Jan 13, 2024
Rob Henderson on Foster Care, Social Class and the New American Elite
Rob Henderson is a writer and author of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter. His forthcoming book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, will be released next month.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rob Henderson discuss the importance of a stable family for children; the concept of “luxury beliefs”; and why some things are more important than social mobility.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I've been following your work for a good long while. But reading your memoir, which is out in about a month, over the last weeks, has put in place for me a lot of where you're coming from and how you see the world.
To start off with, what is the story of your childhood, starting with your birth parents?
Rob Henderson: I was born into poverty in Los Angeles and never met my father. My birth mother didn't know my father, either. She had no recollection of him when she was asked who my father could possibly be. All of this information I gathered later from social workers: we lived in some cars, we were homeless for a time. Eventually, we settled in this slum apartment in LA and my mother was addicted to drugs. She was very neglectful, unable to properly care for me. She would tie me to a chair in another room while she would get high in her bedroom. She would have random men over at all times of the day and night while I was struggling in this chair. Eventually, some neighbors heard me screaming repeatedly. They called the police, who then came and took me away to foster care, which I was put into at three years old.
Mounk: Listeners may think, in an obvious way, it was a good thing that the state intervened and took you out of that home. Clearly, your mother was not fit to care for you. But you observe later in the book that no matter how neglected or abused young children are, they usually want, more than anything else, to stay with their parents. And some of the evidence seems to suggest that that desire is not an irrational one, that actually the results from foster care in particular may end up being worse.
Henderson: That's right. And there's consistent evidence that children are sort of programmed to be loyal to their caretakers, to their parents, to the people who raised them from infancy, even if the childbearing circumstances were less than optimal, as in my case. I do say that it was, in the end, a good decision to put me in foster care. I mean, these were two horrible options, that I could have either stayed with my mother and lived in that kind of environment; or the foster care system, which is also far from optimal as well. But I do cite research later in the book from a paper led by Amir Sariaslan at Oxford, published in 2021. And he and his co-authors essentially analyzed data from siblings within the same birth family. Some of the siblings were placed in foster care out of home care, and some of the siblings remained with their birth parents—oftentimes, the single, birth mother. And they tracked the outcomes of these kids later and found that the siblings who were placed in foster care were two to three times more likely to be poor as adults, addicted to substances, homeless, criminally-inclined—a lot of less-than-desirable outcomes for the kids placed in care relative to their siblings, which does suggest that foster care does have some kind of effect on kids, that sort of severe instability and uncertainty in a young child's life.
Mounk: So at three years old you're placed in foster family. As I'm reading this book—and it really is a compelling book that also has serious intellectual insights—that feels like a moment of hope. But then, it turns out that that environment is deeply unstable. You then are sort of funneled through a whole different set of foster homes over the course of the following year.
What was it like to arrive in the foster system? And why is it that children so often are then placed in a succession of different foster homes?
Henderson: My experience was extremely upsetting. I just remember a series of adults that I was unfamiliar with. A social worker—and they're nice enough adults, but you're a small child, and you've lived with your mother your whole life up to that point—comes and takes you and makes you live with another unfamiliar group of adults and children. I was moving foster homes every six months to a year or so. Day to day, I wouldn't know whether I would be moved to a different home. A day or a week would go by and suddenly a foster sibling that I had formed a bond with would be taken to another home or placed back with their parents. Kids would come and go all the time. From a small child's point of view, it was total chaos.
My case was unusual. Often what would happen is many of them know who their fathers were, but their mothers would become addicted to drugs, or would have maybe some mental health challenges, and so then the child would be placed into care. The mother would sort of recover from their condition, and then the child would be placed back with her. But in my case, I didn't have that. After my mother was arrested, she was deported back to South Korea, and I was placed into foster care. There was no chance of my being reunited with her. And so I was just moving homes every few months.
Mounk: What do you think was the impact of moving between these different foster homes in such a regular way? How did that shape your way of connecting with other people early in childhood and perhaps later on?
Henderson: I found it very difficult to connect with adults. Being taken from my mother the first time was very upsetting. The second time I was relocated, that was also extremely difficult for me. But by the third, the fourth, the fifth time, my emotional response was very blunted, and I sort of became numb to it. Probably, this was not a conscious thought that occurred, but it was probably just some sort of instinctive, impulsive, adaptive response that, if you were to feel those intense emotions every six months, it'd be very difficult on a small child. I kind of just shut down and became numb and became extremely suspicious of the motives of adults, and became a cynical little kid; I thought of all adults as being in this kind of same category—teachers, doctors, social workers.
I was very angry as a kid. Once I did learn to read, and once I was adopted, I was putting in a pretty good effort at one point: I got, I think, third place in the school spelling bee. And I was putting in the effort because I had good parents. My adoptive parents, I wanted to do well for them. That was the longest I've been in a school. I was there for a whole year. But then once that started to deteriorate, after the divorce and the separation, I just wanted to express that anger in some way. And one way was to just stop caring about school.
Mounk: There is this very strong correlation in different stages of your life between stability in the home and how you're doing in life and in school. Obviously, there's some kind of long-term effect, as you argue persuasively, from having an unstable environment in general. But even within that, when there are more stable and happier moments, quite immediately, you seem to thrive. And when that is disrupted, that has a direct impact on you. One of those periods is when your adoptive mother gets together with a new partner, a woman, and she becomes, I suppose, a kind of mom to you. And that is a kind of a second period in which you're doing better academically and in other ways. And when that gets disrupted, again, it has an immediate impact on your life.
Tell us a little bit about what your high school years were like and what that teaches us, perhaps, about how it is that many of your friends, some of whom were talented in all kinds of ways, ended up getting onto the wrong path, in part, because they faced somewhat similar circumstances to yours.
Henderson: As y…