ends which sort of line up with policy ends.
So I mean, you can extrapolate and say that, for instance, within child welfare, if I can make this pivot, there are sort of two dominant narratives, which and they and they are kind of warring at the moment, you know, and the and you know, one gains sort of primacy versus another at different periods. But they are essentially the family is sacrosanct. The family is all do anything that you can forever and ever to keep kids with their family of origin, no matter what.
The other one is, the family is a disaster. You must remove the child, you know, at the at the first sign of problems, and get them to some other you know, beautiful new environment, and then, you know, all the rainbows will shine and everything will be different. It's kind of a demonization of family, kind of in on both ends, or a demonization of certain kinds of families, right?
Really, the only families in the child welfare system are low-income families. There are virtually no middle-class kids in the foster care or CPS net. I mean, really, very few, like teeny amounts, right? So it is certain kinds of families that we're demonizing. We're certainly not demonizing affluent families where parents are totally negligent and wildly addicted. But they certainly exist. We don't demonize them, only certain families of certain economic classes and often certain races.
Luke Waldo 13:10
In season two of this podcast, we had a conversation with Jermaine Reed, who's a Milwaukee based founder and and leader of a foster care agency here, and for that matter, the only black-led foster care agency here in the state of Wisconsin, as far as I know. And he made the very powerful statement, as you just did, in different terms, that in 20 odd years in the field, he had never seen a wealthy child in the foster care system, right, to your point. And the data that you know, the data backs at right. Nearly nine out of 10 families investigated by CPS are at or below 200% of the federal poverty line, right? So, yes, the narrative reinforces the data and vice versa. In in many ways, when you're talking about kind of the demonization of certain families, or maybe not the demonization, but certainly the suspicion of certain families.
And so I'm curious how you see this interesting interplay, because that's in my time in and around the child welfare system, when we started this conversation with with this podcast, kind of reframing families that are being swept up into the system as overloaded by stress, by many stressors, which is oftentimes caused by systemic failures, right? So families who are experiencing poverty, social isolation, just kind of the onslaught of systems like childcare and education and so on, just just coming up short, right for for too many families, we saw more and more kind of professionals in and around the child welfare system who, 10 years ago, would have become very defensive at this idea that they are bringing families that are just overloaded by stress, not neglectful, not abusive, right? They would have been defensive. There were more and more people popping up, going, you know what? When you put it that way, I think, I think we, we recognize that we have brought too many families into our system that don't belong here, right, that are parents that love their children, that want to give their children everything they can, but are oftentimes not able to, because of these systemic failures or stressors. So you talked about these kind of two narratives, right? You talked about, how do we keep families together? The family is, you know, is sacrosanct, is, is.
Claudia Rowe 15:37
Well, what I would say is that you know, much of this country at the moment, is oriented toward for whatever reason, but I think because the the very poor outcomes of the foster care system. And look, I mean, people can argue and say, people have said, you know, this book is so negative about foster care. Yeah, it is because it's about a particular aspect of the foster care system, which is, why are the numbers of of kids who come out of foster care? Why do so many of them have criminal records by the time they're in their mid-20s, and even when they leave the foster care system? Why are, you know, 25 to 30% almost immediately homeless like, you know, people can say, You've, you've, you know, made this incredibly dark view of foster care, but they never really speak to these numbers. These are the numbers. I didn't make them up.
Okay, so, so look, this book is is looking at that very specifically. It's not the entire system with every wrinkle and nuance, it's what's up with these numbers. Why are they so high? How does this happen? And to your point about kind of getting back to what we were saying about families, yes, because these outcomes are now becoming more and more known, and I hope that this book, Wards of the State, helps more people to know them for that reason, I think rightly so. There is an appreciation of the fact that we have traditionally swept enormous numbers of children from poor families into the child welfare system, and that we didn't need to do that for all of them. However, okay, great. If we're going to say we didn't need to do that, we should keep more kids with their families. Because when you rupture that bond, even if the original family is struggling, even if there are problems, when you take the kid out and you rupture that bond, and then you move them from stranger to stranger to stranger in each different placement, it just gets worse and worse, and their ability to form attachments goes away, and that has real neurological effects on behavior. Yes, all of that is in the book.
The problem is, while we have sort of are doing in this country, kind of the front end, okay, let's keep more kids with their with their families, yes, and we are shrinking the numbers in foster care significantly in the last few years, but we are really, really bad at taking the savings from, you know, fewer foster families. We're giving government money to fewer foster parents because there are fewer kids in foster care. We have not effectively deployed those savings toward real family preservation systems that really work. This is the problem. We're like, we're like, toggling kind of a foot in both camps, right? Like, okay, don't take as many kids away. Great. But what about what you're doing to make those families safe and healthy if you do leave the kids there, that is what I see, particularly in Washington State, where I live, where we have we are not there yet.
Luke Waldo 18:52
Well that this is going to be our season five conversation, Claudia, as you and I continue to explore the shift from the investments right or the savings to your point, right? The savings that we should be seeing across the country, because it's, you know, it's each state has slightly different outcomes, but for the most part, as you pointed out, nationwide, we are seeing less and less families coming into the child welfare system. But how do we then take those savings right, and, as you said, invest in families further upstream right to prevent the crises or right the challenges that can lead to CPS involvement, and that would be an interesting thing for us to continue to explore over the next couple of years.
Claudia Rowe 19:29
And I think, to your original point, I think it has something to do with narratives. Dominant narratives, we in this country do not like poor people. We do not like poor people. We say all you want about piety and religion and all the stuff. But I once worked at a foundation very briefly, and an officer there said to me, in this country, the worst thing you can be is poor, worse than black, worse than Native American, worse than anything, poor.
And I, you know, that was many years ago that she said this to me, but it has rattled around in my mind, because it seems like we only punish poor people. We're only, you know, I don't know. I haven't dived super deep into that question, but from the reporting I've done on foster care and everything else, it does look like we withhold care, support on on a kind of rationale of it doesn't pencil out, right? Like, give you give money to families on the margins and they waste it, or they, you know, that it doesn't pencil out, it's not economically efficient. And I have, I get that, I hear that I have, kind of come, come round and round and come and landed in a place of, okay, I'll take it, you know, if it doesn't pencil out, but you saved five kids, that's better than no kids, 20 kids, that's, you know, that's great. You know, if it doesn't pencil out, it's still better than zero. So this sort of, like, it doesn't pencil out argument, to me, is just an excuse for more reasons to not help people. Doesn't pencil out. It helped somebody you know.
Luke Waldo 21:24
Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, it might sound wild for for me to say that it takes courage to say what you just said, right, which is to really kind of call out the fact that in this country, being poor is, it puts a target on your back. So I want, I want to, I want to kind of go back to how we got here with the book. Again, I'm assuming that you didn't choose to write the Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, because you assumed it would become a National Book Award finalist. No, but it did. And again, congratulations for that. But why did you choose to write a book about youth in the foster care and juvenile justice systems?
Claudia Rowe 22:05
Okay, so I really did not have this in my mind. I was sitting in court. I had had stepped away from the newsroom. I was a reporter at the Seattle Times. I had been covering public education. I had written one book, and I felt like I could not get an idea for another book while sitting in the newsroom. My head was just it was just a blizzard of news, and I didn't have enough space in my mind to develop my own observations and ideas.
So a forensic psychologist whose work I knew and he primarily consulted on cases of juvenile homicide. So he was a forensic psych who mostly worked with the defense in juvenile homicide cases. I was somewhat interested in his work. I thought maybe I might want to write about it. He said, All right, I'm going to be testifying in this case. Why don't you come to court and you can listen, just get just, just sort of immerse a little bit and get some ideas. The case was of a teenage girl who had shot and killed a man while on the run from foster care. I knew this case. It was a Seattle case. It had sort of flitted across my radar when it happened, but as I said, I was at that point covering public schools, and I sort of had my blinders on. And yes, I had heard her name, and I roughly, had some sense of the outlines, really rough, but that was it. I had not engaged with this case at all, though I had written previously quite a bit about crime and youth crime.
So there I was, sitting in court, this teenage girl was there. The forensic psychologist was never called. This was a sentencing hearing. The girl had pled guilty. Her name was Maryanne. The girl had already pled guilty to murder, so now we had proceeded to the sentencing portion, and for various reasons that were kind of procedural and having to do with some with her defense team and the judge getting getting things straight. That sentencing hearing was continued for three sessions, not not consecutive days. But over the course of six weeks, that sentencing hearing, which would have normally been like a two hour proceeding one time, you know, cut, dry and go, was not it was hours over the course of weeks, and by the end of it, that forensic psychologist had never testified, but the girl herself had spoken in court, and there was something about her and her story that kind of brought all the 30 years of reporting I had done previously to the front of my mind.
And I realized, Oh, this is not a crime story. This is a foster care story. This is something about a system. This is much bigger than this girl on the street at night and what she did. And it sort of took all this data and research that I knew and all this sort of anecdotes over years of reporting on kids in trouble and sort of shifted them all into a into a shape that I could suddenly see in front of me. And that shape was a question: Is foster care creating future inmates? That was kind of the gist of what was forming in my mind, this question to explore. Wait a minute, so many kids end up with a criminal record even before they were out of the system, and then shortly out of the system, even more. And so many are homeless, and so many are in our county jails and in our juvenile detention halls. Wait a minute. What is this? Is this system somehow propelling those outcomes? That's what I wanted to explore, because this teenage girl in front of me sort of encapsulated that question.
Luke Waldo 25:58
So I want to, I want to explore how these personal stories, like Maryanne's, of young people that are caught up in these systems, help tell a bigger story of those systems and the often overlooked kind of root causes like poverty that we talked about earlier. So tell me more about how you kind of connected these personal stories into this kind of broader backdrop of the systems they're involved in.
Claudia Rowe 26:26
Well, the first thing was, okay, Maryanne is an interesting case and an interesting person. She is not. She cannot be the entire book. One person cannot speak for a system, no. So immediately it had to be broader. It had to encompass more people. And what I did the first thing is, is Maryanne an aberration, or is she somehow typical? Obviously, not every kid in foster care is going to go on the run and shoot someone in the head. In that sense, her act was extreme, but her path through foster care was really typical.
She had been in about half dozen placements, including an adoption that fell apart. You know, she had ended up in sort of a wasn't officially a group home, but it was kind of a group placement where there were like six teenage girls there. Her path was really typical, particularly for older foster youth. And one thing I realized was that most of my reporting, and most reporting on the system such as it is, does not focus on adolescents. It is almost all about babies and toddlers and drug addicted children born, you know, drug children born to drug addicted mothers going through withdrawal as soon as they're born, it's always about that sort of rescuing the infant.
What happens to older kids and what is their experience emotionally? What does it feel like to be that 14 year old? I had very little understanding of that, and I was personally curious, what does it feel like? So the first thing was, okay, Maryanne is not an aberration in terms of her path through foster care. Really, really typical. Then I looked at all kinds of research and data, and it seemed to me that there were sort of four main channels through which kids in the system brushed up against, the criminal legal system or criminal justice system, whatever your preferred nomenclature.
And these four paths are running away, group homes, failed adoptions and aging out at 18 without support. It seems really obvious, particularly to people who work in the system, but I really wanted this book to reach people who might have heard something about foster care or have some vague notion about it, but really didn't know anything about what this mostly invisible system is.
So I was looking at these four pathways and just very quickly, like when kids run away, that means, you know, they're not necessarily running, they're just not in their assigned placement. And they get hungry, they don't have any money, they shoplift, they get picked up by the cops, they go to juvenile detention. Boom, you just became part of that statistic of, you know, brushing up against the criminal legal system. Or you are trafficked and you are picked up and you are boom in juvenile detention again. So that's how running away kind of drives that in the incredibly high numbers of kids.
And I will say one of the most sort of foundational texts that I consulted for doing this book is the Midwest Evaluations, a series of four deep research reports that looked at sort of longitudinally, what happens to young adults immediately after they leave foster care and into their mid 20s. And from those studies, which were done 20 years ago, the number was 59% of kids who have grown up in foster care. by the time they are 26 will have been locked up somewhere, juvenile detention, county jail, state prison, including federal. 59% for a system on which this country spends $31 billion every year to save children, and the outcome is 59% criminal record. I couldn't believe it.
And what I couldn't I mean, it was stunned. And even more stunning was the fact that it seemed like nobody was really that worked up about it. I could not believe that this was just like, oh yeah, that's a number. The reaction to that number, which just sort of hit me like a gong when I first read it just didn't seem like I don't know if nobody was really exorcised about it. I couldn't get over it.
So, um, so I'm looking at these channels by which kids end up in that in that 59% number running away group homes are traditionally very violent. Kids assault one another. They assault staff. They steal from each other. Staff calls police. Somebody gets taken to juvenile detention. Boom, that's another you just got. You just in that number.
Again, aging out without support at 18 is pretty obvious. You know, yes, there's extended foster care you can get till 21 but you have to meet certain conditions. You have to be in school, you have to be employed. And many, many kids, as you know, by the time they get a chance to have the government not in their business running their life, they're like, I'll take it so they don't want extended foster care.
And as you probably also know, you know, 50% of kids who grow up in foster care leave high school without a diploma. They drop out, they don't have a they don't get a diploma in four years. So you're 18, you may or may not have a high school diploma, you likely are have no money for college. You know, yes, there are all kinds of efforts to get kids scholarships and help to get to college, but a lot of kids who grow up in foster care do not have the sort of internal resolve, the internal resources, the sort of emotional grit to envision a goal and plan the steps to get to it. There's a lot of sort of stuff that is imparted to kids in traditional, conventional family structures that kids who grow up in foster care do not have, and then they're 18 and they don't have it. And so these are the reasons that kids end up locked up.
So back to your original question. I needed to illuminate these pathways. I want to look at this incarceration number, so I need to sort of explore these pathways. And so I needed to find people whose experience could illustrate these pathways. So Maryanne was my runaway. She was also my broken adoption kid, but she's not the only one, and the relationship between failed or broken adoptions and incarceration is a little more less direct. It has it's a more of an emotional reality, but a psychologist in Maryanne's case did testify to the court that the rejection she experienced, her adoptive family pretty quickly realized that they could not handle her, her behavior frightened them, and they were attempting to sever the adoption and this happens way, way more often than the system ever acknowledges. A lot of adoptions from foster care fall apart because kids come with serious needs and behavioral problems, and most of their behavioral problems have been treated by medication.
A lot of kids in the system are drugged with cocktails of antipsychotics and and antidepressants and drugs to make them sleep. And, you know, it's all about managing their behavior with these cocktails of medication that were never created for children. But it's children who are, you know, being administered. And it's not just like one Prozac. You know, it's like many drugs anyway. So this experience of rejection by her adoptive family, even though Maryanne herself would say, and has said she didn't like them and they didn't like her, it doesn't matter. The experience of rejection is profound, and this psychologist testified that that she felt it had a real decisive role in Maryanne's behavior, and I'm sure that's true for many other kids who experience failed adoptions.
So I found people who were either sort of older foster youth. The youngest person that I in the book was 18 when she and I started working together. And so she was still attached to the system, but through extended foster care. And then the oldest person was in his mid-50s when we started working together. And the point was to show how long this has been true. It was true for the 18 year old in you know the 20, 2020s when she and I started working, and it was true for Arthur Longworth, who was in foster care in the 1970s and early 80s, and is now almost 60 years old. His life, too, was permanently shaped by his experience in the foster care system, and that is why the subtitle is the Long Shadow of American Foster Care, because it's a shadow over their lives, and really over all of our lives in America, because the costs of the outcomes affect us all. The outcomes affect us all.
Luke Waldo 35:34
So I think that that context is really important, right? Because I again, the challenge oftentimes in telling these stories, right? And we know that stories resonate. They connect with folks. I work part of a children's pediatric healthcare system, part of an institute that prides itself on being grounded in data and evidence, but most people don't, aren't moved by the data, right? Aren't moved by the number that I shared earlier about the number of families that come into the system and their their rates of poverty, right? They're moved by Maryanne story, or by Sixto's story, right?
And yet, it's really important that we provide the context as you shared, just shared so that people understand that this is representative of more, more, Sixto's of more, Maryannes across Washington, in your case, across the country, and so on. And so that all being said, this, again, is a podcast about narratives and how they influence our mental models, how we think about the world, our worldview, and that, of course, then informs how we behave, right in many ways. And so I'm really curious how you think about as we're thinking about Sixto. By the way, Sixto was on our last season of the podcast. For people that don't know who Sixto is, Sixto Cancel is the leader of and the founder of, Think of Us, which is a national organization that's by and for former foster youth who are really making waves and real change in the policies and practices across our country right now when it comes to foster care and the child welfare system.
Claudia Rowe 37:18
And he's one of the major characters in the book is one of my six lead characters. Yes, and we should say for your listeners, these are all real people. There's these are not composites. This is not based on these are this is journalism. These are actual, real people. Sixto Cancel is one of them.
Luke Waldo 37:35
So you know, as we're exploring kind of the impacts of narrative and how we think about our systems. How do you think about kind of these bad apple or fatalism, kind of narratives, right, versus kind of the rugged individualism or bootstraps, kind of of narratives, right that that are often at the center of people's minds when, when reading about these foster youth working in conflict with the narrative that our systems and kind of collective responsibility for these young people are coming up short too often, right? So like this conflict between, okay, I read about Maryanne and I go, Well, bad apple, right, right? Or reading about Sixto and going, see you can overcome, why can't everybody else overcome? Right? And how that comes into conflict with these kind of broader narratives of collective responsibility, of our system's responsibility to care for these children and families differently.
Claudia Rowe 38:29
So as I mentioned, I have done a lot of crime reporting, separate from foster care, and you always hear monster. This person is a monster. In Maryanne's case, the prosecutor did not say that word, but she stopped just short of it, and words like budding sociopath were thrown about. You hear these terms, monster, sociopath, psychopath, sort of used very casually. Those labels have always really exasperated me, because I find them opaque. I cannot get like, what does monster mean that is nothing to me, that is not explaining anything to me.
This is what I mean about trying to get into people's heads. I really want to understand motivation. I want to understand why does a girl on the run shoot a guy in the head, in his car on a cold night in Seattle. Exactly why? What is in her mind? What does she think she's doing? Or any of them, what is going on? So I have done this before Wards of the State, and I did a lot in this book try to get in their heads. Because this narrative of monster or sociopath is, to me, so unilluminating. It is so limiting. It tells me nothing. It doesn't tell me about sort of a human and their history and how we got here, so that we maybe. We don't have to be here again. If we knew better, could we not do better? So I mean, that sounds kind of simple, but really, I just want to understand how did we get here?
Luke Waldo 40:12
If you could tell us a story from your reporting and book that really captured or illustrated how our systems aren't always accomplishing what the dominant narrative would have us believe they are accomplishing, right? So you kind of go back to right, and maybe this isn't the dominant narrative anymore, but many people would assume that the child protective system, right, oftentimes now, known as child welfare, is protecting children from abuse, neglect, and therefore protecting them from harm and hopefully then projecting them into a future of prosperity or optimism. And of course, you've already shared that that's not always the case. So thoughts on a story in particular where you went, Okay, this is, this is telling a different story than many might believe?
Claudia Rowe 41:03
I’m gonna give you two. I'm gonna give you two. The first one is direct, in direct response to what you're saying. And this is now a young woman in the book, Monique, who is in Houston. And I should tell your listeners the book is national while I am in Washington State, and two of my main characters are from Washington State, everybody else in the book is in other states. And this young woman, Monique, was in Houston.
A lot of people in the discussion around child welfare now focus on, at what age do you bring a child into the system, and there is quite a lot of talk about, if you bring them in earlier, the outcomes will be better. Monique was brought into the system when she was five, and she was unusual in the sense that the sort of triggering allegation that that resulted in her and her younger sister being brought into the system was child sexual abuse. That is sort of the least frequent reason under which kids come into the system. Mostly it's neglect, then abuse, physical abuse, child sexual abuse is is the least frequent even though that doesn't mean it never happens. It's just not the thing that we're looking at to bring kids into the system.
Monique was suspected, strongly suspected, of being a victim of child sexual abuse before she was even five years old. So she came into the system very young. This is what we say, is the right thing to do. It did not work out so great for Monique. She was desperate to bond to a family, so desperate that her foster families could not really handle her. She was desperate to get adopted, so desperate that when another foster child came into the home, she felt competitive with that kid, and would act out and fight and kick banisters out of staircases and such.
By the time Monique, who eventually landed in juvenile detention, not for any real crime, but for sort of physical acting out, spent about two weeks in juvie and then was sent to a group home outside of Houston when she was 14. So this is growing up in a group home. This group home was sort of a therapeutic facility, and it was for kids with, often with developmental or behavioral disabilities. It was, I think, quite stable. I mean, I think Monique was there, and she was fed and sheltered and safe, and she went to regular high school off of the campus. They would drive her to the local public high school every day, drive her home.
Last time I talked to Monique, she's now in her late 20s, and she was living in her car. This is a young person who is trying. She really has tried. She tried to go to college. She's tried to hold jobs. She is trying. She is not able to kind of connect it. She she is not able to hold a job. She constantly walks off a job at the at the first sign of frustration or anything she perceives as sort of humiliating or undermining her in any way. A lot of foster youth are extremely reactive. They are unwilling or unable to kind of weather the slings and arrows that all of us do when we're young and in our first jobs, and it is humiliating or frustrating or boring or demeaning, and most of us are sort of like say, Well, this is, you know, the first step on my path to my ultimate goal.
A lot of foster kids don't have an ultimate goal. They cannot envision a future. They have not been taught or encouraged to envision a future, a future sense of self, a future life, a few it's very, very hazy, and the ability to envision a goal and take the steps to get to it is nearly impossible for many, many older foster youth who have who are aging out of the system. So Monique was one of those people who kind of puts a lie to the oh, if you just take them earlier, it's all going to be good. It was not good.
Another narrative was, is what I sort of talked about at the beginning, that there were some kids that are just irredeemable. There's a young man in the book who is Jay, and he's in New York City, and Jay, also, Jay came into the system, sort of in late middle school. He might have been about 12. About 11 or 12, he told me he became very quickly gang involved. It's not surprising gang sort of approximate family, a sense of belonging, right? But it was pretty dicey for Jay. He got beaten so bad, he thought he was going to die. He woke up in the hospital. He thought he would be killed. He also assaulted others seriously. He has a violent history. He dropped out of, or was kicked out of three high schools, and now he lands at his fourth High School, fourth High School, he's 17 years old. Gang involved, or sort of intermittently gang involved, has a criminal history. And, you know, nobody thinks he's even going to graduate high school. I mean, this is his fourth High School. It's not looking good, right?
But just kind of by happenstance, there's a 23 year old youth advocate at this last chance High School. She's 23 she's not some seasoned professional. She doesn't have degrees or years of training, nothing. It's her first job out of college. She's from a totally different world. She comes from a world of, you know, comparative privilege, especially compared to Jay right? She's an educated young woman, you know, in her first job. Her job is just get the kids over the graduation finish line, do whatever it takes. So Jay is on her caseload, and she finds out in talking to him, that he never goes to school because he's afraid of being jumped by a rival gang set on the way to school. So that's their connection. They go. They sit in her office. Her name is Anna. They sit in Anna's office with other staff all around. It's not some cushy therapy room, it's a tiny office in a last chance High School. And they sit and they look at Google Maps and they devise new routes for Jay to get to school so that he can vary his path and not be a target. That's it.
They work together for nine months. It's not even that long, and it's not that deep, right? She knows Jay has told her about his fears, about foster care, about all of it, but that's it. And she says to him, you know, I think not only are you going to graduate, I think you could go to college, because your test scores are actually quite good, especially considering you never go to school. So I think we could do something here. And Jay is like, Well, yeah, anything to get me out of New York City, that's his primary interest. He's just gonna go. He doesn't really believe her. He's just gonna go along with it. Because get out of New York City, try to escape this gang life.
In fact, yes, Jay does graduate. Jay does go to college. Right before Wards of the State was published, a month before it came out, just this past spring, I watched Jay defend his dissertation and earn a doctorate. He got a he's a PhD. It's only 10 years later. This is the narrative of the kid that's irredeemable. You can't do anything. You can't connect with them when they've had so much trauma, it's too late. He's 17 years old already. No, not true. And it's not me saying this. It's Jay who told me the change happened with her in that office.
That's what I'm talking about. Like connection can happen. And Anna told me, Look, it's not like we worked together that long. It's that I came to him at the right time. It was an accident. He was ready to get help, she was ready to give it. And it worked. And 10 years later, Jay's now a professor at a college on a tenure track gig. So there you go. That's a narrative that both of those narratives take the kid in, it'll or when they're really young, it'll be good. It was not good for Monique, if you take, if you work with a kid by the time they're 17 and they're criminally involved, there's nothing you can do. Too much trauma, it's too late. It was not true for Jay.
Luke Waldo 49:38
I have heard you as I you know, did my research for our conversation today, watched a number of your recent interviews and conversations, and you mentioned it just moments ago as well. But I've heard you talk about how the impacts of Child Protective Services, and for that matter, the system and the kids involved in the system are often invisible to so many people, right to our general public. So when you first decided to write this book, I'm curious what your vision was, was it? Was it to make this kind of invisible system, or invisible, you know, kids more visible? What did you hope your readers would take away from it? And then just kind of lastly, how do you believe telling these stories of these former foster youth might really change this narrative for people that were previously unaware of their story in the system they're involved with?
Claudia Rowe 50:31
Thanks for that question. The first thing I did not have like a beautiful, grand vision, I'll just say that it's all kind of feeling your way forward in the dark. And so the first thing I wanted to do was, as I've said, Get in their head. Understand the thinking of young people who become involved in the criminal justice system. How and why? What were you doing? How did you understand yourself? So I had these six characters, not all of them criminally involved, but most of them. Sixto did not have a criminal history, but he was sort of intermittently couch surfing a little bit homeless in high school. You know, I wanted some kind of breadth, right? Not every person in this book has an incredibly awful story. There are some people in the book who have gone on to incredible success, like Sixto, and there are a few others, but I really did want to get into each character's head as much as I could and see through their eyes.
What does it feel like? What is the psychological experience of being a kid on the street? What does that feel like, What stories do you tell yourself? How do you understand what is happening to you? Or do you think you're doing it right? Do you think it's it's all your own agency? I really wanted to understand through the young person's eyes, and that was the first draft that I delivered to my editors here. Look at these six people. Aren't they fascinating? Editor said, Well, that's great, you know? Yeah, they're all really interesting. We see them, but like, where is the connective tissue? How are they there? What are the laws? What is the history, you know? What is the brain science? Give us, sort of the context so that that was the next draft, like building that in all that you've spoken about Luke, about the data and the research is really important. You cannot have individual people stand in to sort of mean something for a whole system without you have to explain this. You have to connect the dots for readers and show how the history and the laws and the way and the way laws change, and what history, how history has unfolded, and where the brain science comes in, or doesn't, you need to weave that in.
So that was the primary challenge of making this book, like showing these people, so that readers feel it. I really wanted, I mean people who are in the system, they know, but it is astounding to me, even to this moment, how very invisible foster care and foster youth are. And there are obvious reasons for it, the state, any state the system, says confidentiality. These kids are minors. We have to protect their privacy now, okay, but there is sort of an implication there that, like nobody should know you're in foster care, as if you know, almost as if it's something to be ashamed of, like a, like a, like a black mark or something, which sort of perplexes me.
But okay, privacy laws, confidentiality laws, okay, but really, the effect of these laws is to prevent scrutiny of like from media, like from somebody like me, a journalist, right? So researchers can look at sort of disaggregated or dis identified cases with no names on them, and they assign numbers to individuals so they can sort of look at broad patterns, but that is not very human. And foster care is invisible because the kids are minors, so the state pulls this sort of curtain of confidentiality around them, but the outcomes are incredibly visible, the carceral system, homeless people on our streets, we you know, we are all living with the outcomes in our lives every day. We just don't see that there's a system behind the curtain that is partially driving those outcomes.
So that's what I wanted to make visible to people, the sort of connect the dots idea, the way this invisible system is actually very visible, we just don't realize it. It's all around us. That's what I wanted the book to show, what I wanted people to know, to feel it. So it's not an academic approach. It's an extremely narrative. Some people even call it a page turner, and that is intentional on my part. I wanted to seed it with suspense, with questions, with what's going to happen, and narratives that start at the beginning and they sort of wind and they come out at the end. It was very intentional. There are people who say, Hey, is it true? There are parts that feel like a novel. Yeah, it's all true. And I wanted it to feel like a novel because I want it to be that gripping, that sort of emotionally engaging.
Luke Waldo 55:34
I want to shift a little bit now to your role on the Seattle Times editorial board, and it doesn't have to be limited to this, but the reason I met you is I've been a part of a narrative change network of professionals across the country who are working in and around the child welfare system that is led by the Casey Family Programs and communications organization called Rally, and we've had a campaign this past year as a network of writing op eds and letters to the editor to really kind of shift the narrative around child welfare, and particularly around families that are oftentimes swept up into the system, right?
And so as you again sit on the editorial board for a major newspaper, how might we, and when I say we, I'm talking again about professionals within the system, or, you know, the general public, who are listening to this conversation, or who have read your book and are really motivated right to to reach out right or to challenge these dominant, harmful narratives and introduce new, more constructive narratives. How might they do that effectively, through letters to the editor or op eds or something that I'm not proposing in this question?
Claudia Rowe 56:55
Okay, um, again, that's a long and complicated question. I'll try to I'll try to tackle it cleanly. So there's an issue of trust. Trust is essential and a problem. Okay? So number one, I think that audiences, whether listening or reading or viewing actually really appreciate when a story is presented with with great nuance, bumps, warts, everything right? I think that the impulse on the part of sometimes professionals in whatever field, education, child welfare, whatever, or in news, in journalism, right? It's, it's all about clean, clean and quick, right? Like so you know, a letter to the editor, that's nice. It's not, it's not enough, right? It's not long enough.
It's not readers and audiences do actually are hungry, in my experience, to engage with a story, that means you got to give them some meat. You got to really give people something to engage with. And readers, I'll say readers as a stand in for all audiences, because that's what I know readers. Readers really want something to engage with and they have a kind of keenly tuned radar for BS, even if they don't realize it. People know when a story is too sunny, too clean, too tidy, they don't believe it.
So one sort of effort that I have been part of as a journalist, particularly when I was a reporter in the Seattle Times newsroom before this editorial board job, it's called solutions journalism, and you can deploy this approach in any topic area. So I was doing it for education, but you could do it for child welfare. And the gist of it is, it's not really solutions. It's responses to social problems. It's responses that show some sort of positive effect, some promising responses to social problems. And you tell these stories, not by Hey, look at the good numbers. That's great. But no, that doesn't sell it. What sells it is, let's get deep into every little tick and turn and bump and hurdle that you the practitioner or the family or whoever encountered on the road to this better future. So we would do it. I would do I did it a lot with school discipline, right? School Discipline is this sort of long standing problem. It's skewed. It targets kids of color. It targets foster kids, homeless kids. It's sort of self perpetuating. It put it traditionally, pushes kids out and then they're even farther behind academically. And it's this whole self perpetuating problem. There are other ways to do it, and I won't go on a tangent about education here, but you could do this with child welfare.
And so you could investigate as a as a journalist or a writer or whatever. You could investigate, for instance, kinship care, okay, kinship care is now seen as a leading edge for reform, instead of putting children who are removed from their families with strangers, you know, with whom they have no connection, no bond, and they'll be moving on to another stranger if that person doesn't adopt them, right? But now, as you know, of course, the really largely due to six dose efforts, there is sort of growing appetite for, oh, let's put a child with Kin, with their relative, with their grandparent, with their aunt, or even fictive kin, which could be like a family friend or a teacher or a coach, somebody who has a connection, a bond, with that kid. And you know, this has happened forever in our society, where grandma takes in her grandkids if her own daughter can't parent for whatever reason, the change is government support for those arrangements, right?
So now the foster care stipend, monthly support check that would go to the family that's a stranger to the child can now go to grandma or auntie, and you can be licensed to be a sort of foster placement, just for your relative, just for your grandchild, your niece, your nephew, rather than going through all the hopes hoops to get licensed as a foster parent for anyone. So this is that's kinship care. You could investigate that and what are the outcomes, and really look at it and sort of determine it is popularly now seen as a better way to go, and it's frankly shocking to me that it's taken this long for it to be seen as a better way to go. But we'll set that aside readers like these stories.
And one thing on the journalism end, for any editors who might, by chance be listening, hey, editors, readers invest in these stories in terms of time they and in terms of, if you're, you know, counting time on a web page or whatever, if you that's how you monetize, for your for your advertising charges right time on the page. Readers engage with stories that have depth and grit and detail. And I think in journalism, there is a sort of a tendency, or a setting to be like, ah, that's too much. There's too much resources expended on that. It doesn't, as I said before, doesn't pencil out, but it does, because readers like those stories, and that's how you build loyalty.
But for the practitioner side of this question, there is also the trust. Not only so it's not about trusting a reader, but it's trusting for the practitioner, the storyteller, and it's the family, right? The family or the kid who also has to trust. There's trust like going in every direction, and for very good reasons, trust is hard to come by, right? And it takes a while to cultivate, but it is worth it. I mean, it is the reason that wards of the state is having some impact. Because I had six years or five to sort of develop real relationships with my sources, and you can do that as a journalist, and you don't need five years for a newspaper story. You can do it in less, but it does take time, and investment of like heart takes investment of your heart and your brain and your time.
So I think that if folks in the field were willing to maybe identify or cultivate relationships with journalists so that they can develop some trust with the with the writer. I mean, this is a two way street, and then it has to be the writer and the family, the writer and the source, the writer and the kid. So it's not something that can happen like breaking news, daily deadlines. It's not but it does have a lot of promise for changing the narrative.
Luke Waldo 1:04:17
So I didn't foresee that. That answer and it's, it's, it's, it's now my new call to action from this episode, which is right we it's a call to action to editors, which I heard a little bit from you. It's called action to our journalists who want to do a deeper dive into, as you said, solutions, solutions based journalism is that solutions journalism?
Claudia Rowe 1:04:34
I think of it as promising responses to social problems. I'm a little leery of the word solutions. They needed the title for it, so that's what they call it.
Luke Waldo 1:04:43
But yeah, so, so a call to to journalists that may be listening to, then partner with. And so it's a, it's a it's a call to action to professionals like me who are deep in the data, deep in the research, deep in the direct practice, who want to be able to, as you put it, right one, we certainly want to find solutions, or we want to elevate solutions, promising solutions. But we also really want to explore these kind of complex, oftentimes chronic problems that have been stubborn and we haven't necessarily found those, you know, clean solutions, right? And that part of the storytelling is working through that mess, right, and that that's where readers are really engaged is this isn't just a clean, right, simple answer to what we know is a really complex problem.
Claudia Rowe 1:05:33
And I don't want to for your audience, I don't want to say, I don't want to, I don't mean to suggest that kinship care is the be all, end all answer to the problems in foster care. It's not. There are other sort of promising avenues that I touch on in Wards of the State. One of them is Quality Parenting Initiative, which is out of California, which is essentially looking at foster parents differently, a different way to recruit, train and involve foster parents in the lives of the kids that they're caring for, because, as you know, but many listeners outside of the system have no idea of this, foster parents are not allowed to maintain a relationship with a child once they leave that placement. You cannot be calling a kid and go, Hey, how are you getting on in your new school or with your new family? You cannot do that if the kid calls, okay, but you cannot be initiating a connection with them.
This is shocking to people when they hear this like, what so Quality Parenting Initiative out of California, which has been adopted by a number of states to varying degrees, is essentially envisioning the foster parent as an integral partner to that kid's development. They're not just a way station or like a, you know, a babysitter who provides, you know, a bed and some meals. No, no, no. They are actually part of that child's life, and they will know that kid they are envisioned to be sort of ongoing connections. That is super intriguing to me. It is, it is not like widely known. It is in a number of states, but it is, I think it's sort of risky in many cases, but it is intriguing to me, and it's another way that you could do like a solutions journalism approach to that kind of relationship.
Luke Waldo 1:07:30
Yeah, so Quality Parenting Milwaukee was adopted and implemented when I was formally in one of our child welfare programs here at Children's about a decade ago, and the fact that you bring it up, I it makes me wonder if it is still being implemented here. I don't actually have that, that answer, but something, something that I would have to explore with my colleagues.
But yeah, I appreciate that perspective, that there are many, many different, you know, quote, unquote, promising solutions, or proposed solutions that are one of many right that that can have positive impacts on kids in the system, you know, families in the system.
Claudia Rowe 1:08:09
Just yeah, just one more thing, I would say, zooming way out, this is kind of broad and not a specific effort. To me as an outsider, you know, a pretty invested outsider. But, you know, I'm not, I'm not a social worker. I'm just a professional observer and writer. To me, what I came away with understanding about foster care. Foster Care is a holding system, or some people would say it's a housing system. It's a way to basically hold kids in, you know, nominally safe placements until they're 18, and then they're the legal adult and like, off you go bye, thanks.
It's a holding system. It needs to be a healing system, right? We know that every kid in that system, by definition, has undergone severe developmental trauma, even if it's merely the trauma of being yanked out of their family when they shouldn't have been and plunked into foster care, and even if it's short term foster care and they're reunited, it's traumatic, and that trauma has tangible effects on behavior. If foster care were smaller and were reconceived to be a therapeutic system, not simply a holding or a housing system, but a therapeutic system. And I don't mean just drugging kids. That, to me, seems like the direction we should be going.
Luke Waldo 1:09:39
Yeah, what a powerful reframe. I really appreciate that, and something for us to reflect on after this conversation. So thinking about your journey right as a journalist who's written this really powerful book, really transformational book, how might we engage more journalists to do some of the work that you've just laid out right, that is more kind of person and family centered, but that is at the same time really exploring some of the root causes rather than symptoms, as well as potentially some of the promising solutions?
Claudia Rowe 1:10:10
That's a great question. So there is a shift happening in journalism. I will tell you that the stuff that I cover, public education, child welfare, juvenile justice, these are not considered the sexy beats in the newsroom. These are not like the sexy beat is City Hall, right? That's what like is like, what, you know, like strapping young journalists envision like they want to cover, you know, City Hall, or politics. Traditionally, the stuff that I cover, it used to be sort of like the girls beat, especially public education. It was, I'm gonna say it, it was ghettoized, right? Like these are like children and families. That's soft, oh, give that to the girls. Okay, I'm that old, right?
But, but still, it persists, right? There is kind of an implicit attitude that if you writing about kids and families, it's like soft news to me, that is insane. It is not soft. It is not and it is also highly political. If you were like a reporter and you you think politics, is it these? I mean, it's all connected, right? So children and families are the target of politics. They are driving politics in many, in many instances.
What can the I mean, if you're saying, what can the field do to engage journalists? I think it's really what can all of us do to reach the gatekeepers in journalism and young journalists too. But I will say that there is a shift at work. I wouldn't say so much in child welfare, but I certainly see it in public education. Many more, sort of more serious, a deeper approach to covering public schools. No, it's not just bake sales. It's really serious stuff, and it is affecting our society. And I think that that message has landed right people get that. I again, it's embarrassing that it's taken this long, but okay.
I think just making the point that this is not soft news by any stretch, and there's no way that anyone who reads that book thinks it's soft and it it is hard news, it is expensive, right? These are, these are policy questions and systems that are taking up billions of dollars. And if you don't care about like hearts and homes or something, and you just want to be a hard-nosed journalist and focus on the dollars and cents, all right, good. Look at $31 billion for foster care that is driving even more expensive systems, our carceral system and homelessness interventions. What are we spending there? Does this pencil out? If you want to take it that way, mathematically, do so.
I mean, I think that there are infinite angles to look at these topics that are incredibly compelling, both to audiences and to journalists who want to, you know, chase something.
Luke Waldo 1:13:07
Yeah, so what I'm hearing from you is, if we're doing a better job of connecting these dots to the kind of human societal costs as well as the actual, you know, dollars and cents cost, that there's a more compelling story potentially for journalists to tell if we can connect those dots, which you've done and beautifully in this conversation,
Claudia Rowe 1:13:27
Yeah, absolutely. And, and making the point to the gatekeepers of journalism that, hey, this is a way to build audience journalism hanging on by its fingernails. Okay, well, people engage with these stories, and that's good for your website.
Luke Waldo 1:13:45
As you reflect on your career in journalism writing this book, what have you learned about your role in narrative change, and why have you learned those lessons?
Claudia Rowe 1:14:00
I guess I have learned that my somewhat obsessive need to understand motivation and what goes on inside a person's mind that is driving their decisions is I'm surprised that it that it is unusual, but I guess it is and it does drive a different way of seeing social problems and of seeing one another, all of us seeing each other differently.
I the first book I did was about this serial killer. It was the same thing. I was trying to get into his head, and I was very frustrated by the term monster, I guess I would say, Look closer, with all of the books, with all of the journalism. This is what I am, this is what I have learned, and it is what I am trying to do, look closer, especially at the things that frighten or confuse me, you, all of us. The things that frighten and confuse me are what are, what are, are attracting my attention as a as a writer? And I guess for all of us, I would say, instead of pulling away or slapping a label on monster, sociopath, no, no, look closer. It will be more interesting, and you will have the added benefit of puncturing your fear. You will be less afraid if you understand better.
Luke Waldo 1:15:23
Yeah. So my last question was, was, what advice might you give to those of us that are really interested in doing the work to really shift narrative, change narrative? I think you've you've given a piece of advice in that last response, is there anything else that you would add that we can do?
Claudia Rowe 1:15:43
Yeah, I think I would circle back on what I said before. Trust is essential, but it is difficult, and I understand, I understand why journalists would distrust people who work in the system or advocates, because advocates have a certain angle that they're pushing, often people who work in the system do as well. Also, you know, governments just mistrust journalists, and it's not necessarily the social worker in the system, but the social worker's boss and their boss who don't want engagement with journalism. I get it. I think there are valid reasons.
However, trust is the key. It is the building block we must sort of be willing to to believe in one another more, and that means working more closely together, hearing one another and looking more closely at the things that frighten and confuse us, which has been sort of my whole approach to my job. I don't know if that sounds too pat or too but it is something I live by.
Luke Waldo 1:16:56
Claudia Rowe has delivered a powerful challenge to anyone who reads a headline about a person caught in crisis, to anyone who covers these stories, and to anyone who designs the systems meant to serve them.
She showed us the ethical imperative of deep immersion, the courage to challenge the "monster" narrative and find the full, messy humanity in every person touched by the system. Her work makes it undeniable: stories, when told with context and complexity, are powerful tools we have to counter the devastating simplicity of dominant narratives.
Look closer, Claudia told us. Especially at the things that frighten or confuse us. Because when we look closer, we puncture our fear, we break through dominant narratives that have hidden important truths.
We see the 17-year-old trapped in gang violence put on a path by a mentor to become a PhD. We see the child protection system leading to the criminal justice system for too many youth. We see that the narrative of the irredeemable child is shattered by connection, even brief connection at the right moment that can change everything.
And without those stories, the invisible remains invisible, the outcomes we all live with every day, but whose origins we never see.
Through these first six episodes, we've explored the power of dominant narratives — from their impact on policy decisions and systems design to the harm they can cause overloaded families. We now shift to building better narratives.
Do stories really have the power we believe they do? And how do we wield that power most effectively?
Our next episode tackles this head-on with the question: "Do Stories Really Matter?" We shift from the outcomes of narratives to the process and impact of storytelling itself. We'll welcome back Jess Moyer and other narrative and storytelling experts like Rinku Sen, Megan McGee, Tarik Moody, and others to explore the science, the art, and the measurable impacts of storytelling on narrative change, revealing the mechanisms by which a well-told story can change hearts, minds, and policy.
You've been listening to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect.
Until next time, keep asking: What stories shape how we see the world, and how can we tell them differently?
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people. This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families.
I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.