Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative

As a professional who has directed two non-profit agencies focused on foster children, I was thrilled to find this book. Bartholet tells the truth (and documents it) about the illogic of the system and the frightening implications for abused and abandoned children. Adoption isn't a fairy tale--but it is the best choice for so many growing up without families of their own in America.

I am a mother of two birth children and one adopted child, adopted from foster care at age 13. I stumbled across this book in a bookstore one rainy day when I had hit the emotional low-point in my own adoption journey. I read it while I was struggling with the endless and maddening redtape and delays entailed in getting our foster child out of "the system" forever. "Nobody's Children" speaks to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose hearts and beliefs nudge them to contemplate domestic adoption, yet who encounter cultural and procedural barriers that discourage most from considering adoption from the foster care system. This is a carefully-researched and footnoted work by a distinguished former civil rights attorney--whose career included work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and now Harvard Law School, where she teaches today. The author is herself both an adoptive and biological parent. Her book gave me new hope. I was inspired by it to work to help bring about the cultural shifts and procedural reforms described in this book, changes that will be required if our nation is truly serious about ending the tragedy (and travesty) of kids languishing in long-term foster care. Ignore reviews by some who utterly mischaracterize Bartholet's arguments. She, like Patrick Murphy before her, fully acknowledge that the vast majority of poor and minority families raise their children well and lovingly, and that far more social resources should be directed toward addiction treatment and supporting stressed-out birth mothers so they can keep their babies. Defenseless, innocent children are not, however, the chattel (private property) of their birth parents. All of us, as a civilized people, must speak out against policies and practices that severely limit a child's chance to be adopted after being subjected to acts of torture or repeated abuse and neglect. To fix "the system" and its horrors, more Americans need to open their homes to the children trapped in it. How to persuade people to consider adopting from foster care? Bartholet suggests a first step: imagine a system that promotes adoption as the best, instead of a second best, way to build a family. A book for dreamers and "doers" both.

This book is great, because it talks about what foster care is about in the eyes of the author. I to have had my share of the juvenile courts issue. My children were removed from me on Dec. 16, 1990 by a police office not a social worker. I was charged on hearsay issues. I have always loved my children, but my mother had stolen my children because I was poor and unmarried. Now I have formed a class action against the abuse of the system.

Read this book written by a civil rights lawyer, feminist and Harvard Law professor who challenges traditional left and right poliltical perspectives on child abuse, family preservation and adoption. She is the mother of one child by birth and two by adoption who writes with power and emotion about the meaning of parenting and family.She looks at the battered women's movement and asks why we have come to think that adult women should be liberated from abusive homes but still insist that children be kept at home pursuant to family preservation policies without regard to the level of abuse and neglect suffered.Bartholet takes on the child welfare establishment and asks us to join her in pushing for radical rethinking of first premises. She wants our society to take adoption seriously for the first time ever, moving abused and neglected children into real homes so that they can survive and thrive. She wants to knock down the racial barriers that stand in the way of "Nobody's Children" finding the parents they need. And, finally, she points out that now is the time for reform if ever there is a time.