Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.

It’s a truism that having kids gives you a new perspective on childhood. My son is seven years old. He’s never missed a meal in his life. It occurred to me that the idea that there might not be food to eat when he’s hungry has probably never entered into his head. Similarly, he’s probably never even imagined that his mother and I wouldn’t be there, that he might be taken out of our house and dumped somewhere he’s never been to live with people he’s never met.

As we age, we learn, both intellectually and through experience, that the world is full of terrible things, and that pain and suffering are an unavoidable part of the human condition. Even as adults, some experiences are so traumatic that their effects linger for years or even for the rest of our lives.

When these things happen to young children, so-called “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” it can distort their development and permanently damage them and their prospects in life because they don’t have the mature resources necessary to cope with what has happened to them. In a sense, even if they “overcome” these experiences, they never truly leave them behind.

Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.

Henderson’s life is a case study in crazy. He never met this father, after whom he was named. Later, he learns through a DNA test that his father was Hispanic. His mother was Asian, and deeply troubled, with a serious drug problem. She had already had two other children with two different fathers when he was born, half-brothers he has never met. Henderson was taken away from her and put into a foster care, where he rotated through a series of foster homes.

Here was one such experience:

Months later, Gerri, my social worker, came to the house. It was time for me to go live somewhere else, she said. I’d just turned seven, and this time I didn’t cry. I was dejected, but the tears didn’t come. I’d learned to shut down, sealing myself off from my emotions. Gerri helped me gather my clothes and put them into a black garbage bag. She picked up a shoe box next to my bed, and a bunch of cards fell out…We packed up and walked out to her car. I wondered if this was how the rest of my life would be: moving to a home, staying for a while, and Gerri putting me somewhere else. By this point I knew that other kids didn’t have to do this.

I previously served on the board of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children of Cook County, Illinois. CASA trains volunteers who serve as special advisors to the judge in cases of children who are involved in the juvenile justice system on account of parental abuse or neglect. These children have done nothing wrong themselves, but are merely unlucky to have messed up parents and home life. Since social service case workers are typically overloaded, and pretty much everybody involved in the case has their own personal interests at stake, CASA volunteers spend time learning about the case and the child and are chartered with acting as advocates for the best interests of the child to the judge.

During our initial board training, someone came into the room and gave us black garbage bags. We were told to put all of our possessions in that bag, and come with her to a place we didn’t know and had never been.

For us, we knew the reality of what was happening, so it didn’t really affect us all that much truth be told. But reading about Henderson’s experience took me back. Imagine being a small child, and a government case worker comes into your bedroom out of the blue and tells you to put everything you own in a black garbage bag and bring it to some strange new place. Unless it actually happened to us, we can’t really relate to that. Children without our intellectual and life perspectives experience these things in completely different ways that we might think they do:

Children believe that if a family loves them, then that family won’t let them be taken away. Adults understand on an intellectual level that this isn’t true—the foster system works the way it works—but little kids don’t fully grasp this.

This happened many times to Henderson, who I believe lived in about seven different foster homes, some of which were candidly exploitative of him. As it put it:

I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family.

Being in foster care puts a kid into pretty much the highest risk category in life you can be. Of boys, Henderson notes:

Studies indicate that in the US, 60 percent of boys in foster care are later incarcerated, while only 3 percent graduate from college.

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