Take My Kid, Please

The story of a frustrated mother, a troubled teen, and a city caught in the middle

by Doron Taussig

*The names of the three Taylor women have been changed.

On the morning of April 18, 2006, a Department of Human Services social worker named Traci Benn received some depressing, if routine, news: A mother had come into the screening room of the government building at 1515 Arch St., looking to get rid of her teenager. In her cubicle on the second floor, Benn, a small, bright-faced woman, performed a cursory review of the Taylor family.* There wasn't much on them — this was not one of those families that had become so institutionalized as to seem almost like a government experiment. The unwanted daughter, a 14-year-old, had been adopted, and the mother had been a frequent foster mom in the past. That was all. After absorbing this, Benn went downstairs to meet the family.

There were three women in the waiting room. The adoptive mother, Ruth, was a petite, frail woman in her 70s who wore big, thick glasses and used a wheelchair. Accompanying her was her biological daughter, Cheryl, who was also small, but exuded compacted energy, like a battery. Cheryl was middle-aged, and bore the burdened air of the responsible adult.

Then there was Jada. Usually, when Benn sees a teen in the DHS waiting room, she is seated two or three chairs away from her family, eyes down and hood up, disengaged. Jada seemed nonchalant — Benn didn't know that, when she first came in, the girl had been cuddling up on her family's shoulders, clinging to them like a barnacle, and, since the adopted girl was of considerably larger frame than the women, looking as though she might accidentally crush them.

In one of the tiny, not soundproofed interview rooms on the first floor, Benn listened first to the adults' version of events. Ruth didn't want to disown Jada, but she was aging, diabetic and couldn't really keep after the girl anymore. Cheryl was now caring for her mother and for Jada, and Jada was proving ungovernable. For two hours, Cheryl outlined the girl's misbehaviors: the stealing, the lying, the truancy and, my god, the porn — trying, as the parents always do, to convince Benn that the child was impossible, and that DHS should, as she put it, "take her back." It occurred to Benn, though, that Cheryl was not so much angry as she was hurt. By the end of the interview, both she and Ruth were in tears, and when Benn walked them out to the waiting room and called Jada back, the women did not meet the child's eyes.

Benn asked Jada if she knew why she was there. "Cheryl wants to place me," she recalls the girl saying. Jada claimed she understood that she'd hurt her family's feelings, but denied some of the behaviors Cheryl had enumerated, and characterized other descriptions as overblown. Generally, she tried, as the children always do, to downplay the situation. But she was clear about this: she did not want to go into "placement" — a foster home or a group home.

The most common discussion regarding children and family services is whether, and when, the government should take a child from a family. In this debate, agencies like DHS are either called "baby snatchers" or else delinquent in removing children from dangerous situations, as a recent investigative series in the Philadelphia Inquirer has implied. It's true that the great majority of children in state care are there because of "involuntary placements" — because their parents were deemed unfit to raise them. But in Philadelphia, there is a reverse trend as well: Parents asking the city to take their kids off their hands.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

It's hard to get a handle on exactly how often this happens, because the city doesn't keep track of placement requests. But between September 2003 and September 2005, 375 parents walked into the DHS screening unit, many of whom were likely requesting placement; an untold number just asked their social workers about it. And each year, between 2,000 and 3,000 parents call or walk into Family Court looking for help, by which, in many cases, they mean placement.

Some of these parents are young and overwhelmed. Some have a child with a debilitating medical issue. The bulk, though, are simply dealing with incorrigible teenagers — or, more accurately, failing to deal with them. They turn to the city, and in so doing, present a profound practical, and philosophical, dilemma.

In Philadelphia, there is a reverse trend: Parents often ask the city to take their kids off their hands.

After about half an hour with Jada, Traci Benn brought the teen back together with her family, and delivered her verdict, which had never really been in doubt: DHS did not want to place the girl. Ruth quietly thanked God, and Jada felt a wash of relief. Cheryl, however, was displeased. She had not come to the decision to give up Jada lightly, and was not prepared to give in.

"Listen," she recalls saying, "I don't even want to cut no corners. I want to know how can you take her back, when you can take her back, and will you take her today?"

But Benn was insistent.

"I've got two ladies that are gonna come out and help you," Cheryl recalls Benn saying, "and they'll be out to see you within a matter of days. They will call you."

Reluctantly, Cheryl assented. And with that, the Taylors — who had just unambiguously demonstrated to Jada that they didn't want her around — took the child home to try to work things out.

Of all the adolescent adventures that make parents want to disown their children, none seems to do so as often or as reliably as coming home from a hard day's work to find their kid in the master bed with a partner.

Of course, such a discovery is usually just the final chapter in a wrenching tale of misbehavior. Teenagers violate curfew, run away from home, talk back, fight, use drugs, sell drugs, miss school and get into trouble at school so that the parent has to keep missing work to go sit with the principal. Basically, they test limits, and many parents are not adept, patient, or strong enough to hold a line against them.

Threatening a child with placement might be intended as a punitive measure, something meant to scare the kid straight; it might also be meant as a way to remove a teen from a dangerous environment, or to protect younger children in the household from her influence. Many parents who do it have tried putting problem children with relatives, like grandma, and have gone to school counselors and police for help. They've come to believe that they're in crisis. This seems to happen often to adoptive parents, and to the parents of sexually maturing girls.

Such was the case with Jada. Jada was born in 1992 to a 16-year-old mother who was living in a foster care facility. The mother wasn't allowed to have a child where she was staying, so she put her daughter into the foster system. At six weeks, Jada wound up in the care of Ruth Taylor.

Years earlier, after four of her five children had grown up and moved out, Ruth had begun worrying that her youngest son was lonely. One night, she heard an ad on the radio exhorting people to become foster parents, and the next thing she knew, it seemed, she had five new boys, brothers, dusting up her home. Over the years, she estimates, more than 70 children have spent time in her care.

Jada was the last one, and she was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. The goal of most foster programs is to "reunify" a child with her biological family (unless the child gets adopted), and Ruth did her best to keep Jada's mother involved.

"I was teaching Jada who her mommy was from the time that she could understand what I was saying," Ruth recalls. "I had gotten a picture of her mother from the caseworker, and I would show this to Jada, and I would say, 'This your mommy.'"

She invited Jada's mother to spend time with her daughter, but the older girl never really engaged.

"She never came unless I called her and said, 'Come on, and look at your child, she's beginning to walk, or she's beginning to talk.'"

When she did come, "she was distant. She would just look at the child in amazement, and never had any conversation for her. Not 'I'm your mommy' or nothing. She'd just look at her." When Jada was 2, her mother agreed to let Ruth adopt her.

Throughout her early childhood, Jada lived a healthy, amply resourced life. She attended a private school, where she was an honor student, had her own computer, went on vacations to Florida and took tap and jazz classes. Ruth and Jada lived with Cheryl, but Jada handled her complicated family smoothly — even as Ruth got older, she called Ruth "mom" and Cheryl by name. And she maintained occasional contact with her biological mother, who had gone on to get married and have five more children.

If all adolescents push boundaries, then Jada busted right through them, leaving fragments of her parents' sanity in her wake. She began with just a small step. Jada has her own room in the Taylor house, a little alcove with a curtain in place of a door. Throughout her childhood, she'd kept the curtain up in the evenings while she worked on her computer. But as she became a teenager, she began keeping it down. When Cheryl came into the room, she would think she saw Jada quickly click away from whatever it was she was looking at — but Cheryl wasn't completely computer literate, so she couldn't be sure.

"What are you doing?" she would ask.

"My homework," Jada would say.

"By the time a child gets to be a teenager, you've demonstrably failed to do enough. Your options are between bad and worse."

One day Jada went to bed without turning her computer off, and Cheryl went in to look at the screen. "That's when I found these little sex pictures," she says. She had already talked with Jada about sex, but she took the computer away and talked to her again. She wouldn't have made too much of the 14-year-old's curiosity. But around the same time, she started getting calls from school saying that Jada wasn't doing her homework, and had been disrupting class by picking on other students.

Cheryl asked Jada if something was wrong. Jada said no.

The first thing Jada stole was Cheryl's cell phone. A creature of habit, Cheryl couldn't find it one day and asked Jada if she knew where it was. Jada said she didn't. A few days later, the school called, asking Cheryl what Jada was doing with a phone.

Cheryl cracked down: She set up a daily report, to be signed by Jada's teachers, monitoring her progress. Nevertheless, Jada's academic performance continued to falter. Two months before her middle school graduation, she was expelled — and didn't even seem upset about it. Cheryl enrolled her in summer school, but when she came home early from work one day, she found Jada there, claiming she'd had a half day. Cheryl called the school and found out that they hadn't seen Jada there all summer.

She managed to attend enough of the remainder of summer school to enroll in Germantown High School for the ninth grade. There, her behavior went from troubling to disturbed. She rarely went to class, choosing instead to wander the hallways. She was suspended repeatedly, and she was hanging out with bad kids, tough kids. She began coming home when she pleased, sometimes spending the night out without permission.

At the same time, her stealing was getting out of hand, and her sexual curiosity had evolved into a preoccupation, possibly an addiction. She was ordering large amounts of pay-per-view pornography, which Cheryl only discovered when the bills came (the final tally was $1,300). She was stealing money out of Cheryl and Ruth's wallets, giving it to her friends, and, according to a DHS report, paying boys to perform oral sex on them (Jada denies this happened). She was masturbating often, and at inappropriate times, such as in Ruth's room while the older woman slept. And while the extent of her sexual experimentation with other people wasn't clear — she said she was a virgin — she was reporting back about her experimentation to her friends, and being labeled a "freak." Jada had not simply become a girl who was sexually active at a young age; she was showing signs of maladjustment.

Cheryl tried taking her to counseling, she tried reprimanding her, and even threatened to take her back to DHS. "We never had this problem with any of the other kids!" she said. "The last one!" But nothing worked: Jada even got expelled from Germantown after she accidentally slashed a friend with a box cutter they were playing with in the hallway. She was transferred to a disciplinary school that is, for many kids, the last step before the juvenile justice system.

Finally, Jada stole Cheryl's ATM card. She knew Cheryl left it in the glove compartment of her car; she also knew the password because, just a year prior, Cheryl had trusted her to go to the store for groceries. When the card disappeared, Jada denied taking it, but Cheryl called the bank and was told that $400 had been withdrawn from the store on the corner. The bank told Cheryl she could press charges. She didn't want to.

"She's my child," Cheryl said. "I love her."

Instead, she called the woman who had brought Jada to them in the first place, a social worker who had been friendly with Ruth years before. A couple of days later, she kept Jada home from school and, without telling her where they were going, drove her down to DHS.

Why would it even occur to a parent that the city might be willing to take her problem child? Isn't that a pretty big service to expect from one's local government?

It is, but it's a service the government used to provide. American municipalities have been taking children from their parents since the early 20th century, and began doing so with much greater frequency in the 1960s. Partly due to state laws that define neglect and abuse broadly — for every 1,000 impoverished children, Pennsylvania places 33.3 kids, compared to a national average of 23.9, according to a National Coalition for Child Protection Reform analysis of federal data — and partly because of a philosophy that embraced placement, Philadelphia was notorious for taking kids. Most of those cases, again, were involuntary. But throughout the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, if a parent like Cheryl brought in a kid like Jada, DHS would usually just take her.

As a result, a broad cultural understanding developed that, should you need it to, Philadelphia will take your kid. And people began to expect the city to do so.

"If someone in their community got [the service]," says Oswald Smalls, a director with DHS, a parent might "feel they're being denied their rights."

The problem with this norm is that it's a questionable social policy. There are many situations in which children should be removed from homes: in cases of serious abuse or neglect, and, more controversially, in cases of young children in highly dysfunctional households. But DHS has come to believe that placing a teenager is bad for that youth's long-term prospects.

Social workers laugh when asked what parents are envisioning when they bring their kids in and request placement. Either they picture boot camp — "like what they see on Sally Jesse Rafael," says Lynn Roman, who handles voluntary placement requests at Family Court — or they envision a bucolic, residential school in the country, where kids are safe from the temptations of the streets. In reality, foster care means either a foster family or a group home, where groups of children from difficult circumstances live together.

These institutions vary in quality, but they are all, at core, institutions, and when people age out of them, they often haven't learned basic, independent life skills, like cooking, driving, or simply organizing their days. What's more, they have no connections in the outside world, no home to go to while they look for a job, no place to visit on holidays. According to a study by Casey Family Programs, kids from placement are over-represented in the criminal justice system, public shelters and on public assistance — they just seem to work their way back to some institutionalized setting. And people who enter the foster system as teens are more likely to experience this struggle, because they're less likely to get adopted.

About five years ago, Philadelphia DHS noted that more than half of the kids it had in out-of-home placement were 12 or older. It began adjusting its policies to discourage the placement of older youths. The agency started strongly encouraging parents who requested placement to try its "Family Preservation" program, a 12-week intensive service that includes counseling, assistance and monitoring. This summer, it took further steps, introducing a new "Teen Diversion Program," which will provide a more intensive service over a shorter period of time to teens, and even held a "kickoff" event, where it reminded workers to try to keep older youths in the home. (Similarly, Family Court refers parents who request placement to its "Reasonable Efforts in Assessment, Access and Prevention" (REAAP) program, a probationlike program that can refer clients to other services.)

This fall, DHS came under a great deal of fire when the Inquirer reported that numerous children had died of abuse or neglect after their families were reported to DHS. The paper's investigation also revealed that, after a highly-publicized abuse death in 2003, the agency failed to make changes to its guidelines for investigating reports. The subsequent fallout led to the resignation of the DHS commissioner, Cheryl Ransom-Garner, and the termination of her top deputy, John McGee.

It remains to be seen what effect these events will have on the new philosophy. Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which advocates against removing children from the home in most circumstances, says that stories like the Inquirer 's often "set off foster care panics. Every worker is now afraid of having the case that's on the front page next week, and they rush to take kids away from their families."

There are legitimate doubts about the family preservation model. Even though Philadelphia points to a recent analysis finding that 75 percent of the children from its Family Preservation program avoided subsequent placement, other nationwide studies of the approach have yielded far inferior results. (In the social service world, contradictory findings are commonplace, because outcomes are so hard to define; for instance, is a child not going into placement really a measure of success? It says nothing about how the child is really doing.)

But even some of DHS's loudest critics agree that, for older teens , the best strategy is to keep them in the home when possible.

"That's one thing I can't criticize them for," says Richard Gelles, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, who has been quoted extensively in the Inquirer series, bashing DHS. Gelles is the author of The Book of David: How Preserving Families Can Cost Children's Lives , but nevertheless, he says, "If you gave me the Solomon-esque choice for the teenage kid ... I would try to keep them in the home. There's at least a shred of permanence there, there's some connectedness when you turn 18."

The problem is, this isn't an optimistic consensus. With troubled kids, there's often no good answer. "By the time a child gets to be a teenager," says Gelles, "you've demonstrably failed to do enough. Your options are between bad and worse."

Two days after the Taylors walked into 1515 Arch St., a pair of social workers showed up at their door. One was Patricia Evans, the DHS worker who would be overseeing the family's case. The other was Cathleen Watkins of Youth Service, Inc., an independent agency DHS contracts with to provide family preservation services. To make matters slightly more complicated, Watkins was a supervisor with YSI, not a caseworker. Carlton Steed, the man who would be working most closely with the Taylors for the next three months, couldn't make it.

Ruth and Cheryl were happy for the company. (Family Preservation workers are often received more warmly than other social workers, because the service is voluntary). Jada was less so. She wore a scarf over her face, claiming, without precedent, to be Muslim, and sat embarrassed as Watkins and Evans listened to the stories of her exploits.

When they'd heard everything, the social workers were utterly convinced that Jada had been the victim of sexual abuse. They asked the Taylors to help compile information about all the men who'd passed through Jada's life (there weren't many of them — she'd been raised almost exclusively by women). The Taylors cooperated, but insisted that no such thing had ever happened.

Watkins and Evans spent a little more time talking to Jada, and before they left, put together a service plan for the family, to be implemented by Steed, that enumerated some basic goals:

"Jada would like for Ms. Cheryl Taylor to reframe [sic] from yelling and Ms. Ruth Taylor to reframe [sic] from giving lengthy lectures when addressing parenting issues. Ms. Cheryl Taylor and Ms. Ruth Taylor would like for Jada to reframe [sic] from lying."

When Steed arrived at the Taylor home, the girl he met was not claiming to be a Muslim, but, instead, was wearing a black hoodie and khaki pants, "looking like someone who was trying to be kinda thuggish." Steed is a slender man with a measured, almost serene voice and manner. This fits his occupation well. A Family Preservation worker's responsibilities are vaguely defined; basically, Steed's assignment is to help his clients through crises. But how he does that depends on the family, and it depends on him. A lazy social worker will simply pay his visits (or not), and fill out the paperwork; a better one will help clients navigate services like school meetings and therapy sessions. But perhaps the most important thing a good social worker can do, in family preservation, is to keep everyone calm.

For 12 weeks, several times a week, Steed sat with Jada and the Taylors and talked to them. Many of these conversations, when recalled, seem basic and mundane — sexual behaviors put you at risk; stealing hurts the people who love you; you shouldn't feel you have to buy friends, because you deserve friends — but they were a change for the Taylors. For a long time, their exchanges had been clouded by anger and confusion. Steed made himself a clear, simple conduit through which they could communicate.

Jada brought up the issue of her biological family on her own. She had previously told Cheryl that she wanted her biological mother in her life, and Cheryl tried to oblige her: The Taylors took Jada's five brothers and sisters out on weekends, bought them birthday presents, and generally tried to create a familial atmosphere, in the hope that Jada's mother would make time for her eldest. When the time came, though, Jada's mother would invariably drop Jada off at her grandmother's house, or take her shopping with her aunts — never bonding with her daughter at all. She forgot the girl's birthday, and although she promised to give Jada information about her father (whom Jada was also curious about), she never did. She had even claimed that when she graduated from nursing school in May of this year she would take Jada in. But May came and went, and the date became a family joke.

LIFE PRESERVERS: Cathleen Watkins And Carlton Steed of Youth Service, Inc. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Jada poured these things out to Steed during her sessions with him, coming to terms with her feelings. (By the fall, she would say that a birthday party her mother once threw for her was "the best thing she ever did for me, since I was born. Other than give birth to me. That's the only thing extraordinary that she did for me.") Whether because of this catharsis or some other factor, her behavior began to improve. She stopped with the pay-per-view cable and became more respectful.

Then, a few weeks into the service, as Jada was headed out to school, she stopped by Cheryl's room to say goodbye — and when Cheryl looked up, a $50 bill was missing from her dresser. Cheryl drove to the bus stop, where Jada was still standing with a group of her friends. She called her over to the car.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said to Jada. "Just give me my money back."

Jada looked at her, and said, "I have to go get it." She walked over to the group of girls, huddled with them, and emerged with $50, though not in the form of a single bill.

When Steed showed up after those incidents, he says, he talked about them with Jada, but carefully.

"We kept encouraging her to be honest," he says. "We didn't beat her down or anything like that."

He just tried to prevent the problem from becoming a crisis.

These days, Jada looks nothing like the bleak, hoodied person Carlton Steed encountered in the spring. Rather, the girl who opens the door and says "Hi!" before running upstairs without introducing herself seems a lot like a typically lighthearted, distracted teen. She sings to herself constantly, "To the left, to the left" ("We're not doing Beyonce," Cheryl tells her). Asked about her use of pornography, she giggles.

Her relationship with Ruth is very much that of a teen with a grandparent: She is respectful, helpful and a little bored with her. With Cheryl, she's sisterly — playful, teasing — only, one sister has a clear authority over the other. Jada's cell phone goes off (a rap song for the ringtone), and Cheryl tells her, "I don't want to hear it again." She doesn't.

The family is still suffering some fallout from the events of the spring. Jada was beaten up outside her disciplinary school — five kids threw to her the ground and pounded her, to the point that she just rolled herself into a ball and prayed; she keeps a picture of herself with a blackened, shut eye in her cell phone — and Cheryl, terrified, pulled her out of the school.

But she wasn't able to find a place to enroll her, and Jada missed much of the fall semester. She's now back at the disciplinary school, waiting to hear back from some charter schools she applied to.

Still, Cheryl's complaints about her adopted sister's behavior have been reduced to things like manners and frustration with the speed at which she does her chores. "I see improvement. It's slow. I need to be on the same floor when she's [cleaning her room]," she says, without even a nod to the disparity between this complaint and her earlier problems. She still struggles to get Jada's biological mother involved with her, but things have been getting a little better, and Jada is talking about the issue openly.

"It bothers me because, like, my brothers and sisters, they know their real father, they grew up with each other around their mother and their father, and I grew up in a foster home, not growing up with my brothers and sisters and my real mother," she says.

Jada has just turned 15, so it would perhaps be premature to say that the Taylor family has been preserved. But DHS's intervention in their case clearly had some positive effects — disproportionate to the norm, most likely.

Steed attributes the success, in part, to the fact that the Taylors were an easier baseline than many families. Their household was not as hectic, and so their problems were easier to hone in on, communication easier to facilitate. It is also probably relevant that when Jada was forced to choose between her home life and delinquency, she saw a home that was an attractive, viable choice — not the case for many kids at such a crossroads.

Jada and Cheryl have heaps of praise for their caseworkers. But they both cite the morning they went to DHS as a turning point.

"When she realized we were taking her back," Cheryl says. "Because it wasn't just talk." Jada says changing her behavior was easy once she realized she had to get serious.

This is a "scared-straight" theory of parenting. Experts and social workers have widely disparate views on the matter — whether any good can really come of a parent threatening, or even trying, to place a kid. Some experts, like Dr. Paul Fink, a child psychiatrist, argue that it can do some good.

"I think it's a bargaining chip," Fink says. "Something has to move this kid out of his mind-set of narcissistic omnipotence."

Others, like Richard Gelles, think that for a parent to threaten a child with giving them up is "horrible ... The reaction to the parent is, 'How could you give your child away? And the child's sense of self-worth just plummets. I don't know that all the wake-up-call interventions have ever actually benefited children."

Jada, for her part, has been rejected at least partially by two families now. But sitting in her house in Germantown this fall, fidgeting and humming, she says that the morning at DHS doesn't haunt her. At least, that's what she says at first. Then she looks at Cheryl and, smiling mischievously, changes her angle.

"They wasn't gonna give me back," she says. "They had me since I was a baby. They would never give up something as pretty as me."

Cheryl averts her eyes. She goes back and forth on whether to contradict Jada on this point — she knows the girl better than anybody, but doesn't seem sure how much the rejection affects her. Later, out of Jada's earshot, she tells this story:

"Sometimes she'll ask me, 'Cheryl, if I fell down a sewer with all this dirt, what would you do?' And I'll say, 'Well, hold on. Is my hair done? Are my nails hooked?' And she'll say, "Alla that.'"

She pauses dramatically, as if to build suspense.

"And I'll say, 'I'd climb down and get you out.' She knows I love her."

(doron@citypaper.net)