City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

To the end of June, the intimate life of American foster care, Cris Beam

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

To the end of June

Cris Beam

the intimate life of American foster care

An intimate, authoritative look at the foster care system that examines why it is failing the kids it is supposed to protect and what can be done to change it. Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children at the critical points in their search for a stable, loving family. The book mirrors the life cycle of a foster child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from birth families. There..s.. a teenage birth mother in Texas who signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later reconsider, crushing the hopes of her baby..s.. adoptive parents. Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the intricacies of growing up in the system, the back-and-forth with agencies, the shuffling between pre-adoptive homes and group homes, the emotionally charged tug of prospective adoptive parents and the fundamental pull of birth parents. And then what happens as these system-reared kids become adults? Beam closely follows a group of teenagers in New York who are grappling with what aging out will mean for them and meets a woman who has parented eleven kids from the system, almost all over the age of eighteen, and all still in desperate need of a sense of home and belonging

Preface -- Author's note -- Catch -- King solomon's baby -- Eye of the beholder -- Timing is anything -- Drugs in the system -- Catch as catch can -- Hold -- Surge control -- Chutes and ladders and chutes -- Arrested in development -- Taking agency -- Homespun -- Release -- Fantasy islands -- There's something about mary -- Experiment -- Touching the elephant -- Last call -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Acknowledgments

adult

Intimate life of American foster care